“Not so far.”
“And I don’t plan to. If at any point you feel that our association is jeopardizing your ability to give your full attention to your official assignment, just let me know and you won’t hear from me again. You’ve got my word on that.” Always, always give them a free out that they’ll never have a chance to use. “Fair enough?”
He didn’t look reassured. “Yeah.”
“Am I asking you to disobey anyone else’s orders?”
“That’s splitting hairs. OK, Detective Kennedy hasn’t told me not to talk to you, but that’s only because it hasn’t even occurred to him that I might.”
“So? It should’ve occurred to him. If it hasn’t, that’s his problem, not yours or mine. You don’t owe him anything.”
Stephen ran a hand through his hair. “I do, though,” he said. “He’s the one that brought me onto this case. Right now, he’s my boss. The rule is, I take orders from him. No one else.”
My jaw dropped. “The rule? What the . . . ? I thought you said you had your eye on Undercover. Were you just hand-jobbing me there? Because I don’t like being hand-jobbed by boys, Stephen. I really don’t.”
He shot upright. “No! Of course I—What are you—I do want Undercover!”
“And you think we can afford to sit around all day reading the rule book? You think I made it through three years in deep cover in a drug ring by sticking to the rules? Tell me you’re having a laugh, kid. Please. Tell me I haven’t been flushing my time down the jacks whenever I picked up your file.”
“I never asked you to read my file. For all I know, anyway, you never saw it till this week. Till you wanted someone inside this case.”
Fair play to the kid. “Stephen. I’m offering you an opportunity that every floater on the force, every guy you trained with, every guy you’ll see in work tomorrow morning would sell his granny for. You’re going to throw it away because I can’t prove I’ve been paying enough attention to you?”
He was red all over his freckles, but he held his ground. “No. I’m trying to do the right thing.”
Sweet Jesus, he was young. “If you don’t know this by now, mate, you’d better write it down and learn it by heart: the right thing is not always the same as what’s in your pretty little rule book. To all intents and purposes, this right here is an undercover assignment that I’m offering you. A bit of moral ambiguity comes with the job. If you can’t cope with it, now would be just a perfect time to figure that out.”
“This is different. It’s undercover against our own.”
“Sunshine, you would be amazed at how often that happens. Amazed. Like I said, if you can’t handle it, not only do you need to know that, but so do I. Both of us might have to do some rethinking about your career goals.”
The corners of Stephen’s mouth tightened. “If I don’t do this,” he said, “I can forget about a place in Undercover.”
“Not out of spite, kid. Don’t fool yourself. A guy could bang both my sisters at once, stick the video on YouTube, and I’d happily work with him, as long as I thought he’d get the job done. But if you make it clear to me that you’re fundamentally unsuited to undercover work, then no, I’m not going to recommend you. Call me crazy.”
“Can I have a few hours to think about it?”
“Nope,” I said, flicking my cigarette away. “If you can’t make this call fast, I don’t need you to make it at all. I’ve got places to go and people to see, and I’m sure you have too. Here’s what it comes down to, Stephen. For the next few weeks, you can be Scorcher Kennedy’s typist, or you can be my detective. Which one of those sounds more like what you signed up for?”
Stephen bit his lip and wrapped the end of his scarf around his hand. “If we did this,” he said. “If. What kind of thing would you be wanting to know? Just for example.”
“Just for example, when the fingerprint results come back, I’d be fascinated to hear whose prints, if any, were on that suitcase, on the contents of that suitcase, on the two halves of that note, and on the window Kevin went out of. I’d also be interested in a full description of his injuries, preferably with the diagrams and the post-mortem report. That might well be enough info to keep me going for a while; who knows, it might even turn out to be all I ever need. And that should be back within the next couple of days, no?”
After a moment Stephen let out a long breath, a trail of white in the cold air, and lifted his head. “No offense,” he said, “but before I go spilling inside info on a murder case to a total stranger, I’d like to see some ID.”
I burst out laughing. “Stephen,” I said, finding my ID, “you’re a man after my own heart. We’re going to be good for each other, you and me.”
“Yeah,” Stephen said, a little dryly. “I’m hoping.” I watched his disorganized red head bent over the ID, and just for a second, under the hard throb of triumph—Up yours, Scorchie baby, he’s my boy now—I felt a little pulse of affection towards the kid. It felt good to have someone on my side.