Page 2 of Misadventures in Blue
“I heard they called in the Ice Queen,” Quinn says, coming over to lean against my car and talking to me through my open window. Quinn’s fresh out of field training, like me, but a couple of years younger, and sometimes that couple of years feels like decades.
But as my grandmother used to say, I’m an old soul, and I’m sure fighting in a literal war did nothing to make that soul any younger. So I take a deep breath and try to be patient with the fact that this guy wants to shoot the shit while all I want is to get my work done.
“Ice Queen?” I ask, not looking up from the report screen of the mounted tablet in the car.
“Yeah, man. Cat Day. You haven’t heard about her?”
I could point out that in a department of nearly four hundred commissioned officers, there are a lot of people I haven’t heard of, but I don’t bother. Quinn doesn’t need my help keeping a conversation going.
“So get this. Years and years ago, she was engaged to another cop, and he was killed in the line of duty. Killed right in front of her. And when the other officers arrived on the scene, they found her sitting on the steps outside the house where he was killed and she’s covered in his blood from trying to do CPR, and the first thing she says is, ‘Can I wash my hands?’”
He pauses for effect. I keep typing.
He keeps going, with more hand gestures now, to drive home his point. “Not ‘Oh my God, my fiancé is fucking dead’ or ‘Someone wheel me to the psych ward because I just watched the man I love bleed out’ or anything like that. Nope. ‘Can I wash my hands?’ She wasn’t even crying. And they said she never did cry, like ever, not even at his funeral. How messed up is that?”
Honestly, I don’t think it’s messed up at all.
Everyone reacts to trauma differently. I once saved a civilian’s life by shoving my fingers into an open wound in his thigh, and three hours later I was eating nachos in the DFAC and compla
ining about how the Chiefs couldn’t get their shit together. The only way to keep living after these moments is to focus on the tiny realities that, when stitched together, make life normal. Washing your hands. Nachos. Talking about things that don’t matter.
To stay normal you have to pretend to be normal.
It’s compartmentalization—but you can’t say that word to the therapists and counselors because then they start nodding and writing stuff down.
“Who’s they?” I ask, looking up from my tablet.
Quinn’s red-blond brows furrow together. “What do you mean?”
“You said they are saying this stuff about Detective Day. Who?”
He waves an impatient hand. “It’s just like—stories, man. Gossip and stuff.”
“Why does anyone care?”
“Because she’s still, like, a frigid bitch,” Quinn states as if it’s obvious.
His words piss me off. “That’s unprofessional to say,” I tell him. “Not to mention shitty.”
Quinn rolls his eyes and his body at the same time in a kind of oh come ON gesture. “You’re no fun, Sutton.”
“So I’ve heard,” I say, getting back to the report.
“Ugh. Fine. But mark my words when you meet her. Frig—”
I give him an irritated glare, and he finally, thankfully, shuts up and leaves me alone.
Ice Queen.
I wonder what she’s actually like. My mom was a firefighter, and I know being a woman and a first responder means walking along a wire with no safety net. Too passive and you get ignored for promotions and recognition. Too aggressive and you get labeled a bitch. Act like a man and you’ll succeed—but then you’ll be punished for not being enough like a woman.
This reflection, along with random thoughts about being home and being bored, filter through my mind as a civilian car rolls into the parking lot. A very nice civilian car.
I watch with interest as it coasts into a spot and stops and then with even more interest as a woman climbs out in a blouse and skirt—no uniform, although there is a badge clipped to the waist of her skirt.
Detective Catherine Day.
She’s slender, upright, with posture and movements so graceful that there must be ballet shoes in her past…ski trips and horses too. Light-blond hair waves just past her shoulders, sleek and glamorous in that Old Hollywood kind of way, and the drape of her silk blouse and the fitted hug of her pencil skirt scream money and delicacy and restraint.
