Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #2: Books 5-8 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [readnow TXT] 📗

years have we known each other? This isn’t idle gossip, we are concerned about you. You don’t seem yourself.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I took another swig of whiskey. Joe was studying me. He glanced at Frank. “To be honest, John, when you went to Goa, we thought you were going to come back…” He shrugged. “At the very least happy! We expected, well…”

I sighed. “You’re not alone, the whole damned precinct seems to have been thinking the same thing. What’s the big deal?”

Frank shook his head. “Don’t misread it, John. You may not realize it, but you are well liked and well respected, people wish you well. Dehan also. She had a lot of attitude when she arrived, but she’s mellowed a lot since you two were partnered. She’s a damned fine cop and…” He stopped and glanced at Joe, who shrugged.

I said, “What?”

It was Joe who answered. “Well, John, everybody except you seems to have noticed that she…” He sighed, then laughed. “God knows why, but she is serious about you.” He glanced at Frank. “And we think she’s good for you.”

I stared at them both. “Who is ‘we’?”

They both spoke in unison, like some surreal sitcom. “Everybody.”

We drank some more, had a bit more ‘guys’ talk—I do not recall what I said or what I admitted to—but at almost four AM, I walked out of the Van Etten building with my hands in my pockets, thinking deeply and humming Sinatra’s ‘One for my Baby (and One More for the Road)’.

I climbed into my car and sat for five minutes staring out the windshield at the empty, lamp-lit streets. I pulled out my phone, opened Whatsapp, and stared at her name for another five minutes. Then I opened our conversation. We were cops. We had no fixed sleeping hours. We sent each other important information at any time. That was how it was. That was what I told myself.

I looked at my watch. It was gone four. I wondered if I was drunk and decided I was, a little.

I typed: “Boot-print confirmed. DNA Ed Irizarry. Bullets not a match. Crime scene .38, door .45”

I pressed ‘send’, put the phone away, and fired up the engine. There was an immediate ping. I left the car in neutral and looked at my phone. It was Dehan. I opened the message.

“Shit. No closer to an answer then.”

I stared at it for a long moment. Then wrote, “I am not sure. I think so.” Then, “You’re awake?”

I sent it and waited. There was no reply. I put the car in gear and moved to the gate. As I was about to pull onto Morris Park and head home, there was another ping. I stopped, selected neutral again, and pulled out my phone. It was a reply from Dehan.

“You feel like an early breakfast? I can scramble some eggs.”

I sat motionless for a long moment. There was another ping. “You there?”

I typed: “Yes. Your place?”

“That’d be a first.”

“We could try something new.”

Silence.

I put the car in gear, ready to go home. Another ping. I put it back in neutral, read the message.

“We could do that.”

I typed, “I’m on my way.”

Fifteen minutes later, I parked outside her block. I sat for a couple of minutes, conscious that my breath probably smelled of booze. I told myself not to be an ass, then climbed out, crossed the road, and rang on her bell. She let me in almost immediately, and when I reached her floor she was standing there, with the door open, dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.

I smiled. “You couldn’t sleep either, huh?”

She shook her head. “You came empty-handed.”

“Good job you have tequila.”

She smiled. “You been drinking, Sensei?”

“It’s what guys do.”

She gave a small laugh. “Does that make me a guy?”

I waited a moment, then said, “I hope not.”

She turned and went inside. “You’ve only been here once.”

“I remember. I won’t forget in a hurry.”

“Neither will I.”

She closed the door. I was in the living room. She had a bottle of tequila on her coffee table, and a shot glass beside it. The bottle was half empty. She had Stan Getz playing.

I turned to look at her. “You like Stan Getz?”

“Yeah. He’s very cool. You mentioned him once, so I decided to explore. Miles, too, when he’s not drilling teeth. You want some scrambled eggs and bacon?”

“Yes.”

She went into the kitchen. “So, how’d it go?”

I leaned on the doorjamb and watched her break and beat eggs. “Frank and Joe had a bottle and some coffee on the go. They called me at just after two.”

“Were you in bed?”

“No. So I drove over. I told you the results in the Whatsapp. I think…”

She turned and came over to me. She put her right hand on my chest and looked up at me with large, black eyes.

“Let’s try something different.”

I shut my mouth and frowned. “OK.”

“We eat, we drink tequila, and we talk about anything—anything—ancient Egypt, reincarnation, Donald Trump, baseball, Elon Musk; you name it, anything but work.”

I nodded. “OK.”

She shrugged and made a Latin face. “And then we see what happens.”

What happened was that we talked and we got drunk, and then we talked some more and we got drunk some more, and it was one of the most enjoyable evenings I had had in years; maybe ever. I told her about my parents, about my wife, about life as a bachelor cop. She told me more about her parents, about her dad’s family and her mother’s, and about life as a single, female cop. We talked about movies we liked and music we loved, books, poems, peculiar memories…

And we laughed a lot. And a couple of times,