Fit to be Tied (Marshals 2)

THE FOLLOWING day we were inside the AJ’s Fine Foods in Glendale because when we went to arrest a fugitive in a house off of 67th Avenue, I had run after him when he took off.

“Ya good yet?” Ian asked, putting the ice pack that the very nice woman in the deli had given us on the back of my neck.

“He needs to drink more water,” Courtney Quinn, another deputy, explained to Ian. “And next time you should fuckin’ listen to me, Smith.”

If I answered her I’d say something shitty, so instead I drank the Gatorade that Lucas Hoch, yet another deputy, gave me. He’d twisted the cap off, which was damn nice of him since I was still seeing spots.

“Nobody runs in the heat,” he reiterated to me, as he had for the past half an hour.

I’d done what I always did, bolted from the car, and this time, it was Ian following. But the chase took a good twenty minutes, up over walls, through backyards, around the sides of houses, across streets, and finally when I caught the guy in a flying tackle on the manicured front lawn in a quiet upper-middle-class neighborhood, I didn’t get back up. I couldn’t. I could barely breathe, I was so hot.

Ian managed to get cuffs on the guy—we’d been practicing at the apartment, in and out of bed—and told him to stay still before he checked on me.

“Jesus, M, you’re really red.”

There was only heat and my skin felt like it was burning.

The homeowner, a beautiful blonde housewife dressed immaculately and sporting a diamond ring as big as my thumb, came out immediately, her friends waiting in the doorway, to see if she could offer any assistance.

“No, ma’am,” Ian said quickly, clearly worried about me. “I just need to get him off your lawn and hydrated.”

“Exactly,” she agreed. “You need to get him inside and push fluids. My kids get like that if I don’t watch them like a hawk.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said affably.

“Do you want to bring him in here?”

We were never, ever, supposed to involve civilians in anything if possible.

“No, ma’am, but thank you.”

When I looked up at her from my prone position, she smiled and nodded.

So Ian found the AJ’s and dragged me inside to sit in the a/c and drink water.

“We don’t run,” Quinn expounded. “Not until after Halloween, when it cools down.”

“It doesn’t cool down until Halloween?” Ian was flabbergasted.

“Yes, marshal,” she teased, and I saw her pupils dilate as she looked at him—easy to see she found him very appealing. “You have to wait a bit longer.”

Letting my head fall forward, I bumped his thigh with my shoulder.

“When we do AT like I was telling you about out there in Twentynine Palms, this shit happens all the time,” he said, trying to reassure me as he put his hand in my hair, scratching my scalp before gently moving the ice pack. “Big strong guys drop all over the place.”

He was trying to make me feel better about being a dumbass, but it wasn’t helping.

“You still feeling light-headed?”

“A little.”

“You’ll be okay.”

“This is lame.”

“It’s gonna happen in this kinda heat, M.”

“You wouldn’t have nearly passed out.”

“No, ’cause I’ve trained in this bullshit,” he insisted, squatting down in front of me, his hands on my knees to look at my face. “And I know you hafta hydrate and limit what you expend energy on.”

I couldn’t shake the embarrassment or the memory of the looks from Quinn and Hoch implying that I was a lightweight.

Of course, fifteen minutes later I had the sunstroke headache, and Ian and I had to pull into a Circle K on the way back downtown and get me Tylenol, more Gatorade, and a 64-ounce Thirst Buster cup full of Dr Pepper because I needed both the caffeine and the sugar, he said. As I held the gigantic plastic-handled cup in my hand, I asked him why.

“’Cause you’re gonna need it.”

“I have to hold it in my lap or between my feet. It’s too big for the cupholder.”

“Just drink it and shut up,” he grumbled. “And get in the car.”

After we ate again, between the food, drugs, caffeine, and staying cool, I was back to myself, feeling better, ready to chase down more bad guys.

When we reached a task force site out in Tempe, close to the university there, we saw all the usual suspects, plus DEA agents. Ian and I vested up, he strapped on his thigh holster—which held his spare SIG P228, because only having the Glock 20 we each carried wasn’t enough—and we headed toward the cluster of men.

“Where are you guys going?” Hoch asked before we got far.

Ian pointed toward the staging area.

“Not yet,” Quinn told us. “We wait until they tell us where they want us.”

I glowered at her. “I thought you said this was our grab. Is it a fugitive capture or not?”