Page 32 of Under Cover
He held up the gun Glenn had dropped by his side. “Sir, when and where did you buy this?”
The alleyway was wet and smelled strongly of wet garbage and piss, but it wasn’t snowing hard enough to stack up on the sides of the building. Which was how this nice suburban dad came to be on his knees in a filthy mud puddle, vomiting up his Christmas meal in the snow.
THEY PISSEDoff the local po-po, declared the situation handled, and told them to resume their usual duties. The officer in charge—a middle-aged, sagging Viking named Brigham—was none too happy about it.
“You called us out here on the word of a hysterical drag queen—”
“She had a very legitimate call,” Crosby said, while Garcia quietly explained to Glenn that he would be charged with a misdemeanor for bringing a concealed weapon to a crowded place without a permit, and then helped to install the family in the back of their unit, after making sure none of them were armed with anything more than a nail file.
“Legitimate my ass—”
Garcia turned from shutting the door to the SUV and pulled out the semiauto, glaring at the guy. “This is legit. More importantly, it’slegitimatelya weapon sold to a distraught man the same day he walked into the gun store. No waiting, unlike the state law, and no check for a jacket or a history of depression. So yeah, this could have been a legitimate nightmare if your guys had rushed in, and it wasn’t, but we appreciate the backup.”
“You slimy little beaner,” Brigham snarled, and before Garcia could even register the slur, Crosby popped the guy in the nose. The other cops—there must have been six or so—stared blankly in response, although none of them went for their weapons or even shouted, “Hey!” Apparently the respect for a federal officer was burrowed deep.
Brigham wobbled and fell backward onto the pavement while Crosby and Garcia hopped into the department-issue SUV. Crosby rolled down the window and called, “We’re not writing you up for this ’cause it’s Christmas. You pull that shit on anyone in my department again and we’ll paperwork you into retirement, you understand me?”
From what Garcia could see, Brigham was still too dazed to do more than nod, but then he might have nodded if they’d asked him if he liked cheese, so there was no guarantee this was going away. As they pulled away, his men gathered around him and helped him to his feet.
“You didn’t have to—” Garcia muttered as Crosby plugged the address Patsy Dickson had given them into the GPS so they could take the family home. Apparently they’d all come to Queens from Secaucus by train. Because New Jersey turnpikes were just the fucking worst, and it was going to take Crosby and Garcia forty-five minutes to get to Secaucus, even in the thin late-Christmas traffic.
“I did,” Crosby said, shaking out his hand. His knuckles looked bruised but not torn, and Garcia fought the urge to grab the hand and kiss the knuckles, because who did that? Who fought for a guy’s honor like that?
“It’s not like the whole world’s been all sweetness and light since I was born, you know,” Garcia chided.
“Yeah, well, fuck them. Fuck the guys in Florida who called you ‘boy’ all the time, and fuck that guy for being an asshole when you were being a professional.” Crosby put his hand back on the wheel to negotiate traffic. “Nobody does that to my partner, you understand?”
Garcia was going to have him. Oh dear God, it was going to have to happen. With a sigh he peered behind them to the Dickson family, who were talking softly, Glenn in the middle, his wife and daughter on either side, hashing out the rest of their lives.
Yeah. Garcia and Crosby were inevitable—but it wasn’t going to happen in the next forty-five minutes.
Instead, Garcia got on the horn to the ATF, and with Harding’s backing, they had people in place for a sting the morning of the twenty sixth.
Without the gun, that would have been a little family drama. With the gun, it had the potential to be a fucking tragedy.
After unloading the tearful, shaking family—and reminding Glenn Dickson he was getting a misdemeanor firearms charge added to his record and would have to appear in court, all the better to make it harder for him to make another purchase—they turned around to come back.
“You need food?” Crosby asked, and Garcia groaned, the sugar crash from all those cookies hitting him hard.
“Fuck. Yes. Stop somewhere—”
“There’s a steakhouse on the next exit. Text Harding. Ask if he wants takeout if we stop.”
“Sure.”
Harding did, indeed, want steak, and they pulled off the turnpike and went in.
It was a classic steakhouse—pretty girls in white shirts and black miniskirts served whiskey, beer, and big slabs of beef. The décor was dark wood and dark leather with white tablecloths, and the two of them sank gratefully into a booth, shedding their outerwear to leave on the seats beside them in the blessed warmth of the restaurant.
After placing their orders—they both went with the biggest cut of prime rib, the better to leave half in the work fridge for the next day—Crosby seemed to sink into the restaurant babble with a sense of peace.
“That was… that really was a miracle,” he said, his eyes closed. He opened them, and Garcia was arrested for the thousandth time, surprised and attracted by their infinite gray-blue depths. There was a deep sense of relief in those depths tonight, and Garcia felt an answering echo in his own soul.
“You mean that Brigham didn’t press charges?” he asked facetiously, and Crosby rolled his eyes.
“That’s coming back to bite me in the ass, don’t think it’s not,” he said soberly. “But I’m talking about the family. I saw it going so bad back there. I was thinking, ‘God, let’s not have to shoot this freaked-out family man on Christmas Eve.’”
“I was so relieved,” Garcia admitted. “God. I mean, in my head I know Christmas is no different than any other night. In fact with families? It gets worse. That girl—I think she sat down at the dinner table, trying to be Danny with ay, and her dad said one too many things about—I don’t know. Gay people. Trans people.Herpeople. And she snapped. Went and put on her slinky dress, her kitten heels, the red lipstick, the pushup bra. Said, ‘Dad, this is who I am.’ And boom. Dad’s got to believe it or fight it, and, you know. Hard to swallow the real.”
