Melanie said, wondering if that was actually drool beginning to form in a corner of the woman’s mouth. Good grief.
“Hubba, hubba.” Joan rolled her eyes and poked Melanie’s arm with her elbow.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, hubba, hubba. You know, as in the man is majorly attractive.”
“Oh.” He wasn’t that major, Melanie thought sullenly.
Joan gave a little sigh. “Well, I just wanted to give you a heads-up before he’s swamped by invitations from all the single women around here. And I wanted to thank you, too, you devious little bureaucrat.”
Melanie blinked. “Thank me?”
“For seeing that the first Cop on the Block is ours, of course. Nice going, Melanie. You didn’t waste any time. I can’t tell you how much we all really appreciate it.”
“Oh. Well…”
Now, wishing it had occurred to her to do something devious, such as rushing through the paperwork for some nice, balding sergeant and his family of five, Melanie waved goodbye to Joan while she cast a furtive glance next door.
Then she stepped back inside and locked herself in. Permanently. She’d been looking forward to making pasta for the first dinner of her leave of absence and to enjoying what would be just about her last glass of wine for the next nine months. Now, with her perfect evening in a shambles, she ate a grudging bowl of cold cereal, then climbed into bed at eight, in the hope that she’d wake up in the morning to discover this was just a terrible dream.
Instead, she woke up shortly after midnight to the sounds of a party next door.
Sonny pulled an ice-cold beer from the cooler, snapped off the cap, and lifted the bottle in a toast.
“Hey, with warm friends and wet beer, who needs electricity or plumbing, right? Thanks, guys.”
When a dozen or so candlelit faces grinned back at him, Sonny had to swallow a lump in his throat. For such a hardass, he was getting pretty soft and mushy these days, he thought as he sidled out of the front room and made his way toward the kitchen and a moment of solitude rather than blubbering in front of his colleagues.
He’d only told Kaczinski and one or two others about the house, but at least forty people had shown up over the past few hours for the surprise housewarming. It was heartwarming, too, because he’d been working alone and undercover so long he’d actually forgotten how many friends he had in the department after nearly thirteen years.
A few new neighbors had dropped in, too, but not the neighbor he loved. Mel had doused all her lights about eight o’clock. Then, around midnight when the volume of the party went up a couple notches, he noticed a bit of yellow light seeping through the shutters of one of the upstairs windows next door.
It wouldn’t have surprised Sonny if she’d called the cops when things got a little noisy, but then on second thought she’d been peeking out the window enough to realize that most of the cops in the Third Precinct were already here.
Most importantly, he was here and alive after the incident last week that should have killed him. The DEA had asked for local backup on a raid on a meth lab in a desolate block on Sixteenth. Since Sonny was familiar with the area and the layouts of most of the abandoned buildings there, he was the first one through the door of the defunct auto dealership.
Normally, when he worked undercover, he didn’t wear a vest. But that day somebody had tossed him one, saying, “This could get ugly.” He’d shrugged into the heavy blue garment just before kicking in the front door and walking into the wrong end of a .44 Magnum and the path of a cop-killer bullet.
The damned thing had blown him backward through the dealership’s dirty plate-glass window, practically out onto the street. He remembered lying there, in all that broken glass, looking up at a bright blue sky and thinking it was a shame that he was dead because all of a sudden he knew how badly he’d screwed up with Melanie and he realized just what he needed to do to fix things. If ever somebody had craved a do-over, it was Sonny just then.
As it turned out, when the bullets had stopped flying and the dust had settled, he hadn’t been dead or even that badly injured. The impact of the bullet had cracked a rib and the subsequent collision with the pavement outside had given him a concussion. Maybe that was good. Maybe he’d needed a brutal jab to his heart and a thorough shaking of his head to see things straight. Now all he had to do was convince his ex-wife that he was no longer the selfish son of a bitch who had ruined their marriage.
“There you are.” Mike Kaczinski came up beside him. He set the candle he was carrying down on the counter next to the sink. “You feeling okay, Son?”
“Oh, sure.”
“How’s the rib?”
“Fine.” Sonny shrugged. “It only hurts when I breathe.”
“And the head?”
“That’s fine, too. It only hurts when I think.”
Mike chuckled softly. “Well, that shouldn’t be a problem, then.”
The candle flame barely cut the darkness around the two friends as they stood there side by side. They’d met in grade school, gotten in all the obligatory trouble together in high school, shared a room at college, and then finally cheered each other through the police academy. Mike had been Sonny’s best man, not just at his wedding, but in every sense of the word.
Like Sonny, he wore his dark brown hair on the long side, the better to blend in on the street. Unlike Sonny, he’d gone home every night to a solid, happy marriage for the past ten years.
Now the two of them stood shoulder to shoulder, looking out the window at the rectangle of yellow light on the second floor next door.
“She’s planning to get pregnant next week from a freaking sperm bank.” Sonny’s voice barely rose above a rough whisper.
“Yeah. I heard.”
“I’m not going to let that happen, Mikey.”
“Yeah. I figured.”
When the last reveler drove off into the wee small hours of the morning, Melanie slipped back into bed, beat her pillow to a pulp, and pulled the covers up over her head. Okay. So she wasn’t going to wake up in the morning to find it was all a bad dream. It was a living nightmare, and she was going to have to deal with it one way or another.
She’d be damned if she’d stay barricaded behind locked doors. Sonny was just going to have to move. Seattle would be nice. Hong Kong would be even better. A bit closer, there was a house around the corner on Garland Boulevard that Dieter Weist and his partner had almost completed so Sonny wouldn’t have to be bothered with all the drudgery that went along with rehabing. He didn’t know the first thing about rehabing anyway. Good grief. When she’d lived with him in his loft, he hadn’t even owned a screwdriver or a hammer to put a picture up on a wall, much less known how to use either one.
What was he planning to do? Live in that hovel next door while plaster rained down on his head and garbage squished under his feet?
He didn’t
