was different and the porch had been extended. Two chairs sat side by side on fresh wooden planks.
A bottle of Jack between them.
The dark bearded man sitting in one of the chairs raised his glass toward Tyler.
“You’re late,” he said.
Tyler sighed, hanging his aching head for just a moment to wonder why he wasn’t surprised before leaping down onto the lush green grass inside the fence.
“Hi, Dad.”
JULIETTE PUSHED HER SUNGLASSES up onto her head as she stepped into the station Monday morning.
“Hey, Lisa,” she said, walking by the reception and dispatch desk.
“Morning, Jules…ah…Chief.”
She and Lisa had gone to school together, and while the Bonne Terre police force didn’t operate on formalities, not calling the police chief by her old nickname was one thing Juliette insisted on.
Six months as chief and Lisa was just catching on.
She stepped through the glass doors that led to the squad room and her office. Just like every morning, as soon as she stepped into the common room, all the chatter stopped as if it had been cut off by a knife.
The squeak of her shoes across the linoleum was the only sound in the room until she came to a stop at the night-shift desk, where the men were changing shifts and shooting the shit.
“Morning, guys,” she said, taking a sip from her coffee.
“Chief,” they chorused. Of the four men sitting there, only two of them managed to say it without the word clogging in their throats. The two she hired from out of town. The other two—Officers Jones and Owens, who had worked with her father and grown up in Bonne Terre—found the word a little sticky.
But she wasn’t here to be their friends. She was focused on busting their asses, pushing and shoving them into the twenty-first century, getting them new equipment, and forcing them to change the way things were done in this office.
And she was damn good at her job.
They didn’t have to like her, but they sure as hell had to listen to her.
“You’ve got reports on my desk?” she asked Weber and Kavanaugh, her two new hires who’d pulled the night shift. They nodded and chorused, “Yes, sir.”
“Great,” she said. “Go on home.”
They stood and she stepped into her office, shutting the door behind her. Conversations resumed as she set down her mug and dropped into her chair like a rock.
For some ridiculous reason, she still hadn’t redecorated this office. She’d modernized every other part of this force, but not these four walls. And so, it remained exactly the same as when her father had been chief. Dark walls, dress-blues portraits of every police chief Bonne Terre had ever seen, and a big desk upon which she could safely float down the Mississippi.
I should redecorate, she thought. When she’d taken the job she’d been so focused on getting updated computers and fresh blood in the squad room that she hadn’t given her office a second thought.
But now, sitting under her father’s stern visage reminded her—especially on the heels of a night haunted by thoughts of Tyler O’Neill—of how much Dad had hated Tyler.
There was a word stronger than hated, though. Despised.
Loathed.
Dad had loathed Tyler.
All the O’Neills, to be honest. He’d hated anything, anyone, who rebelled, who embraced disobedience the way the O’Neills did.
Which, of course, had been part of Tyler’s appeal. That forbidden fruit thing was no joke.
Dad’s attitude toward Tyler had been the same attitude he’d brought to the job, the same attitude he’d rubbed in the face of every juvenile delinquent and small-time crook in Bonne Terre.
His job had been to punish. To control. Dad was a hammer, a blunt instrument wielded without thought to circumstances.
Juliette didn’t share his attitude. She thought being police chief was about something else, something kinder.
She wanted to help, not control.
This job isn’t for you, he’d told her when she’d applied for the position. You’re too soft. Too willing to forgive when you need to punish.
She aimed a giant raspberry at her dad’s portrait and rolled her chair up to the desk and the small set of reports sitting on her blotter.
A domestic over at the Marones’. Again.
Shirley Stewart escaped from the retirement home. Again. She’d been found on the steps of the Methodist church, unharmed.
Attempted grand theft over at the—
“What?”
She snapped the report open, scanned the perp sheet.
“No, no, no, no,” she moaned. She leaped up from her chair and busted into the squad room. “Where is he?” she asked.
“Holding four,” Owens said, leaning back in his chair. He jerked his thumb back toward the holding cells as if she didn’t know where they were.
“I was supposed to be called if anything happened with this kid,” she said.
“What were we supposed to do?” Owens asked, his eyes wide in false and infuriating innocence. “The mayor caught him breaking into the car.”
“Where’s the car?”
“Impound.”
“Do we know whose it is?”
“It’s not in the report?” Officer Owens asked. “Your night-shift boys caught it. I can go check it—”
“Do that,” she said, so fed up with Owens’s laziness and Jones’s excuses.
The metal door opened up with a bang under both her hands and she stalked down the small hallway between cells. It was hot and still, the high windows letting in bright bars of sunlight across the gray concrete walls.
Four was back in the corner, and as she got closer she saw him on the floor. His wrists were propped up on his bent knees, the hood of his ragged gray sweatshirt pulled up over his head.
“Miguel?” she said and his head snapped up.
“Chief!” He jerked upright, his legs hitting the cement floor, but his face was still buried in the shadows under his hood. “Chief, I’m so—”
“Sorry?” She asked. “Let me guess, you didn’t mean to attempt to steal a—” She glanced down at the report.
“A Porsche,” he muttered.
