Butterface

“No, you don’t,” Lucy said with a nod of agreement. “But it does help if you want to keep your feet warm at night.”

“I can get socks for that,” she retorted.

So what if she was picturing big thick ones that smelled of warm cedar, just like Ford did.

“Ladies,” Larry said, his unexpectedly deep voice cutting through their giggles. He stood in front of the room, paint brush at the ready. “Class is starting.” That was their usual Wednesday night cue to shut the hell up. “Tonight’s painting subject is the naked mole rat sunning itself on a settee.”

“Okay, I take it back,” Lucy whispered in her totally loud way. “Painting a drowning aardvark wouldn’t be that weird for him.”

…

By Tuesday, the box of supposedly bleach-enhanced Chapstick left on Ford’s desk in the squad room had been swapped with a new kind of supposed gift. There, on his stack of case files, was a brown paper bag with eyeholes cut out. Ford stared down at it. The fuckers had even done a half-assed job of drawing a pair of women’s open lips below the eyes, with an opening cut into the middle. Fury, hot and immediate, rushed up from his toes, and his gaze locked in on Gallo and Ruggiero, who were watching him.

“You two don’t know who happened to leave that, do you?” Ford didn’t bother to try to hide the anger burning in his gut as he grabbed the latest anonymous so-called gag gift from the stack of case files on his desk and crumpled it into a tight ball that he flung into his trash can.

Gallo just grinned his shit-eating grin and shook his head. “Nah, but it looks like someone hit a sore spot, huh, Johnnie?”

“Probably a PTSD reaction to his last assignment,” Ruggiero said, his voice thick with fake sincerity. “You’d think for that kind of hazard duty he would have at least brought back some useful information.”

“Sure,” Gallo said. “But you can’t be too hard on him. Hartigan probably barely made it out of there with his virtue intact.”

He knew what they were doing. The dipshit duo had gotten yanked into the captain’s office a few hours ago for a reaming loud enough that everyone in the squad could have written direct quotes. The pressure was building for results, and the organized crime task force had gotten almost nothing beyond the date of the heroin delivery. Without a time and location, that bit of news was worthless.

Ford had spent the last two days interviewing CIs, tracing down warehouse owners on the waterfront, and every other idea he could think of to actually use some detective skills to uncover the information they needed. Gallo and Ruggiero had been hitting the streets as well.

They’d all turned up shit.

So yeah, it’s possible the two detectives were just taking out their frustration on him any way they could. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t pissed off regardless.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, closing the distance between his desk and where Gallo sat on the corner of Ruggiero’s desk. “Did the captain chew you a new one for the task force’s lack of results? I mean, sure, you might wish that was because of one operation that didn’t pan out, but you’ve been in charge for months and working the Espositos for years.”

The entire squad room went silent. Even the precinct’s admin assistant stopped typing. Gallo got red enough in the face that Ford wondered if the portly detective was about to have a heart attack.

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Hartigan.” He stood up and took what he probably thought was a threatening step forward. “Maybe if little pukes like you did their jobs right, we’d have something to nail those bastards on. Instead, we just got some weak-ass story about how the brown-bagger doesn’t know anything about what her brothers are up to.”

For as quiet as the squad room was before, it totally disappeared at that moment. “What did you just call Gina?”

“A brown-bagger.” Gallo puffed up his chest and put a swagger in his step as he took the last two steps before stopping just inside Ford’s personal bubble. “Why, would you prefer grenade?”

“You need to shut the fuck up, Gallo.” And he needed to mentally remind himself grown men did not lose their shit on their superiors at work. Besides, Ford wasn’t the hot-headed stereotypical kind of Irish. He liked rules and order. He was just about to turn and walk away when Gallo jabbed his finger into Ford’s chest.