by Finn, Emilia
If she was a good cop, she’d already know I was here. I’d know if someone was in my space while I slept, so the fact I’ve come this far makes me worry for her the way I didn’t worry ten minutes ago when I studied her not-terrible street.
The bedroom window faces the street where my car is parked. The blinds are partially open, the window closed to keep the cold air out. I inch the door open and pray the hinges don’t squeak, but as soon as I make enough room to step inside, I stop and press a fist to my mouth to stop my own involuntary groan.
Libby-fucking-Tate grew the hell up. She sleeps tangled in her covers, one naked leg out of the blankets, one leg in. She’s topless, but sleeps on her stomach, so I see nothing but her bare back and half an ass cheek. She still has dimples, but they’re not on her knees anymore. Snake eyes blink from the small of her back, and muscles in her thighs, tensed even in sleep, make my brows lift high.
I found a gym membership in her accounts. I can now confirm she uses it.
Jesus.
I step into her shadowed bedroom and move closer. Her bed takes up eighty percent of the room. She has a foot of space on the left, a foot on the right. And at the end, just enough room for a chest of drawers, so long as you squeeze to get between it and the bed. She has another, smaller TV perched on top of the drawers, and a utility belt tossed down beside it. I see the cuffs, the keys, the flashlight. I see the gun holster, but no gun.
I also see her hand hidden beneath her pillow, and in my mind, I see it wrapped around the gun for protection.
Adrenaline surges in my blood as my body understands the danger. It’s dark, she lives alone, she’s a cop, and I’m a stranger in her home; I’m a dead man if she wakes.
I’m here to check her space and then leave. Staring at her ass is neither useful nor smart, so I take one last peek, then move through her room in silence. I check the drawers and under the bed. I check behind the clothes neatly stacked in each drawer, under the shirts, amongst her panties. Mostly she owns beige grandma panties, but there’s a thong or two in the back. They’re her special occasion panties, and that bothers me on a strange, primal level. She doesn’t need special occasion panties, and any man that has seen them has somehow landed themselves on my shit list.
I haven’t thought of Libby Tate in, well… I want to say twenty-two years. I want to say I left the chubby little girl standing at the top of those stairs and moved on with my life. But in reality, I’ve thought of her a lot. When you’re at war and you have only one ally, you think of that ally long after the war has ended. It’s a brotherhood of sorts, a camaraderie, despite having only served together for a short time.
In truth, I thought of Libby Tate almost every single day of my first year in an alleyway. Many people bought drawings of her; her eyes, her hair, her smile. I have a million sketchpads, and every single page is filled with doodles of that nine-year-old girl.
I thought of her every second day of my second year in that alley, and most days of the year after that. I wondered if she was safe, if she was happy. I’d acquired a radio during my days in hell, a scanner that dialed into police frequencies. For years, I heard Raymond Tate’s voice, I heard him go about his work and act like he was a legitimate servant of society. But best of all, I did not hear of a child being rushed to the hospital because of a drug overdose, nor did I hear of her being beaten half to death by her police officer father.
Tate remained in his position of power for many years after that day in the club, which I guess was good news in a way. It was shitty news for me and the others that he’d hurt. But it was good for Libby; it meant she was alive and safe, and it meant she had food on her table each night.
I’ve created warped coping mechanisms over the years; I wanted him to be taken down, but not immediately, because that would affect Libby’s happiness and safety.
Like all things, I want justice, but on my terms.
I continue to search her room, peek at the windowsill, and try my damnedest not to look at her face as she sleeps. Her long hair isn’t as curly as it used to be. Now it’s more of a loose wave, long enough to touch her shoulders and hang in her face while she sleeps. Her lips are pouty, just like they were when she was a child, her cheeks puffy, though that has more to do with sleep than it does with her weight.
The image I found online today didn’t include puffy cheeks.
Her lashes are long, but not the fake kind. Her nose is pert and the perfect button size for her face. It was too big when she was nine. Now it borders on small and, well, cute.
So much for not looking at her face.
I guess the most surprising feature of all has nothing to do with knee dimples or wavy hair, and everything to do with the muscle I see in her shoulders, her back, her thighs. She’s a gym junkie, and that’s kind of cute in a way, but at the same time, it’s somewhat intimidating, when almost nothing intimidates me.
All of the women I know that go to the gym – and I know many, because how else would they maintain their size zero clothes? – go to spin class or Pilates. What Libby does isn’t a class. It’s not a spa or yoga retreat. Libby lifts, she lifts heavy, and when her hand slides out from beneath her pillow and she turns a little to the side, my mind scrambles with an inability to focus.
Tits.
Or bruised knuckles.
Side tit and creamy flesh.
Or focus on the knuckles, and the proof that she hits too?
Neither!
There’s nothing in her room, and staying now has nothing to do with searching and everything to do with a man’s dependency on a beautiful woman.
Sliding between the bed and the dresser, I grit my teeth when my jeans brush against the wooden frame of her bed. It makes just the barest sound of fabric on wood, but in the middle of the night, in the dark, with a cop in her bed, it sounds like a gunshot to my ears.
She doesn’t wake. In fact, she gives a piggy-like snore and turns back to her stomach.
She’s a cop, but her spatial awareness is all kinds of fucked up.
Slipping out of her room, I take a fast study of her bathroom; neat, but not cleaned today. In her shower; clean, but with a small pile of hair in the drain. Behind her toilet; one hidden gun. No drugs, no money, no admissions of guilt.
Nodding as though I’ve proven something to myself, I back out again and know I’m pushing my luck the longer I stay. I need to leave and make a new plan, because after twenty-two years, I’ve ended up in the same town as Libby Tate, a couple Bishops, and Sean Frankston’s child. Twenty-two years, and they all end up in the same geographical space, despite starting somewhere else entirely.
The word coincidence is a lie.
Now I have to decide what to do with this new information.
Leaving the hall and passing through the living room, I stop with a skid at a flash of red tucked into the back of the couch. I was facing the wrong way when I passed earlier, but now I see it. I glance back toward Libby’s room to make sure she’s still out, then I move toward the couch and yank the fabric free. A lifetime of memories sprint through my mind. A lifetime of wants, hungers, loneliness, exhaustion, fear. So much fucking fear. Dark alleyways and skittering vermin pass through my conscience while I stand in Libby’s dark living room and study my discovery.
When Libby makes another soft snoring sound, I ball the fabric in my fists and toss it back onto the couch as though it offends me. I take a step back, then another. I only make it three steps before I charge forward and snatch it up, then I dash out her door and make sure it’s locked up securely before I walk away.
I skip down the stairs and out the front door, and when Olly winds his window down and lifts an inquisitive brow at the dinosaur sweater an eleven-year-old boy once wore now bundled in my hand, he says nothing except, “Sir?”
I slide into the back seat with an odd betrayal swirling in my stomach. Technically, finding evidence of being a dirty cop would be the true betrayal, but my emotions take over, and the unfairness and everything this
sweater represents bothers me more. She has it. Perhaps she’s had it all along. Why, after two decades, is this sweater still in her possession? Why is it out in her living room as though she’d touched it only today? And how the fuck did she come into possession of it in the first place?
“Sir?” Olly prompts me again.
“Head to the hotel. We’re done for tonight. I’ll drive myself tomorrow, but I have some things for you to look into while I’m busy.”
He pulls away from the curb and heads across town. “Bishops?”
“We’ll watch for a little longer, but I think I’ll make contact soon. I’m gonna work this other angle first.”
“Work it.” Dropping character, my driver smirks and meets my eyes in the mirror. “I see you working it, Griff. I know whose home you were in tonight, I see the fire in your eyes. You act like I haven’t known you for fifteen years already.”
“If you think you know me so well, then you know you should shut your mouth and drive me where I wanna go.”
He’s not scared. He might be the only person on this planet that knows the real me. He doesn’t know my name was Bishop once, but he knows I’m from the streets, he knows I have a problem with authority, and he knows that deep down, below the intimidation, below the businessman, below the high-rise buildings and multitudes of loyal staff, I’m just a poor kid with a witty sense of humor buried deep in the dark recesses behind my black heart.
He’s possibly the only human I would call a friend.
Chuckling when I say nothing else, he dips his imaginary hat and makes a right onto Main Street. “Yes, sir.”
My lips twitch, but I try to school it as my sweater rests on my lap and Libby Tate sleeps naked just a couple miles from where I’ll have a bed for the night. “Shut the fuck up, or I’ll staple your lips closed.”
5
Libby
The Rollin On Gym
“Officer Tate! Hey!”
I glance up and smile when a group of teens horsing around at the front doors of the Rollin On Gym call my name. Trouble makers, law breakers, smartasses, they’re the very delinquents I, as a cop, should hate. But their rebellion is all for show. They’re good kids, and their loyalty for family and their town is fierce.
“Officer! Help me.”
Slowing my steps, I stop in front of the foursome and lift a brow. “Got a crime to report, Miss Kincaid?”
“Yeah!” Evie wears a sports bra, booty shorts, and a thick scrunchy in her hair to keep the wild curls off her face. She’s sixteen, I think, and has the body that comes with spending her life inside a pro fighting gym. Defined abs that I secretly envy every day, ropey muscles on her shoulders and biceps, and a mean right hook when someone steps up in the boxing ring. She’s a champion fighter already, and has lofty plans to go pro when she’s old enough and her daddy says she can.
She can look after herself just fine, so I know her calling me over now has nothing to do with a crime, and everything to do with the two guys that stand at her and her cousin’s back. “Ya know the sasquatch, right?” She jabs a thumb over her shoulder to Ben Conner, the boy not-so-affectionately known as Sasquatch. “He made a bet, see? So, one, betting as a minor is a crime. And two, when you lose your bet and cry like a little bitch instead of pay up, that’s a crime in my gym. Tell him to hand the fifty over, and we won’t have a problem.”
“Okay, but…” I drop my bag and eye the foursome. Evie’s cousin, Lucy, also known as Bean, is a fighter just like Evie. Similar bodies, but where one is light skin, light hair, light eyes, the other is her opposite. Darker skin, mahogany hair, brown eyes. And where Evie is loud, Bean is humble, often laying her opponents out in silence. “You’re saying Benny the Sasquatch made an illegal bet?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Evie argues. “And now he won’t pay up.”
“But there are two sides to every bet, right? So that means you were also making illegal bets… right?”
“Right!” Her eyes widen. “No, wait…”
“What was the bet? Perhaps I can let it pass if it was reasonable.”
“It was a circuit,” the fourth and last member of the group speaks up.
Macallistar Blair was a fighter until recently, but he had to undergo surgery on his heart, so what was once a promising fighting career is now, according to my sources, over. He carries anger in his eyes for what’s been taken from him, and I’m not sure anyone else sees that anger the way I do. Everyone is so focused on the fact he’s alive, when there was a good chance he wouldn’t be, that they don’t see his feelings on his fight career. He was planning to go pro, and now he’s not even allowed to jump rope.
“Thirty rounds,” he continues. “Push-ups, sit-ups, hip escape, a thousand kicks, ten rounds of sparring. First to complete wins.”
“Took all damn day,” Evie growls. “The whole effing day! I won fair and square, and now he’s all ‘but my hamstring! My poor, tender, sissy hamstring was tight’.”
“You cheated!” Ben growls. “You know you don’t deserve the fifty.”
“How’d you cheat?” I wait for Evie’s bright eyes. “What did you do to have the cop’s son calling foul?”
“She—”
Benny’s voice cuts off on a squeak when Evie throws her elbow back and nails him in the gut. “I did nothing. I won fair and square, and he’s crying like a little bitch. Now I need my money, so I’m coming to the cops.”
“Snitches get stitches,” Benny growls. “I don’t have room in my life for snitches.”
“No.” She rounds on him and plops her hands on her hips. “Snitches end up in ditches. Pay up, Sasquatch, or face my wrath.”
“Alright, see, this is how this is gonna go.” I grab Evie’s shoulder and spin her back to face me. “You’re both making illegal bets, you’re bordering on child abuse with a circuit the size of the one you did, one of you threatened stitches, and another, death. Am I following this so far?”
Evie grins and nods her head.
“Right, so you’re both idiots. Take your problems to the octagon and away from me. Otherwise I’ll toss you both in the tank, separate cells, and you won’t be released until the toilets have been scrubbed.”
Wide-eyed, Evie curls her lips back with disgust. “Ew.”
“Exactly. Still want me to recover your money from the deputy’s kid?”
“No.” Turning, she grabs Lucy’s hand and tugs her away. “We’ll settle this on the mats like men.”
“You’re not a man!” Ben hollers as she leaves. “Evelyn, you’re not a man! Stop acting like you can square up.”
When the sounds of a chicken clucking echo along the hall and turn the teen’s face red with anger, I pick up my bag and walk toward the locker room. I pass the girl’s mom and shake my head, then I pass Oz – Benny’s stepfather – and laugh when I find him squatting around a corner, listening to his kid squabble with a girl.
“Ben’s an idiot. Seriously.”
“But they’re so cute, no?” Standing, Oz goes from being eye level with my hips, to making me fold my neck back to maintain eye contact. He’s had his sleep too, and now he’s ready to work off the nervous energy before we start back on days on Monday. “Benny’s gotta keep that under wraps for like, ten more years before her daddy releases the shackles. It’s so much fun to watch.”
“I’m watching close,” Tina saunters by. Tina is Evie’s mom and almost twin. “Swear to the devil, you keep that boy close, or you’ll have to answer to me. That might be something one day, Lord knows they keep swiping at each other, but we don’t let history repeat around here. School first, then she’ll win a title or two, get a degree and buy a home, then we’ll let her date. If Benny can keep his shit together for that decade, then maybe we’ll let him ask her out.”
Oz lifts his hands in surrender. Hat pulled low, wicked grin wrinkling his face, he backs away and chuckles. “I keep him straight. I keep him outta jail. I’m doing the best I can.”
Tina stops and narrows her eyes,
but I shake my head and walk into the female locker room to get ready for my workout. Those kids are going to terrorize this town, and despite their parents thinking they have it under control, I know the kids will end up in the back of a patrol car a dozen times between now and when they graduate college. Things get sticky when it’s your dad or your uncle fastening the cuffs, and when the girl is cute as hell and bats her lashes to be let go, Alex and Oz stand no chance.
I’m going to have to be the bad guy, I just know it.
I stop by the lockers on the far wall, push my bag in and snatch my headphones out, then swinging a towel over my shoulders and grabbing my water bottle, I close the door and set the passcode.
I’m not in a rush today. For one day a week, I get to take my time, wander around, slow my sets, and count my breaths. Every other day, I have an hour to get in and out, shower, and run to work before I’m late.
I reenter the hallway and head toward the weights room. I’m not a pump-class or organized sport kind of girl. Instead, I push my headphones in and turn “Love The Way You Lie” up until my ears almost sting. I have somewhere to be at six, so I have two and a half hours to mellow out and feel the burn.
I let myself find the rhythm beating through my ears, but when I enter the weight room and find a broad back imposing on my space, I stop and frown. I normally dump my bottle and towel by that corner. I normally place my things between the wall and the multi station, do a five-minute run on the treadmill, then work on my shoulders and back. But someone else’s ass is using that space, someone else’s shoulders, covered in sweaty ink, are already feeling the burn from the heavy weights.
Put out, since I’m a creature of habit, I reverse and use the opposite corner. I set my things down and growl when I tug a headphone out by accident. I catch the sound of a male grunt as he slowly does his reps, but I push the headphone back in and try to find my zen.