The fact that he laughed was a good sign.
OUR TEMPORARY housing was close to the downtown Willo Historic District, a neighborhood Latham had called a “cottage community.”
“Which means what?” Ian asked as he took a right onto a small, quiet tree-lined street.
“I think it means they don’t have any apartments. It’s all homes.”
“That makes no sense,” he told me. “If you look in that envelope he gave us, there are key fobs in there and directions for where we’re supposed to park our car. There’s no way we’re staying in some house. It’s gotta be an apartment.”
“It’s so beautiful here,” I commented as we passed a Tudor-style home and then a Craftsman bungalow, a Spanish Revival, and many others. Each was different, and that was interesting to look at. The homes and the landscaping told me the neighborhood was old, yet immaculately kept.
“I wanna go home,” he growled.
And I knew he did. “Let’s just find the house, all right? The sooner we get there, the sooner we can dump our crap and get to work.”
“But that’s what I’m saying, M. I don’t think we’re looking for a house.”
It turned out he was right. The condo on the fourth floor of the enormous complex we would be staying in was actually adjacent to the historic district on Vernon Avenue.
After we parked the car and Ian grabbed his duffel out of the back, I got my garment bag, duffel, and the wheeled suitcase currently full of shoes out of the trunk.
“May I help you with that, sir?” Ian teased.
If looks could kill, he would have been dead, but clearly I wasn’t that scary because he only snorted out a laugh before grabbing my garment bag. He lifted it easily, even though it was the heaviest of the three pieces of luggage, and started toward the elevators.
The apartment was 1,700 square feet of boring: one master bedroom, two smaller ones, two bathrooms, fireplace—though only God knew why—a laundry room, and a tiny patio. It made me think of my first apartment when I was going through the police academy. It was sparsely furnished, very clean, and utterly adequate.
“It’s fine,” I assured Ian.
“It sucks,” he judged vehemently.
I understood his hatred. He had left a place with the same lack of character that was totally forgettable not six months before. This felt like backsliding.
“We don’t live here,” I reminded him as we both dropped the bags. Moving into his space, I kissed him, tenderly, lightly, before nipping his lower lip and stepping back.
“Where ya goin’?”
“We promised we’d be back there in an hour. It’s almost been that.”
“Fine, but tonight we find a place where we can drink, and then you promise to come home with me and fuck my brains out.”
“You don’t have to get me drunk first—no alcohol required, marshal.”
He chuckled, and the sound of him, all husky and seductive, made me want to rethink the plan of getting back to work.
“Too late,” he announced, already using his cop voice. “Let’s get going.”
No amount of talking was going to get me laid at the present moment, and I had no one to blame but myself.
IT WAS different in Phoenix. And while I was getting the hang of how they did things, Ian was not. Simple things, like other marshals stopping him from putting a guy down on the pavement or up against the side of a car, drove him nuts.
“What the fuck,” he growled at me.
I winced at the volume. “The ground is hot; so is the car.”
“I hate it here,” he lamented.
I had to nag him not to turn off the car and leave people inside, and he had to get used to carrying metal cuffs again—their budget was different in Phoenix, so he couldn’t stuff his TAC vest with plastic ones all the time.
“Why?” he asked irritably, holding the cuffs up as he held a guy over the open trunk of the white Mercury Marquis.
I made the snapping motion for him again because he’d locked them… again. “You gotta flip it open and then sort of flick it around their wrist.”
He didn’t have either the snap or the flick down. It got to the point, after the first week, that they were always my cuffs on the suspects. But I had years of practice on him because I’d been first a patrolman and then a police detective. Ian’s background was all military combat, never as an MP, so he didn’t have my cuff technique.
“And why are they suspects?” Ian fumed as we took a guy into the office for processing. “They’re fuckin’ fugitives, for crissakes. That’s what we do—we pick those fuckers up!”
Latham was all about being PC, and that included what his team called the people we brought in. He was very concerned about public perception and how his office was viewed. I had never seen so many outsiders allowed to ride along, shadow, and interview team members. I was glad that Ian and I were sort of wild cards, that he didn’t know us well and so kept us out of the limelight.