Tied Up in Knots (Marshals 3)

I watched the soldiers take the flag off the coffin, fold it, and present it to Rose before an older woman I assumed to be Eddie’s mother, as I hadn’t seen her before, took it from her. Rose’s face crumpled and she leaned sideways against Janice, who shot the other woman a murderous glance as her daughter fell apart in her arms.

“Aww, man,” Bates groaned, his gaze meeting mine.

“Gonna be a long day for Rose,” I sympathized, the whole scene almost more than I could bear. It was a graphic reminder of my greatest fear—Ian lying in a coffin while I clutched a folded flag to my chest.

“Amen,” he returned as the priest began addressing the crowd.

FUNERALS WERE exhausting. I had no idea until I went to my first one when I was twenty-two. One of the guys I was in the police academy with was hit by a drunk driver while crossing the street and died instantly. I barely knew him, but the entire class went to the funeral. When I got home, I’d passed out on my couch and only woke up when Aruna arrived a full ten hours later with food.

She was a good friend, always thinking of me, and as I stood in the cold in the cemetery it hit me that I should call and tell her. I tried to always reach out when I thought of telling someone something, instead of waiting and letting the surge of whatever kind of feeling it was, good or bad, go to waste. Sometimes that wasn’t so great when I was pissed. I vomited out things I should have never said, but when I was feeling grateful, it normally worked out well.

“What?” Aruna greeted after answering on the fourth ring.

Except, of course, when I was calling one of my snarky as hell friends. “Thanks for always bringing me food. You’re a nice person.”

There was a pause. “Why’re you drinking so early in the afternoon?”

“I’m not drinking, you witch. I’m at a funeral and I’m feeling sentimental.”

“Well, knock it off. I got custody of you when everyone else moved away, so I’m contractually obligated to take care of you, and by proxy, Ian. The others send me support payments every month.”

“Jesus, the mouth on you.”

“That’s what Liam says,” she said suggestively.

I hung up because, Christ, that was TMI, and she texted me lips and a heart and the poop emoji. She seriously needed medication.

After I got off the phone with Aruna, I was surprised to get a text message from Mike Ryan, one of the members of my and Ian’s team. The picture I got was of a huge fruit basket taking up most of the space on my desk.

“They’re getting bigger,” Ryan said when he answered his phone on the first ring.

“I told her to stop sending them,” I sighed, smiling as I thought of Oscar Guzman’s mother. “But she won’t.”

“You and Doyle saved her kids from a sex trafficking ring. How’re you not drowning in kiwi for the rest of your fuckin’ life?”

“Is there really kiwi in there?” I asked.

“Oh hell yeah. There’s mango and papaya and—what the fuck is this?”

“Lychee,” I heard his partner, Jack Dorsey, answer in his booming baritone.

“Lychee,” Ryan repeated. “Whatever the fuck that is.”

“Tell him there’s starfruit in there, too, and Valencia oranges that came straight from Spain without stopping at the local farmer’s market.”

“I’ll send her another e-mail,” I told Ryan. “I bet it costs a mint to send that to us every month. Maybe I can get her to go to once every three or six.”

“I’m taking the peaches for my mother so she can make pie. She’s gonna lose her shit when she sees these in the middle of fall.”

“I want some. They’re my peaches,” I said, pulling my cashmere scarf tighter around my neck as I stood on the sidewalk watching Ian shake the hands of more and more people. Rose had wanted to introduce Ian around, so when she slipped her arm into the crook of his, I mouthed that I’d wait for him and got out of the way.

“You realize this is gonna be something else that we’ll have to explain to the new guys we get in here,” Ryan said offhandedly.

“What’re you talking about?”

“You heard Kage a while back, we need a couple more teams of guys.”

“And you’re worried about what, filling ’em in?”

“Yeah man, it’s a pain in the ass having to tell the new guys about all the inside jokes and the way we do things and everything else. He needs to just leave it alone.”

“Because you fear change,” I scoffed. “That’s a great reason not to work at full capacity.”

“You hate it too,” he accused me. “Remember Littlefield and Posner? They didn’t work out and they were supposed to be good.”

“That’s not fair.”