“I don’t think she can hear me,” he replies with a nod at the dead woman.
That Barnes fails to consider Sully a lady, much less curb his tongue in front of her, can be attributed to the fact that they’ve been working together for quite a long time now. Longer than either of them worked with any other partner, and longer than the duration of both their failed marriages combined.
No one understands Sully the way Barnes does. No one makes her more frustrated, no one makes her laugh harder, and no one has her back the way he does. In many ways, they’re like an old married -couple.
Their relationship is far more productive and rewarding than the ones either of them shared with their ex--spouses, but it’s strictly platonic. So far, anyway.
Once in a while—-a very great while, usually when they’ve adjourned to the pub for a -couple of whiskeys after a long, hard day on the job—-Sully finds herself wondering what it would be like to throw caution to the wind and let the man kiss her.
Assuming he’d even want to.
You never can tell with Stockton. He likes to tease her that he’d never be attracted to a “scrawny little white woman” like her.
“I like ladies who have a little meat on their bones,” he commented just the other day as they sat at the bar unwinding after attending the funeral of a rookie who’d been shot responding to a domestic disturbance. Ordinarily, they don’t indulge in whiskey during the day, but the ser-vice had stirred Sully’s grief for her beloved father, who’d passed away in September. Barnes was doing his best to cheer her up—-by busting her chops, as usual.
“And what would your daddy have said about you dating a black man?”
“What is this, Alabama in 1962? He might have had a problem with me dating a fellow cop, but he wasn’t a racist.”
“He was a cop himself, and so was his father,” Stockton pointed out.
“And so were his brothers and uncles and grandfather and great--grandfather, but . . .”
“But he wouldn’t have wanted you dating a cop.”
“Listen, I’m a big girl. I make my own decisions.”
“So what are you saying, Gingersnap?” That’s his pet name for her. Early on in their relationship, she asked him to stop. That did a lot of good. “You saying that you want to date a cop?”
“What, are you kidding me? I married one the first time around, and look how that turned out,” she said, and that was that. For the time being, anyway.
Someday they might find their way into each other’s bed. That, or they’ll be best man or maid of honor at each other’s second weddings.
Sully shoves her hands into the pockets of her insulated navy blue coat and leans over the dead girl.
The body was found in a clump of shrubs between Twelfth Avenue and the Hudson River a little while ago, phoned in by a man who’d been chasing a terrier that had escaped its leash.
Now he protectively cradles the little dog in his arms, standing alongside the usual assortment of curious onlookers plus a -couple of reporters and a television news crew, all clustered beyond blue police barricades. Within the perimeter cordoned off by yellow tape, a forensics team takes measurements and snaps photos. On a car radio somewhere nearby, Johnny Mathis is singing that it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
It isn’t, but it might be true by nightfall. The forecast calls for the first snowfall of the season, though Sully isn’t convinced it’s really going to happen and in fact accepted a friendly little wager from Stockton as they were driving over here from the precinct.
“It hardly ever snows in Manhattan in December. That would be too perfect. It only happens in small towns and in movies,” she theorized. “In real life, the snow doesn’t fall here until the holidays are over and there’s absolutely nothing to look forward to but baseball and that’s still months away. It’s like, kick ’em when they’re down.”
“The snow is like that?”
“It is.”
“Sadistic snow, is that it?”