Page 38 of Falling For You

"—wound's on the back of the skull. Doesn't match a forward fall. Might want to take a closer look before you write this up as an accident."

The detective crouched beside the body. Tilted Puno's head. Looked at the wound, then up at the stairs. Wrote something down.

"Good catch, Sergeant Handler."

Elliot shrugged. "Just doing our jobs."

"That was an asshole thing to do."

Doug exhaled through his nose.

"Doug."

"No. He asked you for your read. You gave it to him. He shot it down. Then he walked over to that detective and said the exact same thing like it came from him. I heard the whole thing."

"I know."

I didn't care that Elliot took credit for the read. A man was dead at the bottom of a stairwell he never used, in a part of the building nobody had eyes on, and the wound didn't match the story. That was what mattered. Whether the detective heard it from me or from Elliot, it didn't change what needed to happen next. The case needed to be worked. That was the job.

"I'm looking forward to you making sergeant, Doug."

He relaxed into a small smile.

Doug always had my back. Not once had he let me walk into something alone in the three years we worked together. He didn't grandstand, didn't angle for recognition, didn't make the job about himself. He listened, he showed up, and he was fair. Every shift, every call, every scene. He was exactly who should be leading other officers, and I hoped he knew it.

The range qualification was on my schedule for that afternoon. Fifty rounds, passing score of eighty percent. Standard stuff.

I lined up my first shot, and somewhere between the inhale and the trigger pull, Elliot Handler's face settled right over the center of the target. Not the most professional thing to picture during a firearms qualification, but nobody had to know. And it turned out that imagining my ex's smug face on the silhouette did wonders for my accuracy. Each round landed tighter than the last.

I finished with a ninety-eight. The range officer signed off on my sheet and I walked out feeling lighter than I had all day.

CHAPTER 16

Sergeant Hollywood

WYATT

There are calls I don't talk about.

There are things I've seen on this job that don't leave. They sit in the back of my head and wait for a quiet moment. When they find one, they play the whole thing back whether I asked for it or not. The sounds. The smells. The face of someone who already knows what you're about to tell them.

Most of us deal with it the same way. Dark humor. The worse the call, the darker the joke. If other people heard the things we said to each other on the ride back, they would think we were broken. Maybe we are. But the jokes keep the call at arm's length long enough for us to eat dinner, go to sleep, and show up to work the next shift.

And then there are the calls that don't get jokes. The ones where nobody says anything on the ride back. The ones that send me home wanting to hold my daughter so tight she complains. I'm not going to tell you what happened on this one. I'm just going to tell you that I went home and held Birdie while she told me about a caterpillar she saw at recess. I listened to every word like it was the most important thing anyone had ever said to me.

"Bad call?"

Andy was on her porch across the street, staring at the steps in front of her, her hands in her lap. I'd told Barb I needed to step outside for some air. The house had gotten quiet. So quiet that it gave the call room to come back, and I didn't want Birdie or Barb to see me carrying it.

She looked up. "Sort of."

"Can I join you?"

She studied me for a second. "Bad call too?"

I sat down next to her on the steps. "Yeah."

I told her about the call. The scene, what we found when we got there, the part I couldn't shake on the drive home.