AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Ever thought about working with kids?” I asked him as we got back into the car.
He cocked his head to the side. “Working with kids how?”
I shrugged, turning the car on and looking back over my shoulder to pull out of the parking spot. “I dunno. At the AAYC, maybe? Or other community centers. They always need people who want to work with kids in after school programs and shit.”
Taavi’s expression was thoughtful. “Don’t you need an education degree for that?”
“Don’t think so,” I replied. “Although if you wanted one, I’m sure you could get one.” I headed toward downtown and the restaurant where I’d managed to get a table.
Taavi snorted. “I’m a little old.”
“Says who?”
He shot me a look.
“Seriously. Says who? I’ve never seen a fucking age limit on an application to college.”
He fell silent, and when I quickly looked over at him to see if he was mad at me, his expression was once again thoughtful.
For once in my goddamn life, I kept my mouth shut and didn’t push or make some snarky, smart-ass comment about him joining a frat or some stupid shit.
I spoke again after a careful evaluation of whether or not what I was about to say was fucking dumb. “If you want to go to college, go. Richmond has a lot of options.” And then I decided to stop being quite so selfish. “Or somewhere else. If you don’t mind moving.” I could feel my ears starting to heat up, like they always did when I felt particularly awkward.
“Maybe,” he murmured softly, and I couldn’t quite tell if he was thinking about it or just wanted me to shut the fuck up. I figured shutting up was probably the right move either way, and we sat in silence for the couple minutes it took me to find a parking spot and get us into it.
As we walked the half-block to dinner, it was Taavi who broke the silence. “Did you always want to be a cop?”
At least that was a safe topic. I nodded. “I can’t even remember when I first decided that’s what I wanted to do, it just always was,” I told him. “I was the kind of kid who constantly pretended to be a cop. I used to arrest my stuffed animals and shit.”
His lips quirked, the upper one very slightly fuller than the lower. “Did that stop stuffed animal crime?”
“For like five minutes until I got bored again and un-arrested them,” I told him, trying to keep my tone serious and somewhat failing.
“It must be nice, though, to have found your calling?”
I snorted. “Until I quit it, yeah, I guess.”
“Wait—what?” He sounded shocked. It reminded me that I’d left the RPD after I stopped talking to him, so he didn’t know.
“Um. Yeah. I, uh, quit. Because of all the bullshit,” I answered. “The MFM protests, the fucking asshat from Fourth who pulled us over… and then Villanova asked me to stop investigating the Oldham murder.”
“The woman who’d been shot?”
“And then threw a fucking mug at me, yeah.”
“Why?”
I sighed as I held the door for him, and he flashed me a quick smile as he slid in under my arm—without really having to duck. “Fuck if I know,” I answered, then stepped up to the podium at the restaurant and gave the hostess my name. She took us to a small table in the back—set well away from the others behind partitions, as pretty much all restaurant tables were in our post-Arcanavirus world. Taavi and I didn’t actually need to be distant from anybody, since once you went fur or fangs or pointy ears, you were good in terms of reinfections, but restaurants were set up as though all their patrons were potentially infectious humans.
Once we were seated, I came back to Taavi’s question. “I don’treallyknow why he wanted me to drop it,” I said softly, “but I suspect that somebody was putting pressure on him to let it slide.”
“Somebody?” Taavi asked, toying with the corner of his napkin.
“What I think,” I explained, “is that there was pressure from some Ordo member in the government or media or someplace that could have made Villanova’s life shit.”
“Ordo?”
I couldn’t remember if I’d mentioned them around him before. “Yeah. The Antiquus Ordo Arcanum. The dickweeds who are probably behind Shelby’s killings. And the Oldham murder.”
