Page 236 of Back in the Saddle

He pushed away from his car, went to the door, folded in, reversed out.

And he was gone.

* * *

A coupleof not-so-fun things happen when you spring a bunch of abductees from unpaid, forced labor in a Fentanyl, heroin, cocaine operation.

Yes, it was confirmed that was why they took Homer and the rest of those people.

Allow me to explain…

The first not-so-funthing was watching your man, who prided himself on keeping his cool, lose his ever-lovin’ mind, at the same time you watched your friend’s man do the same, when the dude with the more-official-than-the-normal-official uniform told a couple of cops to round the four of us Angels up, put us in police cars and take us to the station.

I shared a car with Harlow, and before we were whisked away, I watched Eric beingveryin the face of the big kahuna cop. Cap, his entire body so tight, it was a visible ticking time bomb, was right at his back.

The rest of the guys were fanned around them, and I couldn’t tell from body language, should the situation escalate, if the Hottie Squad would pull Eric and Cap off or join in.

Though, it seemed like they were veering toward the joining-in scenario.

That was scary, and after all we’d just been through, I didn’t want Eric to get arrested for assaulting a police officer, but it was also all kinds of sweet (not to mention sexy AF).

As we drove away and lost sight of them, I took stock of my girls’ and my current situation.

On the good side, we hadn’t been handcuffed.

On the bad, we were in the back of cop cars, somewhere I’d never been, and I couldn’t say much for the experience.

And after I asked what this was about, and the cop who was driving said, “Chief wants you, that’s all I know, so don’t ask any more questions,” I was no closer to knowing why I, as well as all my besties, were in cop cars on a mandatory trip to the station.

More on the good side, when we got there, we weren’t printed, nor did we have our mugshots taken, which was fair, I thought, seeing as we hadn’t committed a crime (that I knew of).

Instead, all four of us were taken to an interrogation room, we were given cups of really bad coffee and told to sit our asses down and wait.

And wait we did.

For two hours.

(Okay, maybe it was more like half an hour, my sense of time was skewed seeing as I would rather have been procuring plastic bags and whatever the others needed to feel safe going back to their spaces.)

Eventually, fancy uniform guy walked in.

We were seated, two on one side of the table (me and Harlow), two at each end (Raye and Luna).

He took the only open chair on the other side of the table from Harlow and me.

“I’m Jorge Alvarez. Phoenix Chief of Police.”

He didn’t offer his hand, so none of us did either.

“Now, my guess is, you girls know about the Rock Chicks,” he went on.

Okay.

I could call myself a girl. And my girls could call me a girl. And other girls could call me a girl. And Eric could call me his girl.

But I was a thirty-three-year-old woman.

To this dude, I was not a girl.

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