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ARCHER MALONE
JANUARY 1ST
“Dispatch to Detective Archer Malone.”
That telltale click echoes in my brain. That almost imperceptible alert that someone is dead.
“Dispatch to Detective Malone. Do you copy?”
“Yeah.”
My room is pitch-black but for the single flashing light on my barely used television. Sirens wail outside my window, echoing in the streets and bouncing off the multistory buildings lining this part of the city. The part that houses all the idiots who went into professions that put them mercilessly on call—the cops, the medics, the firefighters… the detectives.
My head aches where I slammed my phone against the side of my face, and my heart thunders. With nerves. With readiness. “I’m awake. I copy.”
“Suspected homicide on the corner of Tenth and Tergent. Single female vic.”
“Tenth and Tergent…” I push my sheet away and drop my legs over the side of the bed. “That’s the Opulus, yeah? The club?”
“Yes, Detective.”
“Copy. Call Detective Fletcher, too, and have him meet me there. ETA ten minutes.”
“Copy that, Detective Malone.”
Killing the call, I drop my phone to the mattress, then I lower my head and rest it in my hands to sleep for a minute more. I’m so fucking tired. So sore. So desperately in need of the world to swing back on its axis and make things normal again.
My breath evens and my heart slows. Sleep beckons to me, taunts me, but as I glance left to where I know my watch sits on the bedside table, I sigh and work to rid the exhausted fog from my brain.
Reaching across blindly, I tap the screen and groan as the time illuminates in the dark.
2:45am.
“Fuck.”
Pushing up to stand on legs that would wobble if I let them, I leave behind my cozy bed, my comfortable sleep, the warm body purring beside mine, and the dreams that play through my mind the moment my head hits the pillows each night.
Instead of hitting the switches, I use the thin rays of moonlight sneaking through the living room window to light my way as I cross the cold floor on aching feet and step into the bathroom in the hall. I take a piss and mentally count the sleep I got: not quite four hours, from when I laid down to when dispatch’s call came in—and that was only after Fletch and I tied up a nasty case that has kept us busy since before Christmas.
Nothing like a December 24thhomicide to ruin a baked dinner for a couple of cops.
After finally nailing the perp—a female who was sick of her mother’s shit—and filing the paperwork, Fletch and I walked out of the station at a little past nine-thirty last night. He went to my brother’s bar to find a female companion. And I came home to the warm body I knew would be in my bed.
Now, because the universe likes to fuck with me, I’m up again and being dragged into the cold.
I finish in the bathroom, fix my shorts and wash my hands, then I head back to my room and search in the dark for something to wear. Jeans, a shirt, socks, and boots. I slide my phone into my back pocket and my watch onto my wrist. I snag a beanie from the pile of clothes in the corner and pull it down over my ears, then I kneel onto my bed and bury my face against Chloe’s warm neck.
“Keep sleeping.” I press a kiss to her ear and hate how soft I’ve already become. We only just met, and I’m already a fucking sucker for her beautiful eyes. “I gotta work.” One last kiss as she lazily turns to her back, then I push off the bed and head into the hall.
Not five minutes after the call that woke me up, I leave my apartment and skip onto the stairs cutting through the middle of my apartment building, then just a few minutes after that, I pull up at Club Opulus in a rusted-out police cruiser.
Despite the name of the club I was called to tonight, my city doesn’t have a fuck ton of money. It’s an old port city, a place surrounded by water, and once upon a time, enough imported cocaine to keep everyone a little rich. But businesses change hands, families are disenfranchised. Even mafia crews have fallouts, and there are simply other, better ports in this country to sneak product in by.
When the illegal trade of Copeland City was pushed back and the bulk of it moved to the East Coast, with it went the money that kept things going ‘round.
Catch-22, I suppose.
Still, I prefer it this way.
