All Kinds of Tied Down (Marshals 1)

“Hey,” I shouted back, which wasn’t protocol at all. “It’s Miro and Ian.”

Ching’s groan came through loud and clear. “What are you supposed to say, asswipe?”

“I forget,” I ribbed as Ian chuckled.

“Fuckin’ Jones,” Ching groused, but I could hear the amusement in his low voice. “Becker, Sharpe, me, and Kohn are out here. This floor’s secured, but nothing else, so you guys stay put.”

“Yessir,” I said, chuckling.

“The balcony, Jones?”

“I think it’s the best way to leave a room,” I apprised him. “Don’t you?”

That time I could hear more than just him laughing.

WHEN WE finally got the all clear, we put a Kevlar vest on Kemen, put a jacket on over that, and with us all dressed the same, all in the same jacket, exited the hotel. Kage stood in front of at least a dozen reporters shoving microphones in his face as we walked by. I didn’t realize until we were moving through the crowd how many policemen, news crews, and bystanders had gathered around the hotel. It was a zoo.

It was good press for the police sting. There was a real deficit of places teens could be sent if they weren’t bad enough to go to a juvenile detention facility and home wasn’t an option. We needed more programs to rehabilitate them and get them off the street. I didn’t know what the statistics were, but I did know that a lot of the girls, and boys, who got out of a life of prostitution got sucked back in. And a lot of them, like Kemen, were confused and mistook the shelter a pimp offered for love. He related pieces of his life story to us on the ride over to our office from the hotel. I knew most the facts, but hearing him flesh out the details was grueling. Even Ian squirmed a bit.

Once we got to the office, we put Kemen in a holding cell and went back to our desks to start the arduous reporting process. Ian started making the calls to vice to let them know they could pick up Taylor Ledesma. The process to indict him was ready for round two.

I took my jacket off, wincing at the scrapes on it, and put it on the back of my chair. Ian was right; I needed to invest in some crappy clothes for work.

“Coffee,” Ian moaned as he dropped into the chair at his desk that butted up to mine. “I told the kid that we’d bring him back something.”

“Okay.” I chuckled. “Let’s go.”

We put our badges back on the chain holders we wore when we weren’t in the field and walked the two blocks to our favorite breakfast diner, arguing the whole way about the e-mail Ian had sent me earlier in the morning. He finally passed me his phone and told me to make it forward so that when Kage called him, I would get an alert as well. I didn’t think it could be done from Ian’s phone—I thought only our boss could do it—but I fiddled with it just in case. When he got a text message from Emma telling him she’d made dinner plans with friends for them, I passed it back to him.

“No pizza for you, buddy,” I said, nudging him with my shoulder.

“What?”

I ordered three specials and talked to Rosa, my favorite waitress, as Ian texted Emma. I got Kemen a huge orange juice, and Ian and I both even bigger coffees with two shots of espresso in each. We would definitely be awake after drinking that.

“What’s Bastille?” Ian asked when we had our food and were sipping coffee on the way back to the office.

“I know what Bastille Day is,” I threw out.

“No, it’s a restaurant down on Rush.”

“I have no idea. Why?”

“That’s where Emma has us going tonight.”

“Oh, nice,” I said, taking another sip of the elixir of the gods. “Damn, that’s good.”

“I just want pizza.”

“Stop whining, it’ll be fun.”

“I don’t like French food.”

“You’ve never had any French food, so how would you know?”

“I just do.”

“Way to be open-minded.”

“I don’t wanna go,” he muttered.

“Just drop it.”

But he didn’t. Instead, he complained on the walk back, on the way up the elevator, down the hall to the holding cell to pick up Kemen, and finally to the conference room where the three of us sat and ate.

“Bastille is nice,” Kemen offered as he took a sip of his orange juice before he started in on his Mexican omelet. I passed him the guacamole and salsa, and Ian forked over the sour cream when he had what he wanted. “I’ve been there a ton of times.”

“There, ya see,” I said between bites, “Kemen says it’s nice.”

Ian made a jacking-off motion.

“You did not just do that.” Kemen sounded horrified.

“That’s funny.”

“What is?” I asked Ian, ignoring our witness.

He shrugged. “It’s just, whenever a witness is younger than you—or a woman—you use their first name. Older than you and a guy, you use their last. Do you realize you do that?”