“Let me guess. Something that requires silence? Meditation? Building creepy serial-killer shrines.”
“I’m not creepy.”
“You’re not exactly Mr. Warm and Friendly.”
“Quiet doesn’t equal serial killer.”
“But it can.”
“I’m a cop.”
“It doesn’t make us perfect.”
“Why am I doing this?”
She stopped at an old, junky sedan, jamming her key into the door. “I don’t know. Why are you doing this?”
“You seemed...” It was probably too direct to admit the truth, but he wasn’t very good at white lies. He could keep his mouth shut, but he didn’t lie well when faced with a direct question. “Like you needed it.”
That queen-of-the-world expression disappeared, replaced by confusion. A hard-edged, brows-together confusion he didn’t want to mess with. “What do you care what I need?”
“I don’t. Or shouldn’t.”
“Superhero complex.” She shook her head as if that was a bad thing. “You gonna ride with me or what?”
“Need a sober driver or something?”
“I don’t get drunk.”
“Ever?”
“Nope. Besides, we have an early morning.”
“So why are we doing this?” His shoulders were already tense from all this back-and-forth. How was he getting pulled into this verbal sparring? He never did that.
“You need to understand, I don’t know how your old department was, but here we’re a family. We have to trust each other. We don’t have to all be best friends, but we need to know that if someone gets in a jam, someone else is going to be there backing us up. Being the quiet guy in the corner isn’t going to fly.”
He understood that, to an extent. In his rookie days he hadn’t gone out and partied like most of the guys he’d gone to the academy with. He didn’t step out of line. Not one drinking-and-driving incident, hell, not even a speeding or parking violation. Even if he’d gotten one, he would have paid it rather than flash his badge.
He believed in right and wrong. Because doing the right thing would be noticed and rewarded.
Joke’s on you.
But he’d been friendlier then. Smiled more. Hoping for some kind of belonging that had never materialized. No one liked a guy who wouldn’t bend the loosest of rules.
“Getting in or what, Captain Quiet?”
“Captain Quiet?”
“It’s my superhero name for you.”
“I’m not answering to that, either.” But he got into her glorified rust bucket. Why? A million reasons that didn’t make sense. At least not without some deep introspection he wasn’t in the mood for.
“That one suits you, though. You’d probably even look good in a pair of superhero tights.”
He frowned over at her as she pulled out of the parking lot. Was she...flirting?
He didn’t have much time to ponder. The Good Wolf, an old, dilapidated place on the riverfront, was a short drive from their apartment complex. It was brick on the outside, showing its age, a vintage neon sign buzzing Open in the big window.
Inside it was dark and smoky, but not as dingy as he’d expected. Tess waved to a couple other guys and suddenly he was being introduced, maneuvered into a seat, beer placed in front of him.
Social hour. He was so damn rusty with this he felt like an awkward teenager again. But Tess didn’t let him stay that way for long. She prodded him into a long, drawn-out conversation about the old Superman movies.
Then she foisted him off on a middle-aged guy who turned out to be all right once they found some common ground talking cars. Still, Marc found himself watching Tess even as he chatted and drank.
She was an odd figure. A leader of sorts, but more like a mother. Which was a weird thing, because half the guys were her age or older. Weirder still because he didn’t think most of the guys staring at her ass thought of her as a mother hen.
But she stepped in. Cut a guy off when he’d hit his limit, separated one of the young guys from a clearly uninterested woman. Every time Marc thought he escaped her notice, she pushed him into conversations about cars with one guy, baseball with another.
She was everywhere, subtly maneuvering people away from what they shouldn’t do and toward what they should. It was all kind of mesmerizing.
“She doesn’t fuck cops.”
Marc jerked his head toward one of the guys from earlier who was leaning against the table next to him. Granger. He’d been the first one she’d had to cut off, and he wasn’t falling-over drunk but definitely impaired.
Marc kept his tone bland even though the out-of-nowhere comment pissed him off. For a lot of reasons. “Excuse me?”
“You’re staring awful hard at our Camden.” Granger gestured to where Tess was laughing with two older guys, covertly handing off their not-empty drinks to a waitress. “The thing is, every single guy in the department, and probably some of the not-so-single ones, have tried and failed. She doesn’t fuck other cops.”
“Not why I was watching her, pal.”
“Chill, man.” He held up his hands. “Not trying to warn you off, just giving some information. We’re all friends here.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
Granger slapped the table. “Keep it in mind.”
Marc rolled his shoulders. The kid, and he was just a kid, was right. Friends. He needed to make friends. Sure, not lifelong buddies, and certainly not anything involving fucking, but it wouldn’t kill him to remove the stick from his ass.
He was free. Until Mom and Dad moved, but even then. He’d already done his duty by moving here. Leah was back in their lives. Why was he still trying so hard? He didn’t matter. Never would.
It was long past time he started living for himself.
TESS WAS IN TROUBLE. Of two very different kinds. Sadly, they both involved drunk men she felt responsible for.
The first she was going to ignore. She had to. She had to be up early and couldn’t risk another bottle-throwing incident on a work night. At some point, once in a while, she had to put herself first.
The second bit of trouble, well, she was 100 percent responsible for the second, and kind of enjoying it. Typically, she didn’t like drunk men, but she’d also been around enough to know everyone handled their liquor differently.
Some got belligerent, like many of the drunk drivers she dealt with on the job. Some got violent. Hello, dear old Dad. Some, well, some just got goofy. Buttoned-up, strong silent type Marc Santino got goofy.
It made her grin, and feel oddly light. Both things her father’s drunkenness never made her feel. Everything about Marc’s normally tense, ramrod straight posture had relaxed. He was smiling, head bobbing along with whatever Stumpf was telling him.
He did shake off an offer for another beer, which was more than half the guys in their little group would ever do. Which was why she tended to spearhead these little gatherings and moderate some of the looser cannons.
Most were making noise about leaving, so she made sure none of the worse-for-wear guys were planning on getting behind