The Poet (Samantha Jazz)

“You need extra protection.”

“What? Should I ask you to sleep over every night? Maybe get naked? Will that keep me safe? Don’t divert attention from you to me.”

“What are you doing right now, Sam?”

“What part of ‘my father was shot dead in front of me’ do you not understand? Blood splattered all over me. His blood, Ethan. Do you think I can ever wash that away? Do you think I will ever work a day on this job and forget that?”

A horn honks.

I turn away from Lang, and traffic is now moving. He sets us in motion, and silence is a sharp blade between us, ready to cut one or both of us. Lang turns up the radio, pumping out a country song, his way of telling me that he’ll back off, at least for now. My foot is tapping on the floorboard, fingers playing a tune on my knee, neither of which has anything to do with the music. It’s about the ten million nerves he’s hit. It’s a solid five minutes before the tension in the car eases to the point of being tolerable. My foot stops moving, my fingers still with it.

My cell phone buzzes with a text message. I welcome the entry back into a case that occupies my mind. It’s Officer Jackson, letting me know that all voluntary DNA has been collected. He’s achieved that goal in record time, but this doesn’t surprise me. Jackson continues to impress. I forward the message to Lang. I just don’t want to open a conversation with him again right now.

A few minutes later, he pulls us into the station parking area and into his assigned spot before killing the radio, but not the engine and air. “Jazz,” he prods.

“I get it,” I say. “You care. We’re friends.” I look over at him. “Maybe even best friends.”

“I guess that’s why having sex won’t work, right?”

I laugh. “Do you ever stop?”

“Made you laugh, and you’re the one who suggested I sleep over and we get naked.”

“You know I wasn’t suggesting that. We are never having sex, and I don’t even think you want to have sex with me.”

“What I want,” he says, somber now when he is rarely somber, “is for you to stay alive and keep giving me hell. I thought you were dead that night, too. I knew you were with your father that night. When that call came in, I died inside. You know that, right?”

I recognize in that moment that I’ve been so burned by my own personal hell and desperate to escape that burn that I’ve blocked out everyone else’s. Including my mother’s. “I know you were affected, too. I do. But my father dying didn’t make me a lesser detective. I need you to trust me again.”

“I trust you more than anyone on the force. This case is not like other cases, and you know it. One of our own is missing.”

“If The Poet is really following me, then me jumping off this case won’t stop him from coming at me. And before you suggest I leave town or hide, I won’t. If I don’t have his attention, someone else will. My job is to protect that someone else. That’s my oath.”

“I know that.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“To stay alive.”

“I plan to.”

“Not everything goes as planned. Let’s just go inside and find what we need to arrest this asshole.” He opens his door and gets out.

Chapter 31

Lang and I enter the precinct prepared to divide and conquer, but before we even reach our desks, Chuck steps into our path. “We’re still waiting on the apartment building footage,” he says. “But—” He motions for us to follow. “I’ve got something to show you both.”

We don’t resist. Like good little detectives, we follow the information god toward a conference room. On the way there, he motions to three people sitting at a table outside of his cubicle—two men and a woman—pounding away on laptops.

“Our new interns,” Chuck informs us, and when all three of the interns look up, he motions them back to their computers. “Keep working. We’re trying to save lives. Time is critical.” Chuck is already walking again, expecting us to follow, in charge and taking names.

“What is it with you short people?” Lang murmurs. “Are you all bossy and shouty?”

I laugh at the “shouty” word because he’d learned it from a little old lady just three days earlier when she’d told him to back off or she’d get shouty with him. It had not been in his official capacity. He’d stopped at a doughnut shop. They’d clashed over who got the last glazed doughnut. I’d sipped my coffee and watched him hand over the last glazed doughnut, losing that war. “What is it with you giants?” I counter. “Are you all incapable of listening unless we get shouty?”