“You pull a double?”
“Caught one late, me and Reineke.” He settled on something that looked like a cheese Danish if you were blind in one eye. “Just wrapping it up. Vic’s in a titty bar over on Avenue A, getting himself a lap dance. Asshole comes in, starts it up. The titty doing the lap dance is his ex. Gives her a couple smacks. The guy with the hard-on clocks him. Asshole gets hauled out. He goes home, gets his souvenir Yankees baseball bat, lays in wait. Vic comes out, and the asshole jumps him. Beat the holy shit out of him and left his brains on the sidewalk.”
“High price for a lap dance.”
“You’re telling me. Asshole’s stupid, but slippery.” Jenkinson ripped the wrapping off the sad-looking Danish, took a resigned bite. “Leaves the bat and runs. We got wits falling out of our pockets, got his prints, got his name, his address. Slam-fucking-dunk. He doesn’t go home and make our lives easier, but what he does, a couple hours after, is go to the ex’s. Brings her freaking flowers he dug up out of a sidewalk planter deal. Dirt’s still falling off the roots.”
“Classy guy,” Eve observed.
“Oh, yeah.” He downed the rest of the Danish. “She won’t let him in—stripper’s got more sense—but calls it in while he’s crying and banging on the door, and dumping flower dirt all over the hallway. We get there to pick him up, and what does he do? He jumps out the freaking window end of the hall. Four flights up. Still holding the damn flowers and trailing dirt all the way.”
He shifted to order coffee with two hits of fake sugar. “Got the luck of God ’cause he lands on a couple chemi-heads doing a deal down below—killed one of them dead, other’s smashed up good. But they broke his fall.”
Deeply entertained, Eve shook her head. “You can’t make this shit up.”
“Gets better,” Jenkinson told her, slurping coffee. “Now we got to chase his ass. I go down the fire escape—and let me tell you smashed chemi-heads make one hell of a mess—Reineke goes out the front. He spots him. Asshole runs through the kitchen of an all-night Chinese place, and people are yelling and tumbling like dice. This fucker is throwing shit at us, pots and food and Christ knows. Reineke slips on some moo goo something, goes down. Hell no, you can’t make this shit up, LT.”
He grinned now, slurped more coffee. “He heads for this sex joint, but the bouncer sees this freaking blood-covered maniac coming and blocks the door. The bouncer’s built like a tank—so the asshole just bounces off him like a basketball off the rim, goes airborne for a minute and plows right into me. Jesus. Now I’ve got blood and chemi-head brains on me, and Reineke’s hauling ass over, and he’s covered with moo goo. And this asshole starts yelling police brutality. Took some restraint not to give him some.
“Anyway.” He blew out a breath. “We’re wrapping it up.”
Was it any wonder she loved New York?
“Good work. Do you want me to take you off the roll?”
“Nah. We’ll flex a couple hours, grab some sleep up in the crib once the asshole’s processed. You look at the big picture, boss? All that, over a pair of tits.”
“Love screws you up.”
“Fucking A.”
She turned into the bullpen, acknowledged “heys” from cops finishing up the night tour. She walked into her office, left the door open. Detective Sergeant Moynahan had, as she’d expected, left her desk pristine. Everything was exactly as it had been when she’d walked out her office door three weeks before, except cleaner. Even her skinny window sparkled, and the air smelled vaguely—not altogether unpleasantly—like the woods she’d walked through in Ireland.
Minus the dead body.
She programmed coffee from her AutoChef and, with a satisfied sigh, sat at her desk to read over the reports and logs generated during her absence.
Murder hadn’t taken a holiday during hers, she noted, but her division had run pretty smooth. She moved through closed and open cases, requests for leave, overtime, personal time, reimbursements.
She heard the muffled clump that was Peabody’s summer air boots, and glanced up as her partner stepped into the open doorway.
“Welcome home! How was it? Was it just mag?”
“It was good.”
Peabody’s square face sported a little sun-kiss, which reminded Eve her partner had taken a week off with her squeeze, Electronic Detectives Division ace McNab. She had her dark hair pulled back in a short, but jaunty tail, and wore a thin, buff-colored jacket over cargo trousers a few shades darker. Her tank matched the air boots in a bright cherry red.
“It looks like DS Moynahan kept things oiled while I was gone.”
“Yeah. He sure dots every ‘i,’ but he’s easy to work with. He’s solid, and he knows how to ride a desk. He steers clear of field work, but he had a good sense of how to run the ship. So, what did you get?”
“A pile of reports.”
“No, come on, for your anniversary. I know Roarke had to come up with something total. Come on,” Peabody insisted when Eve just sat there. “I came in early just for this. I figure we’ve got nearly five before we’re officially on the clock.”
True enough, Eve thought, and since Peabody’s brown eyes pleaded like a puppy’s, she held up her arm, displayed the new wrist unit she wore.
“Oh.”
The reaction, Eve thought, was perfect. Baffled surprise, severe disappointment, the heroic struggle to mask both.
“Ah, that’s nice. It’s a nice wrist unit.”
“Serviceable.” Eve turned her wrist to admire the simple band, the flat, silver-toned face.
“Yeah, it looks it.”
“It’s got a couple of nice features,” she added as she fiddled with it.
“It’s nice,” Peabody said again, then drew her beeping communicator out of her pocket. “Give me a sec, I . . . hey, it’s you.” Mouth dropping, Peabody jerked her head up. “It’s got a micro-com in it? That’s pretty mag. Usually they’re all fuzzy, but this is really clean.”
“Nano-com. You know how the vehicle he rigged up for me looks ordinary?”
“Ordinary leaning toward ugly,” Peabody corrected. “But nobody gives it a second look or knows that it’s loaded, so . . . same deal?”
Automatically Peabody dug out her ’link when it signaled, then paused. “Is that you? It’s got full communication capability? In a wrist unit that size?”
“Not only that, it’s got navigation, full data capabilities. Total data and communications—he programmed it with all my stuff. If I had to, I could access my files on it. Waterproof, shatterproof, voice-command capabilities. Gives me the ambient temp. Plus it tells time.”
Not to mention he’d given her a second with the exact same specs—only fired with diamonds. Something she’d wear when she suited up for fancy.
“That is so utterly iced. How does it—”
Eve snatched her wrist away. “No playing with it. I haven’t figured it all out myself yet.”
“It’s just like the perfect thing for you. The abso perfect thing. He really gets it. And you got to go to Ireland and Italy and finish it up at that island he’s got. Nothing but romance and relaxation.”
“That’s about it, except for the dead girl.”
“Yeah, and McNab and I had a really good time—what? What dead girl?”
“If I had more coffee I might be inclined to tell you.”
Peabody sprang toward the AutoChef.
Minutes later, she polished off her own cup and shook her head. “Even on vacation you investigated a homicide.”
“I didn’t investigate, the Irish cop did. I consulted—unofficially. Now my serviceable yet frosty wrist unit tells me we’re on duty. Scram.”
“I’m scramming, but I want to tell you about how McNab and I took scuba lessons, and—”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but I liked it. And how I did these interviews on Nadine’s book, which is still number one in case you haven’t been checking. If we don’t catch a case, maybe we can have lunch. I’ll buy.”
“Maybe. I’ve got to catch up.”