Page 21 of Misadventures in Blue
Her guess is my hope. I don’t have his cell number, and I don’t feel comfortable digging through personnel records to get it when this isn’t police business. Ditto with his address.
But showing up at his favorite dive is any better? Get a grip, Day.
“Thanks, Nicki.”
“Anytime. And hey…” She stops for a moment, as if deciding how to proceed. “I saw in payroll that you had low-light range today. And I know that—well, what I mean is, if you ever need to talk, I’m here.”
My throat feels as if someone’s cinching a ribbon tight around it. “Thank you, Nicki. That’s very kind.”
“I mean it, okay?”
“Okay. Good night.”
And Russo hangs up without saying goodbye, per usual. I drop the phone in my passenger seat and sigh.
I should go home.
I should
go home and do what I’ve done every year after low-light range: pop open a bottle of wine, drink the entire thing, and then fall asleep curled around Frazer’s college sweatshirt.
I should not go to a place called the Dirty Nickel to find a man thirteen years younger and…
And what? What is my plan? That Jace will take one look at me and know I need to be hugged? That I need a warm chest to finally, finally cry into?
No. If anything, we’ll fuck, because that’s the only connection we have, and then we’ll both be miserable after because every time we have sex, we’re courting major professional trouble.
I should not go to the Dirty Nickel.
I should not.
I start my car and tell myself to drive home.
The Dirty Nickel is in a rougher part of town, in a cluster of old strip malls and used car lots, tucked away at the end of a low-slung building that also contains a thrift store and a vape shop. It’s a far cry from the martini bar I occasionally venture out to with my girlfriends from college.
I nearly almost go home to change into something less fancy…and then remember I’m not in my usual silk and tailored wool. I’m in the dark-blue polyester of my uniform, with utility boots and a ponytail.
All I’m missing are the sunglasses and I could be a cop for Halloween.
With a sigh at the uniform—and at everything, absolutely everything—I get out of the car and walk inside. It doesn’t matter what I’m wearing. It doesn’t matter because I shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be doing this, but it’s the only thing I can think to do. It’s the only thing that feels right when everything else feels so wrong.
The inside of the bar is only marginally better than the outside. Pool tables hunker down under dim lights, a couple of televisions play a baseball game between two teams no one cares about, and an unseen jukebox issues forth music the other detectives and I call “construction worker rock.”
At seven, the place is just picking up, and I catch a table in the far corner with a few faces I vaguely recognize. Young cops. It’s awful, perhaps even a little elitist, but I don’t bother to learn a rookie’s name until they bother to stick around for five years. Or more.
So I’m not entirely certain who they are or what shift they work or how long they’ve worked for Hocker Grove, but they’re definitely HGPD. Even if I didn’t recognize their faces, I’d be able to tell they were cops immediately. Legs sprawled but eyes alert, everyone in those free T-shirts you get for working golf tournaments or charity 5Ks or holiday parades. The men with short, inexpensive haircuts and the women in low ponytails or messy buns.
Not every woman.
In a table of about twelve, five are women, and three of those five are definitely cops, but the other two are just as definitely not. They’ve got impeccable makeup and glossy hair, and they’re young, so fucking young.
Badge bunnies.
I’ve never liked the term—it seems vaguely sexist to me to disparage young women for the type of men they like to take to bed—but right now, something about their shiny, giggling youthfulness sets my teeth on edge. Especially after I see that one of them is curled around the one cop I do recognize.
Jace.
He hasn’t seen me yet. He’s peering up at the baseball game with his fingers wrapped around a beer bottle, but the bunny sees me standing in the doorway. She watches me watching them with her salon-perfect ombre hair brushing against Jace’s shoulder and her hand on his thigh. He’s in street clothes, the same kind of free-event T-shirt the rest of the cops are wearing, and battered jeans and boots.
