Page 13 of Under Cover
Gail snickered. “Hey, I’m a goddess, but I’m not a miracle worker, yeah?”
“I hear ya. If you can scare me up some place this thing won’t get towed or creamed, you’ll really be earning your salary, right?”
“Right, Olaf, I’ll see if I can’t get some uniforms to set you up.”
“Thanks, Elsa. Signing off.”
He set the radio in its receiver, and Garcia chuckled through a mouthful of chicken sandwich.
“What?” he asked, the Irish cop twang in his voice more noticeable than ever.
“What do you have against New York parking?” he asked, swallowing gratefully.
Crosby sheepishly rolled his eyes. “You ever been to Chicago?” he asked.
“No.”
“Well, you know how New York streets are so narrow you can’t see the tops of buildings and shit?”
“Yeah.”
“Chicago’s streets are wider, and I’d say it’s because we’re not barbarians, but fact is, the one street they made to New York spec turned into a fuckin’ wind tunnel. It faces the lake, and people get blown backward if they try to walk on the ice in the winter. But that doesn’t change the fact that the streets are wider and the sidewalks are wider and there’s fucking parking where you don’t think parking’s gonna be. But it is. So yeah. I got a healthy distrust of being able to park the great Cop Whale here anywhere that’s not the structure at our office, you hearing me?”
Garcia nodded and took another bite of his sandwich. From anyone else, he’d say Crosby was griping to hear himself gripe, but he heard a healthy dose of longing for his hometown in Crosby’s voice, and Garcia got it.
Crosby could never go home.
He wasn’t going to bitch about that, so he’d bitch about the parking instead.
But apparently one rant was all he ever spent on something because as the car hummed along, Crosby let out a breath and looked unhappily at the fast-food bag on the center console.
“You feelin’ better?” he asked, and Garcia managed an “Mmf!” through another mouthful of food.
“Great,” Crosby said. “You can have my burger. Lookit this traffic—we got forty-five minutes minimum before we’re anywhere near Queens.” Fucking New Jersey. Freeways there like vermicelli. Forty-five minutes was generous.
“What about your lunch?” Garcia asked, but Crosby shook his head.
“Man, those poor kids. I ain’t hungry after that, you know?”
Outside, Garcia nodded, but inside, he was thinking how funny it was that he could happily hook up his way through his twenties and think that was the way things were going to go until he was ready to retire, only to be brought low by this broad-chested Adonis who was entirely clueless as to what he was doing to Garcia’s constitution.
Garcia refrained from the burger, thinking maybe they could split it after they checked out the locale.
THE LOCALpo-po had done what they’d been asked and staked out a parking spot across from the club itself without going in. Crosby and Garcia were out of the vehicle and crossing the street after a cursory wave to the boys in blue. Garcia had done his best to make sure he didn’t have mayo on his shirt or his mouth before the car stopped, but he resisted the urge to double-check that now. He’d have to get used to having the sort of clout that meant he barely had to talk to other cops if he didn’t need to.
Not that Crosby was rude, but it was clear he was on a mission.
They passed the front of the building, which hosted a tiny newsstand, and moved to the alleyway between that high-rise and the next. There were businesses on the bottom and apartments on the top, like a lot of NYC, but Garcia was getting the feeling of classic funkiness here—the precursor to gentrification. Jackson Heights wasn’t theworstarea of Queens, and it was the sort of place where people knew each other, even just to recognize them and curse them out for walking too slow.
As they trotted down the alleyway, which was wide enough for dumpsters and probably lines of people in the night but too narrow for a car to drive without losing paint, Garcia heard sounds—thumps, yells, some serious destruction.
Then he heard a shout, anguished and desperate, “Run, Kurt, run!” before a muffled shot.
“Shit!” Crosby cried out. He paused to pull his radio from his belt. “Elsa, shots fired, our location, get an ambulance here and some uniforms stat. Garcia and I are on scene, going in.”
“Crosby,stay—”
Before the rest of the order could come through, Crosby hooked the radio to his belt and pulled his largest gun from his hip before he looked at Garcia grimly. “I’ll stay put if you want,” he said. Garcia got it then, that he would. This was dangerous, and he wasn’t going in alone, but he needed Garcia’s okay for them both to check out the situation without someone on their six.
