by Mary Calmes
Brooks Latham was in charge, and we would report to him, but he was simply a senior inspector, not a chief deputy like Kage.
“Normally here you’re not going to be with the same partner every day, or even on the same team. We tend to mix things up, depending on individual strengths and what’s needed on a certain op.”
We were both silent, waiting. He was not saying anything either of us liked so far.
“Are you guys partners in Chicago?”
“We are,” Ian told him.
“Great, that helps. I’ve had some trouble matching people up.”
“Not an issue with us,” Ian assured him.
He gave us a smile. “You guys hungry at all? I could feed you lunch before I give you the rest of the tour. You like Greek?”
We both did.
Crazy Jim’s was close to the courthouse, and since it smelled fantastic as soon as we walked in, my appetite jump-started. We both had pita subs—Ian a steak picado and me a chicken feta—and we shared a goat cheese salad that got hoovered down in no time.
“You guys always eat like this?”
Ian and I exchanged glances. “Normally we eat way more,” I clarified. “But since you were buying, we figured we’d go easy on you.”
The fact that he laughed was a good sign.
OUR TEMPORARY housing was close to the downtown Willo Historic District, a neighborhood Latham had called a “cottage community.”
“Which means what?” Ian asked as he took a right onto a small, quiet tree-lined street.
“I think it means they don’t have any apartments. It’s all homes.”
“That makes no sense,” he told me. “If you look in that envelope he gave us, there are key fobs in there and directions for where we’re supposed to park our car. There’s no way we’re staying in some house. It’s gotta be an apartment.”
“It’s so beautiful here,” I commented as we passed a Tudor-style home and then a Craftsman bungalow, a Spanish Revival, and many others. Each was different, and that was interesting to look at. The homes and the landscaping told me the neighborhood was old, yet immaculately kept.
“I wanna go home,” he growled.
And I knew he did. “Let’s just find the house, all right? The sooner we get there, the sooner we can dump our crap and get to work.”
“But that’s what I’m saying, M. I don’t think we’re looking for a house.”
It turned out he was right. The condo on the fourth floor of the enormous complex we would be staying in was actually adjacent to the historic district on Vernon Avenue.
After we parked the car and Ian grabbed his duffel out of the back, I got my garment bag, duffel, and the wheeled suitcase currently full of shoes out of the trunk.
“May I help you with that, sir?” Ian teased.
If looks could kill, he would have been dead, but clearly I wasn’t that scary because he only snorted out a laugh before grabbing my garment bag. He lifted it easily, even though it was the heaviest of the three pieces of luggage, and started toward the elevators.
The apartment was 1,700 square feet of boring: one master bedroom, two smaller ones, two bathrooms, fireplace—though only God knew why—a laundry room, and a tiny patio. It made me think of my first apartment when I was going through the police academy. It was sparsely furnished, very clean, and utterly adequate.
“It’s fine,” I assured Ian.
“It sucks,” he judged vehemently.
I understood his hatred. He had left a place with the same lack of character that was totally forgettable not six months before. This felt like backsliding.
“We don’t live here,” I reminded him as we both dropped the bags. Moving into his space, I kissed him, tenderly, lightly, before nipping his lower lip and stepping back.
“Where ya goin’?”
“We promised we’d be back there in an hour. It’s almost been that.”
“Fine, but tonight we find a place where we can drink, and then you promise to come home with me and fuck my brains out.”
“You don’t have to get me drunk first—no alcohol required, marshal.”
He chuckled, and the sound of him, all husky and seductive, made me want to rethink the plan of getting back to work.
“Too late,” he announced, already using his cop voice. “Let’s get going.”
No amount of talking was going to get me laid at the present moment, and I had no one to blame but myself.
IT WAS different in Phoenix. And while I was getting the hang of how they did things, Ian was not. Simple things, like other marshals stopping him from putting a guy down on the pavement or up against the side of a car, drove him nuts.
“What the fuck,” he growled at me.
I winced at the volume. “The ground is hot; so is the car.”
“I hate it here,” he lamented.
I had to nag him not to turn off the car and leave people inside, and he had to get used to carrying metal cuffs again—their budget was different in Phoenix, so he couldn’t stuff his TAC vest with plastic ones all the time.
“Why?” he asked irritably, holding the cuffs up as he held a guy over the open trunk of the white Mercury Marquis.
I made the snapping motion for him again because he’d locked them… again. “You gotta flip it open and then sort of flick it around their wrist.”
He didn’t have either the snap or the flick down. It got to the point, after the first week, that they were always my cuffs on the suspects. But I had years of practice on him because I’d been first a patrolman and then a police detective. Ian’s background was all military combat, never as an MP, so he didn’t have my cuff technique.
“And why are they suspects?” Ian fumed as we took a guy into the office for processing. “They’re fuckin’ fugitives, for crissakes. That’s what we do—we pick those fuckers up!”
Latham was all about being PC, and that included what his team called the people we brought in. He was very concerned about public perception and how his office was viewed. I had never seen so many outsiders allowed to ride along, shadow, and interview team members. I was glad that Ian and I were sort of wild cards, that he didn’t know us well and so kept us out of the limelight.
We were on a bust with another team and one of the reporters tried to film Ian and me capturing a suspect. After he put on a pair of latex gloves, Ian took the phone right out of the guy’s hand and dropped it down a storm drain. That time we didn’t get hauled into the office because it was his word against ours and the reporter was apparently kind of a douche. But it became a daily occurrence for us to be sitting in front of Lathan’s desk for something.
Excessive force. Inadequate force. Why did we grapple with suspects instead of simply pulling our firearms? Why did we run warrant checks on everyone at a particular location when we had the person we were there for in custody?
After the second week, Ian started stopping in the middle of putting his foot in some guy’s back and yelled over to me, “Can I do this?”
And I’d nod yes or shake my head no. One of the things frowned upon was taking a guy at the Scottsdale Fashion Square in front of the food court. Ian flew over a table and tackled the guy, picked him up, and flung him back down onto the tile. The “suspect” didn’t move after that. We both had on baseball hats and sunglasses, and when the mall cops showed up, I flashed my badge. As soon as we got back, we were in Latham’s office.
“You should have waited for the suspect to exit the mall,” he lectured us.
“Write that down,” Ian directed me right before he was suspended for a day.
“I’ll put it in a memo,” I advised him, and that did it, I was suspended too.
We spent the whole Thursday in bed ordering delivery and napping.
“Maybe we should have just taken vacation time,” I whispered as I lay on the floor in the living room—the coolest room in the apartment—with Ian draped over me in a sated, sticky sprawl.
He grunted his agreement before tipping hi
s head back to lick up the length of my throat. That was all it took for me to roll him to his back and fuck him again.
Later, while we were lying poolside, a beautiful dark-tanned dark-haired woman who looked like she could model if she wanted walked over and asked Ian if he’d like to have a drink with her later.
“A drink?”
She chuckled. “If you’re not busy, uhm….”
“Ian,” he supplied.
Her smile was wicked, and the way she bit her bottom lip, alluring. “Ian,” she repeated, her voice as seductive as her body. “I’d love to show you the sights. You’re new in town, right?”
He nodded.
“Yeah, I figured. I haven’t seen you around, and I would have definitely noticed.”
It was a nice line.
“I can’t,” he replied, sitting up on the lounge chair, tipping his head back as he looked at her from behind his aviators. “But I’m very flattered and I appreciate the offer.”
“Why can’t you? I don’t see a ring.”
It took everything in me not to pounce on him and yell “Ah-ha!”
Ring. The magic word. She would have stopped and never walked over if she’d seen a ring on his finger.
Fucking Ian.
Getting up, letting him handle the situation he found himself in, I took off my White Sox cap and tossed it on the chair I’d just vacated. After walking to the edge of the pool, I jumped in and let myself sink to the bottom.
It was quiet and calm, and I sat there for as long as I could, eyes open, taking in all the blue before surfacing slowly.
“You’re such an asshole.”
Looking over my shoulder I found Ian, glaring down at me, arms crossed, sunglasses hanging on the collar of his T-shirt.
I swam backward, away from him.
“Really?”
“Aren’t you going for drinks?”
He shook his head. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Why not? You can go.”
“M.”
“You got no ring and all,” I couldn’t help adding.
“Just get outta the pool. I’m hungry.”
Instead I did a few laps, and when I finally got out, he was right there with a big fluffy towel to wrap around my hips.
“What’re you doing?”
“You can totally see the outline of your dick when your shorts are wet.”
I shrugged.
He growled. “Don’t be an ass. I told her I was with you, all right?”
I squinted at him.
Turning, he waved, and when I followed his gaze, I saw the woman and her group, all of whom were sitting in the shaded area beneath huge ceiling fans, return the gesture.
“See?”
I nodded and went to move past him, but he stepped into my path.
“Ian,” I said softly.
“Stop,” he ordered gently as he took my face in his hands and stepped closer, into me, into my space, leaving no room to guess what we were to each other. “I know what you need, M.”
“Yeah?”
“I do.”
I liked the way those two words sounded on his tongue.
“Gimme time.”
Whatever he wanted.
THE FOLLOWING day we were inside the AJ’s Fine Foods in Glendale because when we went to arrest a fugitive in a house off of 67th Avenue, I had run after him when he took off.
“Ya good yet?” Ian asked, putting the ice pack that the very nice woman in the deli had given us on the back of my neck.
“He needs to drink more water,” Courtney Quinn, another deputy, explained to Ian. “And next time you should fuckin’ listen to me, Smith.”
If I answered her I’d say something shitty, so instead I drank the Gatorade that Lucas Hoch, yet another deputy, gave me. He’d twisted the cap off, which was damn nice of him since I was still seeing spots.
“Nobody runs in the heat,” he reiterated to me, as he had for the past half an hour.
I’d done what I always did, bolted from the car, and this time, it was Ian following. But the chase took a good twenty minutes, up over walls, through backyards, around the sides of houses, across streets, and finally when I caught the guy in a flying tackle on the manicured front lawn in a quiet upper-middle-class neighborhood, I didn’t get back up. I couldn’t. I could barely breathe, I was so hot.
Ian managed to get cuffs on the guy—we’d been practicing at the apartment, in and out of bed—and told him to stay still before he checked on me.
“Jesus, M, you’re really red.”
There was only heat and my skin felt like it was burning.
The homeowner, a beautiful blonde housewife dressed immaculately and sporting a diamond ring as big as my thumb, came out immediately, her friends waiting in the doorway, to see if she could offer any assistance.
“No, ma’am,” Ian said quickly, clearly worried about me. “I just need to get him off your lawn and hydrated.”
“Exactly,” she agreed. “You need to get him inside and push fluids. My kids get like that if I don’t watch them like a hawk.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said affably.
“Do you want to bring him in here?”
We were never, ever, supposed to involve civilians in anything if possible.
“No, ma’am, but thank you.”
When I looked up at her from my prone position, she smiled and nodded.
So Ian found the AJ’s and dragged me inside to sit in the a/c and drink water.
“We don’t run,” Quinn expounded. “Not until after Halloween, when it cools down.”
“It doesn’t cool down until Halloween?” Ian was flabbergasted.
“Yes, marshal,” she teased, and I saw her pupils dilate as she looked at him—easy to see she found him very appealing. “You have to wait a bit longer.”
Letting my head fall forward, I bumped his thigh with my shoulder.
“When we do AT like I was telling you about out there in Twentynine Palms, this shit happens all the time,” he said, trying to reassure me as he put his hand in my hair, scratching my scalp before gently moving the ice pack. “Big strong guys drop all over the place.”
He was trying to make me feel better about being a dumbass, but it wasn’t helping.
“You still feeling light-headed?”
“A little.”
“You’ll be okay.”
“This is lame.”
“It’s gonna happen in this kinda heat, M.”
“You wouldn’t have nearly passed out.”
“No, ’cause I’ve trained in this bullshit,” he insisted, squatting down in front of me, his hands on my knees to look at my face. “And I know you hafta hydrate and limit what you expend energy on.”
I couldn’t shake the embarrassment or the memory of the looks from Quinn and Hoch implying that I was a lightweight.
Of course, fifteen minutes later I had the sunstroke headache, and Ian and I had to pull into a Circle K on the way back downtown and get me Tylenol, more Gatorade, and a 64-ounce Thirst Buster cup full of Dr Pepper because I needed both the caffeine and the sugar, he said. As I held the gigantic plastic-handled cup in my hand, I asked him why.
“’Cause you’re gonna need it.”
“I have to hold it in my lap or between my feet. It’s too big for the cupholder.”
“Just drink it and shut up,” he grumbled. “And get in the car.”
After we ate again, between the food, drugs, caffeine, and staying cool, I was back to myself, feeling better, ready to chase down more bad guys.
When we reached a task force site out in Tempe, close to the university there, we saw all the usual suspects, plus DEA agents. Ian and I vested up, he strapped on his thigh holster—which held his spare SIG P228, because only having the Glock 20 we each carried wasn’t enough—and we headed toward the cluster of men.
“Where are you guys going?” Hoch asked before we got far.
Ian pointed toward the staging area.
“Not yet,” Qui
nn told us. “We wait until they tell us where they want us.”
I glowered at her. “I thought you said this was our grab. Is it a fugitive capture or not?”
“It is, but, you know, Latham always says we wait for direction.”
“Even on a warrant that we’re serving?”
They both nodded.
“Oh.” I shouldn’t have been surprised, the procedure in Phoenix a constant learning opportunity. “So even during those times when we’re supposed to take point, you guys run the support agenda?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh,” I said, turning to Ian.
He crossed his arms. “Are you fucking with me?”
I checked on Hoch and Quinn, and as they both appeared confused, I returned my focus to Ian. “No, I don’t think so.”
When I was hired, Kage had made clear that in his office, we went for the jugular each and every single time. He was always in charge; he expected his men to carry themselves that same way in the field. It was lucky that Ian had ended up working for Kage, as he was not the guy who waited and said please and may I. Ian kicked the door down and God help you if you were behind it when he did.
“We hang back and wait,” Hoch reiterated, in case Ian and I were slow.
“Okay,” I agreed, because it was not my call.
“Fuck no,” Ian growled, and when he stalked away, I was committed to following, as it was basically in my job description.
Two hours later, as we sat in Latham’s office listening to him yell again, for like the hundredth time in a three-week period, I realized Ian and I were on thin ice. We’d be lucky if we had jobs when we got home.
“We never lead!” he bellowed at us. “We take our cues from the other law enforcement on site so it can never come back on us!”
Latham’s team didn’t breach, they didn’t tell everyone else to fuck off; they took custody only when it was time or when they were asked to. It was a completely different dynamic than we’d been operating with since we became marshals but really, was probably the one with a lot fewer incident reports.
“And you went in without even pulling your guns. What the hell was that?”
I cleared my throat. “We were walking into an area with a high number of civilians, sir, and so until the threat presented itself, we didn’t want to draw our weapons.”