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Sliding into the front seat, I flash him a barbed smile before I crank the engine and peel out of the parking garage, leaving a trail of exhaust fumes and dust behind me to keep him company.
I’ve seen men and women in my department take bullets to the chest and bleed to death. I’ve seen bodies on the street that look more like roadkill than actual human beings. I’ve held the gaze of a woman with a needle in her arm while she silently begs for death to take her.
Bill’s suffering, while nothing to make light of because we all know how rough it can be to have an orgasm withheld, is nothing in comparison.
My cell pings and a glance at the screen shows a text from my partner Devan with the address.
“27th and H street,” I mutter out loud.
It’s not too far from my apartment, either. Not the worst area but nothing good. You’d never tell your grandma to move in and take up knitting there.
The sun hides behind thin gray clouds and turns the sky to a sick shade of yellow, broken only by the towering spears of buildings. Empire Bay, New Jersey, is sick. I’m sick too, and neither of us seems willing to change any time soon.
Maybe it’s because we’ve both made peace with our lot in life and the place we occupy in time and space. The city will always be a haven for the fuck-ups and the go-getters. I’ll always carry my trauma right there in the open and live my life the way I want. Take what I want.
Cities come with anonymity for some and a host of problems for most. I’ll always fight for justice for the small ones this city stomps beneath its feet. Right into the dirt where the people of good society say they belong.
People like my dad.
His face flashes through my mind, but not how he looked when I found him. I remember one of our game nights,beforehe dragged the bottle out of the liquor cabinet, where he’d actually been laughing at a joke I’d made.
I flip the blinker and take a left turn—right into a line of backed-up traffic.
It’s always fucking busy on this end of town.
I force myself to settle. The killing calm morphs into something darker and far more dangerous, the icy pool at the center of my being born of necessity and tragedy. The will to survive.
I pull to a stop two blocks over from the scene in the only parking space I find. Parallel parking is a skill I’ve never mastered and I nearly bash into the mirror of the car behind me when I tug too hard on the wheel.
Stupid nerves.
I can’t slip again.
Sunglasses in place, I cut through the crowds on the sidewalk and try to blend in. Stalking forward unflinchingly until I reach the yellow-and-black hazard tape surrounding the scene.
The tape is already in place, thankfully, and very necessary with the crowds gathered to take in the mess. Red and blue flashes turn the metal of the nearby security bars to neon, the bars that keep the businesses to the right and left of the scene locked tight until nightfall.
Through the crush of bodies and the chaos—
There. Something inside of me stills.
My stomach dips and swirls until I rein myself in and force my nervous system under control. There’s an arm outstretched in a pool of blood with fingers clenched in a position of perpetual reaching. Whether it’s for something in this life or the next, I have no fucking clue.
Another body, another murder, and it’s up to me to make a quick arrest.
I take a deep breath but it stalls in my lungs when I glance up at the glowing red sign. Then it takes everything inside of me not to fall apart.
I’m frozen at the edge of the caution tape with my gaze trapped on the flickering lights of the convenience store behind the body. On the store sign that readssam’s. Soon even the edges of the red lettering blur into a mishmash of shapes and shadows.
It shouldn't still affect me.
I’ve gotta get it together. Have to maintain control and pretend—
Pretend like another group of officers didn’t investigate a similar murder, beneath a similar sign, the night my dad was murdered.
TWO
layla
