by Anne Calhoun
He lifted his mouth, then bent his forehead to rest on hers. “Have you told Chris about this?”
“Not yet. I thought we could tell him together. It’ll be fun.” Her voice grew serious. “You’ll quit the police department for me? I mean, you can think about it over the next few months. If I get my way, I’m not going to be traveling for a while. I’ll totally understand if—”
“I may not have a job after tomorrow anyway,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I agreed to work with Kenny. Hawthorn might think I’m playing both sides. He might want to go after him with someone who wasn’t trained by Kenny.”
“You haven’t told Lieutenant Hawthorn yet?”
“He’s been out of town at some conference.” He shrugged. “Oh, well.”
Where was the cop who’d been so furious to be saddled with her just a few short weeks ago? “I guess we’ll deal with it tomorrow tomorrow,” she said nonsensically.
“What the second reason you’re here?”
She walked over to the box and parted the flaps to reveal chintzy eighties Christmas decorations scavenged from the boxes in her basement. “I brought over some of Nana’s Christmas decorations. I thought … they’d remind you of Christmas with your grandma. Gold garland, the ornaments with the thread wrapped around them, colorful lights, tinsel, and a tabletop tree. You’re invited to come decorate with me and Em and Mom. In fact, Mom says no excuses, or she’ll track you down, but I wanted you to have a little bit of Christmas here, too.”
“Thank you.” He nodded at a battered bit of greenery in her hand. “What’s that?”
“Mistletoe.” She held it over her head, and beckoned him to her with one crooked finger. This time, when he laughed, his whole body relaxed.
* * *
Lieutenant Hawthorn returned from his conference on Tuesday morning. Conn was waiting by his office when he walked in just before eight o’clock. “Officer McCormick,” Hawthorn said. “Come in.”
The Block hummed around them, a little hive of activity as the holidays approached. Conn stood in Hawthorn’s office, hands shoved in his pockets. The weight of his badge and gun registered more than they normally did, because he wasn’t sure if this was the last time he’d wear them.
“I read your final report,” Hawthorn said as he set his coffee on his pristine desk. “It’s a little unclear as to how the mystery-stalker situation resolved itself.”
“It was her sister,” Conn said. “I saw a threat when it was just a teenage girl acting out.”
Hawthorn gave him a sharp look, then an odd, raw laugh. “Don’t underestimate the power of a teenage girl to ruin someone’s peace of mind.” He sounded like he was speaking from experience, but Conn knew better than to ask. “I assume she doesn’t want to press charges and would prefer to keep this out of the media.”
“Got it in one,” Conn said.
“Good. Jordy’s refusing to cooperate with us. All charges have been dropped. Abracadabra, you’re back on your regular shift.” He opened his laptop, then looked back at Conn while he waited for it to power up. “Anything else?”
“I’m putting in my papers,” Conn said. He took his badge and his gun off his belt and set them on Hawthorn’s desk. Only because Cady came back for him could he do this. Her love, her presence, made it possible for him to see a future without the police department.
“Explain yourself, McCormick.”
“Cady offered me a job as her bodyguard. I took it.”
One of Hawthorn’s eyebrows shot skyward. “That was fast.”
“I won’t actually be leaving town for a few months,” Conn said. “But after I tell you what I learned in my own investigation, I’ll need to put in my papers anyway. I know who set me up.”
“You do.”
“It’s Kenny. He’s running the Strykers from the gang unit.”
A slight widening of the eyes was Hawthorn’s only reaction to this bomb. “And you know this how?”
“I put it together,” Conn said. He set a file folder on Hawthorn’s desk, and a memory stick. Hawthorn would want an electronic version, but not one sent through the department’s email. “I went into the records and started looking at the arrests, the trends, which cases stuck and which ones went away. I couldn’t make the data, which said the Strykers were fading away, work with my experience on the street, which was that the Strykers had the entire East Side in a stranglehold. So I started looking at the officers on the gang unit. The one thing they had in common was that Kenny trained them.”
“He’s not part of the gang unit.”
“No, but until last year, he worked out of this precinct. Remember when he transferred into administration and everyone was so surprised?”
“He was distancing himself.” Hawthorn had no nervous habits. You had to really pay attention to notice the most minute changes in facial expression. “What happened?”
“I confronted him about the assault. He said it was an initiation rite. He was going to track me down on shift one night and tell me what was going on. I wasn’t supposed to be assigned to a special duty that basically made me drop off the face of the earth.”
“Why you?”
“Because I had no one but the department. I was a loner, volatile. Kenny thought I’d be easy to turn.”
“And now you’re not alone.”
Now he had Cady, but Conn could be mysterious and silent, too. “When he couldn’t find me, he figured either I’d figure out what happened and go to him, in which case I could join them, or I’d go to him crying to make it go away, in which case he’d fix it and act like he knew nothing.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him I was in.”
Hawthorn’s gaze flickered to the gun and badge on the table. “But you’re obviously not in.”
Police departments had factions that rivaled the tribal warfare tearing apart most of the world’s hot spots. Conn had been singled out for one of those factions, which usually meant, in the us-versus-them world, that he was tainted to all the others. “Even if Cady hadn’t offered me a job, I can’t be that kind of cop. If that’s what it means to be a part of this department, and Kenny turned it into an us-against-them proposition, I won’t do it.”
Hawthorn’s gaze sharpened. “So if you didn’t think you have to resign, you’d stick around until she went on tour?”
“I can’t. I agreed to participate in illegal activities,” Conn said. “That’s grounds for termination.”
Hawthorn shook his head. “Pick up your weapon and your badge, Officer McCormick.”
Conn stared at him.
“You’re right. That is grounds for termination, except when you can use your newfound detective skills and your experience as an undercover officer to get inside the ring and help us take it apart from the inside. Unless what you’re really saying is you won’t be a bad cop, but you also won’t be a snitch.”
The option of working to bring down the bad cops hadn’t occurred to him; he’d seen only the chance to be in or to be out. “You want me to work for him?”
“Right now I don’t have a case,” Hawthorn said. “We’ve got suspicions, a paper trail, trends. But I don’t have hard and fast evidence. You can get me the evidence we need to shut this down … if you agree to investigate your fellow officers. I know what they say. Don’t betray a brother or sister in blue. But when your brother or sister in blue betrays everything the department stands for, betrays the trust of the community he or she is sworn to protect and serve, then you call upon a different loyalty: the loyalty to the cops who stand against corruption.”
Like Kenny, Hawthorn made playing on his team sound cool, like being chosen, one of the elite in the worst possible way. Everyone rotated through Internal Affairs; it helped reduce the stigma of being the snitch who investigated and prosecuted other cops. But that didn’t change the “us against them mentality” most cops had for Internal Affairs. Kenny’s club was the cool kids smoking pot and ditching sc
hool. But unlike Kenny, Hawthorn’s invitation was a more refined, more elite version of being a cop. It was being one of the best cops, the ones who held themselves to a higher standard every single day, in every single encounter with the public or with their fellow officers.
He didn’t have to give up the only family he’d ever known.
Conn picked up his gun, then his badge from Hawthorn’s desk. He secured the holster on his right hip, then pinned his badge to his belt pocket. Despite the added weight of the gun he felt lighter, freer.
Hawthorn’s gaze sharpened. “You’re taking a big risk. There’s no guarantee they won’t kill a cop to protect themselves.”
Conn shrugged. “If I can take him down, I will. Leave this house a little cleaner than it was when I got here.”
Hawthorn nodded. “By the way, McCormick. As Ms. Ward’s body man you were isolated, alone, and off-balance,” Hawthorn mused. “And you handled it like a pro.”
Conn blinked.
“All those things your superior officers write you up for? The inability to control your impulses, your hotheaded approach, your total disregard for protocol and safety? It’s one thing to keep your head when bullets are flying. It’s another to do it when it’s the constant strain of a psychological threat. Nice job, Officer McCormick.”
“Thanks,” Conn said. The tips of his ears were turning red. He resisted the urge to shove his hands in his pockets of his utility pants.
“You’re welcome,” Hawthorn said genially. “Now go back to work, pretend I just reamed your ass, and help us take down these bastards.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A few days later, Cady stood on the corner of the busiest intersection in SoMa, Cady juice in one hand, her guitar case in the other. She’d had dinner with Chris while Conn had another in a series of mysterious meetings he’d been involved in lately; she didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell. Chris had wandered off in search of a gift for Natalie. With Conn’s watch cap tugged low over her eyebrows and ears, and her hair caught in a scarf, Cady had so far managed to avoid being recognized. A familiar energy pumped through her veins—anticipation, excitement, fear, and the thrill of doing something that left her both intensely vulnerable and intensely happy. It was, she realized, a throwback to the girl she’d been, singing anywhere, anytime, for anyone just for the sheer joy of it.
The group of kids playing Christmas carols on the opposite corner finished up and packed up their instruments and stands. She waited until they’d piled into their mom’s minivan before heading over to claim the corner, then took a picture of the street sign, Christmas lights dangling in the enormous potted tree behind it, and sent it to social media. Christmas carol sing-along, SoMa … come on down.
Twenty seconds later a girl across the street looked up from her phone, scanned the street corners, and saw Cady. She waved. Cady waved back as she lifted her guitar strap over her shoulder and started tuning it. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Conn settle against the hood of the LPD patrol car parked by the corner. He was in street clothes—jeans, boots, Henley, denim jacket—but the way he exchanged a few words, then a laugh with the officer also leaning against the car sent the message loud and clear: also a cop.
The crowd gathered quickly as she started with holiday standards, then segued into popular carols. Just her voice, her guitar; no amps, no lights, nothing but her and the crowds. She tuned out the lifted phones and serenaded her hometown crowd the way she wanted to, not with a big concert, but just her, close enough to touch, back where it all began, on a corner in SoMa.
A bigger crowd was starting to form, spilling onto the brick-paved street and blocking traffic. The cop leaned on his cruiser, keeping the peace, but keeping an eye on the crowd in case he needed to shut them down. Conn was just keeping an eye on her.
“Move closer, folks,” she called. “Get comfy with your neighbor. If we stay out of the street, I can keep singing.”
She ran through all the standards, “Rudolph,” and “Silent Night,” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman,” even launching into “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” when a little boy shouted out the request. When she finished Dave Matthews’ “A Christmas Song,” she opened her eyes to find Conn standing next to the cop. She caught his eye, smiled. He smiled back.
“Okay,” she said, then cleared her throat. “Okay. Thanks for coming down. One more. It’s something new.”
A whoop went up.
“Really new. So it might change,” she warned. “It’s kind of a love song, and it’s kind of a work in progress.”
She sang with her eyes closed, her head tilted back, her guitar dangling from her back, keeping time with her palm against her thigh, snapping on the opposite beat. Her voice, when it emerged from her throat, started in a conspiratorial croon, rising in volume, throaty and raspy, singing the song of defiant proclamation.
It wasn’t a love song. It was real. It was the song that came to her like a gift from the gods, nearly fully formed, melody and harmony and words all at once, flowing from her in one short session. She didn’t hide behind the easy, the power ballad, the sweetness. She held up guaranteed loss, time passing, the inevitable struggle and tears and pain, then wove the most quintessential truth of all, that only love redeemed the pain. She sang a promise, that she’d stand by him forever, not just when it was easy, but when it was hard.
In the back of her mind she knew the cafés and stores were emptying, customers gathering in doorways and windows, standing on the balconies of apartments over the shops and restaurants. The crowd went quiet, so quiet she could hear the bells jingle on the carriage horse’s harness, the soft rush of tires on bricks as cars drove carefully through the intersection.
She could put this song on the label’s album. It would fit the theme. But it belonged on the album she was making now, pouring from her, songs coming almost whole. Sharing this one was the biggest risk she’d ever taken, but she’d never felt so powerful, so vulnerable, and so whole. She stopped keeping time, lifted her hand as if calling for a witness, head back, throat bared to the sky, the last notes ringing clarion clear in the cold winter air.
Silence.
She stared at them, so she wouldn’t look at Conn. They stared back, and then the corner exploded with applause and whoops, nearly lifting the bricks out of the street. She ducked her head, smiled, said thank you until she thought the words were meaningless. Then, because she couldn’t stand it anymore, she slanted a look at Conn.
Tears stood in his eyes. He hadn’t moved, looked like he wouldn’t ever move. The cop beside him had tactfully moved to the intersection and was helping a couple of tourists find a restaurant. The crowd clapped and clapped and clapped, calling for an encore, but Cady barely heard them.
She put her hand to her heart. I’m yours.
He nodded. Blinked. Looked up at the sky. When he looked back at her, he withdrew his hand from his pocket and patted his own heart. And I’m yours.
The moment broke when someone surged forward and asked for a selfie, an autograph. She said yes to everyone, until the last person walked away smiling.
Conn straightened and strolled onto the sidewalk. “Sure you’re ready to sing that for the rest of your life? Because based on that reaction, I think you’re stuck with it.”
“Every single day.” His face was relaxed, casual, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. Conn McCormick, easy and happy and holding her close. “Forever and ever, amen.”
He swooped her up in one arm and set her on a low wall surrounding the planter. With the added height they were face to face, which made it so much easier for him to kiss her.
“Well, isn’t this cozy?” Chris said. He wore a hat with reindeer antlers on it, and carried a cup of what smelled like spiced cider.
“What are you doing here?”
“You gave a concert. I came to hear it,” he said serenely. “And Natalie’s working tonight. So am I, for that matter. This town has a pretty astonishing music scene. I’m going to some
clubs.” He turned to Conn. “I hear you’ll be joining Cady’s entourage.”
She’d sprung that on him over dinner. “We haven’t talked about pay or anything,” Cady said. “Conn’s got some things to finish up here, too.”
Chris’s gaze flicked over Conn, clearly assessing what a beat cop in Lancaster would make. Then he pulled out his phone. “Do you know what we paid Evan?”
“No,” Cady said. “That’s what I pay you for, and I know what I pay you.”
Without looking up from his phone, Chris named a figure that made Conn’s jaw drop.
“More than the City of Lancaster offers, I assume?”
“It works for me,” Conn said.
“You suck at this. You always, always negotiate. I just lowballed you, and Evan did mediocre work,” Chris added. “Cady routinely told Evan to fuck off because he was annoying her.”
“Well. He did annoy me and he fucked off and here you are. I don’t eat tongue,” Cady said. “Do not ever mention beef tongue, or any animal’s tongue to me in the context of food.”
“Okay,” Conn said, obviously letting it go.
“I’m not going anywhere for a few months,” Cady said, shooting Chris a stubborn look. “So we can finalize salary then. For now, Conn’s staying with the police department.”
Conn turned to Chris. “Are you okay with this?”
Chris sighed. “You’ve proved you’re a paranoid, suspicious control freak who will stop at nothing to keep Cady safe. I can’t believe you accused me of trying to terrorize her!”
“Like you don’t eat kittens for breakfast,” Conn shot back.
“Oh, I do,” Chris said with an evil smile. “I do. But I use their delicate bones to pick out the tufts of fur left in my fangs so it’s not obvious.”
“I give up,” Cady said, throwing her hands in the air. “The two of you will drive me insane. Just don’t mention tongue.”
Chris smoothed the front of his jacket. “As I was saying, a paranoid control freak who will stop at nothing to make sure Cady’s safe, which is the only thing I care about when it comes to the individual in your role with the Maud Squad.”
