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“I heard you were coming to town,” he said, “but couldn’t get any info from Lex.”
Charlie rose from his desk and gave her a tight hug. In his fifties with a slight beer belly, Charlie was the kind of cop who would stay until he was forced into retirement. He didn’t work undercover anymore, but now ran his own small squad within Lex’s unit, focusing on fraud against senior citizens. The last case they worked together—five years ago—he’d posed as a substitute teacher at a high school and Kara had been a student. They’d uncovered an identity theft ring.
“Damn, it’s great to see you,” she said, feeling surprisingly emotional.
“It’s not the same here without you, Q.”
“Hey, hey, hey!” another familiar voice said from across the room. She turned as Pete Diaz approached and took over the hug from Charlie. Pete was a wiry Puerto Rican only an inch taller than her (just under) five foot four, with a bright smile and sharp instincts. He’d been a uniformed officer for six years before transferring over to the gang unit, then moving to Special Operations a couple years ago. She’d tapped his brain often because of his deep knowledge about gangs. He squeezed her tight, then let go. “You owe us big-time,” Pete said. “No calls, not even a postcard.”
“Beer’s on me.” As she said it she knew she couldn’t go out in public. Not when David Chen had put the word out that he was paying for her head. “When all this bullshit is over,” she added. “Unless you want to hang out with me and a couple of feds in a stuffy hotel room.”
“We’re holding you to it,” Charlie said.
“So many people at their desks, you’d think there was no crime out there,” she said.
Charlie rolled his eyes. “Getting new undercover gigs approved is a clusterfuck. The layers of bureaucracy have grown even since you left.”
“Place isn’t the same without you,” Pete said.
“Well, hopefully once this is all done, it’ll be like old times,” she said.
Of course, nothing would be the same. Colton, her sometime partner and sometime lover, was dead. She glanced over to the far corner. His desk was empty. He wasn’t coming back, but no one had filled his space. No one could. He had been one of a kind and the world was worse off with him gone.
She sensed someone watching her and when she turned, saw Lex Popovich standing in his doorway. He frowned at her. “I still can’t make him happy,” she said to her former colleagues, and crossed the bullpen. She smiled broadly. “Hey, boss.”
He motioned her into his office, then shut his door. “What the fuck are you doing here, Quinn?”
“Good to see you, too.” She plopped down in the vinyl-covered visitor’s chair. It was more lopsided than she remembered.
Lex stared at her, his lips a thin line. He’d aged faster than she expected. More wrinkles, less hair, and seemed to have lost twenty pounds. Maybe he had a few to lose, but he didn’t look like her boss.
“By the time you leave this building,” he said, his voice low with restrained anger, “every dirtbag will be waiting to kill you. What about ‘contract for your head’ don’t you understand?”
“I understand the threat, Lex. I have two feds watching my back every minute of every day.”
He waved his hands in the air, made a point to look around his office. “Where are they? Right now, they’re not watching your back.”
His reaction seemed over-the-top. Kara didn’t remind him she was in the heart of LAPD surrounded by hundreds of cops. “I wanted to see a friendly face and that certainly wasn’t going to be in the federal building.”
Lex walked behind his desk and plopped down into his worn chair with a sigh. “Nothing has changed. If anything, things are more volatile.”
“I’m here because David Chen’s lawyer is moving to dismiss the entire case. Dyson needs me. The federal case is moving as slow as molasses, but we can nail him on murder—I’m not letting him walk on it. We win this, it’s a good thing. Murder keeps him behind bars and brings me one step closer to home.”
He stared at her. “It is good to see you, kid.”
“I knew you missed me.”
“I don’t miss your bullshit.”
She pinched her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Not even a little?”
Now he laughed and every muscle in her body relaxed. “The feds treating you well?”
She shrugged. “More or less. They are feds.”
“True.” He sipped from a coffee mug on his cluttered desk, grimaced and put it down. “Greer sends me reports on your investigations. You’ve done some good work.” Tony Greer was the FBI assistant director who oversaw the Mobile Response Team.
“Great work,” I emphasized.
