Julia Spencer-Fleming - I Shall Not Want

Through the glass, she heard the crunch of boots on gravel. "What's going on here?" a man said, his voice hard with suspicion and authority. She could see him outlined in her rearview mirror, tall, big, one hand resting on the butt of his service weapon.

Stud Boy raised his hands placatingly. " Nada, nada . We were just stopping to see if the lady needed any help."

"Yeah? Well, she's got help now. Clear off."

The smaller, weaselly guy scuttled across the road, but Stud Boy hesitated.

"Either you're in your vehicle, or you're facedown in the dirt with my boot in your back. Your choice. You got ten seconds."

Stud Boy glanced at the guy who was still hovering just out of reach at the front of her car, then gestured toward the Hummer. "We don't want any trouble," he said, smiling. His lip piercings glittered in the cruiser's cold white light. He glanced down at Hadley. "Later, pretty girl."

She wrenched her eyes from his and focused on her hands. Holding her keys. Her knuckles were white. She heard the thudding of overengineered doors, and then the Hummer roared to life and, in a spatter of gravel, pulled into the road and vanished.

The boots crunched toward her. The officer squatted down. "Hey," Kevin Flynn said. "Are you all right?"

"Your granddad called the station." They were sitting in Flynn's cruiser with the heater on high. Flynn had complained of the cold when he snapped it on, but she knew it was because she was shaking. She couldn't seem to stop. He had kept up a steady flow of chatter, walking her to the cruiser, grabbing her notebook and her criminal justice text, toting the two bags of groceries she had picked up at the Sam's Club down in Albany. It was almost like the way she'd hear him rattling on at the station, except he kept sneaking glances at her when he thought she wasn't looking. Taking her emotional temperature.

"Of course, dispatch isn't manned, most nights. Womanned? I bet Harlene would like womanned . Anyway, his call shot off to the Glens Falls board, and they gave me a squawk, and here I am."

"Thank you." She sounded like Hudson, when she made him thank his little sister. She took a deep breath-it was getting easier the longer she sat in the self-contained world that was the squad car-and tried again. "I mean it. Thank you. They… I was…" She shook her head.

His hand touched her shoulder, so tentatively she might have imagined it. "You don't have to say anything," he said. "And you don't have to thank me."

"You don't understand," she said. "I didn't-I just sat there. Like a victim. Like a babysitter in a horror movie."

"Naw. They scream and run around a lot."

She looked at him.

"Sorry," he said.

"I'm used to taking shit from men, you know? They trash-talk at me, and I flip it right back to them. But these guys… I didn't even tell them I was a cop. You know why? Because I'm not. I'm just a woman who gets dressed up in a costume five days a week and pretends to be one." She leaned forward, bracing her arms on her knees, and his hand fell away instantly. "I am such a failure at this. A failure and a fake."

"What, because you didn't get out of your car and mix it up with four bad dudes? That's just being smart. Hell, if it'd been me in that car with no weapon and no radio, I would've done just what you did. Stay put and keep my mouth shut."

She shook her head again. "You don't need a gun. You have that thing, you know, that cop thing going on. With the hard voice and the take-no-shit attitude." She looked at him again. Eyeing his frame. "You looked huge. I mean, you're tall, but you're not-" She curled her fists and shook her arms in an iron-man pose.

He grinned. "It's a trick I learned from Lyle MacAuley. He leaves his bomber jacket unzipped and kind of spreads his arms out. Makes him look twice as wide as he really is."

She let her mind wrap around that one. "There are tricks to it? As in, performing?"

He twisted in his seat so he could face her. "Sure. Like what you were just talking about. The voice? And the attitude? I just copy the chief. Nobody gives him shit." He paused. "Well, nobody except for Reverend Fergusson." He smiled a little. "Look, when I started at the MKPD, I felt exactly the same way you do now. It was, like, the day after I turned twenty-one. I was sworn in before I'd had my first legal drink. And I was even skinnier than I am now, if you can believe that." He held his arms open, inviting her to gaze upon his skeletal thinness. She didn't see it. He was lean, all right, but in a good way, the way of a healthy young man who hasn't quite finished fleshing out.

"I felt like somebody's little brother, getting to tag along with the big boys. I kept waiting for… I dunno, some TV moment, when I would suddenly stop being Skinny Flynnie and start being bad-ass Officer Flynn."

"Skinny Flynnie?"

He blushed. "That's what they called me in high school."

"Hah. They called me-" She stopped. "Never mind. High school sucks."

"Oh, yeah." He reached out to turn the blower down a few notches, and the way his wrist bones poked out of his shirt cuff did make him look like a teenaged boy. "Anyway, I was working this case last year, interviewing a witness, and she lied to me. She and her husband. I had to go back with the dep and reinterview her. I was really pissed off, thinking about how she'd played me, but then, it suddenly struck me; it was my own fault. Because up here"-he tapped his temple-"I was still Skinny Flynnie. I knew the rules and regs, I had learned the tricks, but I didn't believe ."

"Believe." This was starting to sound very California. "In what, yourself?"

He shook his head. "In the power of the suit."

"Okay, you've lost me."

"You know that movie where the dad puts on the Santa suit and he turns into Kris Kringle?"

" The Santa Clause ? Oh, yeah. I know it." Hudson and Genny had watched it approximately eight hundred times last December.

"Okay. All this"-he waved his arm around, taking in the computer and the mic and the racked and locked shotgun and his hat balanced on the dashboard-"is the suit. You put on the suit, and you become The Man."

She thought about that for a moment. "I don't know. I've got the uniform and all that, and I still feel like a fraud."

"Just give it time."

Her mouth crooked up. Words of wisdom from a-"Flynn," she said, "how old are you?"

"Twenty-four."

From a kid who was eight years younger than her. She curled into the seat. "I think you may have more time than I do."

Spinning yellow lights appeared on the road ahead of them, resolving into a tow truck. She stirred, ready to get up, but Flynn's hand was in the way. "Gimme your key," he said. "I'll take care of it."

She stripped the key off her ring and dropped it onto his open palm. She watched through the windshield as he spoke with the tow truck operator, handed over the key, and shook the man's hand. Weird. Considering what almost happened with the freaks in the Hummer, she should still be jangling, jumpy, coked up. Instead, she felt as relaxed and boneless as she did in the shampoo girl's chair at the salon.

Letting someone else take care of her.

Huh.

Kevin climbed back into the cruiser and tossed his hat back on the dash. "All set." He turned off his light bar and shifted into gear. "He's taking it to Ron Tucker's garage. Best mechanic in town. He'll do you right." He pulled onto the road. She let the rolling fields and farms slip past them, almost invisible in the darkness.

"Flynn." The question popped into her head from nowhere. "Did you run the plates on those guys?"

He grinned.

"What?"

"There you go. That's thinking like a cop."

"Did you?"

"Of course I did. When I pulled in behind you. The truck's registered to Josefina Feliciano, DOB 7-25-61, POR Brooklyn, New York. Three points down for passing a school bus, no record."