Taylor Smith - The Night Café

Hannah counted herself among the good guys, but Russo kept her feeling a little off balance, too. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do about that. The two of them had been tap-dancing around each other for a couple of months now. If the irregular hours they both kept made it tough for them to find time to see one another, Russo had made it clear he wasn’t about to let a few scheduling problems get in his way. The guy was determined, she’d give him that. And a damn good kisser, Hannah had discovered. Her stomach cart-wheeled as she recalled their one and only real date. It was about ten days ago, dinner followed by a walk on the beach. Yes, a cliché right out of the classifieds, maybe, but it had worked. Unfortunately, it had come to a breathless but abrupt end when he’d been called out to a murder scene in West Hollywood. He wasn’t supposed to be on call that night, but as luck would have it, a gang war had erupted in Compton and all of Russo’s colleagues had been out picking up the pieces of carnage there when the dead sheet call came in.

“You’re a tough lady to get hold of,” Russo said now.

“I wouldn’t want to seem easy.” Hannah winced. Damn, was she flirting? She hated flirting. “Anyway, I called your office. You have a new partner.”

“Yeah, she’s a newbie. She’ll be riding with me for the next couple of months. I’m her T.O.” Her training officer. “Name’s Lindsay. She just transferred in from the Twin Towers.”

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, in addition to policing vast swaths of Southern California, also ran the detention facilities that housed men and women arrested anywhere in the county. It was impossible to climb through LASD ranks without sooner or later doing a stint as a corrections officer in one of the jails. Hannah herself had worked in the Twin Towers correctional unit for a year after graduating from police academy, and she’d hated every minute of it. The relationship between jailed and jailer was made up of equal parts suspicion, contempt and gamesmanship, bored inmates having little else to occupy them besides looking for ways to end-run the guards. The day her transfer to a patrol beat had come through, Hannah had danced a jig right there in the control tower.

“I’ll bet she’s glad to be out of there. I assume she’s been on the street already?” Hannah asked. You didn’t make detective in the Sheriff’s Department until you’d put in your time on patrol.

“Yeah, she worked the Valley and Compton. She only just told me you’d called. When exactly was that?”

“Thursday or Friday, I think.” Actually, Hannah knew precisely when she’d called, but there was no mileage in looking too eager. “She said you were out of town.”

“Yeah, I had to go up to San Francisco. I got back on Friday, but I didn’t get your message until a few minutes ago. The kid’s in big trouble.” Russo sounded annoyed. That was gratifying. “She misses another message like that and she’ll be back on a beat before she knows it.”

“Don’t be too hard on her. She doesn’t know me from Adam. Probably thought I was one of your groupies.”

Russo made a dismissive noise, but cops did tend to attract a fan base. It wasn’t just the man-in-uniform phenomenon. Plainclothes detectives held just as much fascination for civilians. It was the illusion of invincibility, maybe, that knight-in-shining-armor thing. As a former cop herself, Hannah knew the badge was no guarantee of valor or integrity, much less infallibility. Russo had certainly suffered his own share of personal and professional problems, but he seemed to deserve his rep for decency.

“Believe me, Lindsay knows now she’d better tell me right away if you call,” he growled. “When I didn’t hear back from you, I was beginning to think you were avoiding me. I was thinking about taking up stalking. Anyway, why did you call the desk instead of my cell?”

Hannah hesitated. Why indeed? Because she’d been hoping to get a recording and put the ball back in his court? Because the thought of seeming desperate, or of putting herself out there and getting hurt again was scarier than anything she could imagine? She’d walked into booby-trapped buildings with less trepidation than she felt at the idea of letting this guy get close. She’d been on her own nearly five years now. There’d been a couple of so-called relationships in that time, but she’d had no problem keeping them compartmentalized, tucked away in a little offside place that came nowhere near threatening her peace of mind. But when John Russo had walked into her life, she’d realized fast that she was in big trouble.

“How come I didn’t call your cell?” she repeated. “I don’t know. Because the office number was the one I called, I guess. How are you doing?”

“Okay. Working too much, as usual. You know that murder I caught in WeHo the night you and I went to the beach?”

“I remember.” Boy, did she. Hannah’s face went warm, thinking about them necking on the beach like a couple of teenagers. “The paper said you arrested some movie writer. The guy who did that NASCAR picture—what was it called?”

“Speed Demons.”

“That’s right. He crashed a race car while he was researching that, I read.”

“Yeah, what a bozo. You’ve heard of method acting? Looks like this guy invented method writing. He nearly bought it when he flamed out that car. Told me he wanted to get a sense of what a race driver feels when he’s going around a curve at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Another time, apparently, he climbed Mount McKinley to learn about life and death at high altitudes and nearly got his guide killed.”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “Not a rocket scientist, it would seem.”

“No kidding. So, this time he’s writing a murder mystery about working girls, and the next thing you know, there’s one dead hooker in his bed and another one running screaming down La Cienega Boulevard wearing nothing but rope burns.”

“Yikes.”

“He’d gagged and hogtied both girls—ankles and wrists linked to nooses around their necks. Left them that way while he went to the liquor store, if you can believe it. First girl passes out, strangles herself. Second girl manages to get free just as she hears the writer’s car pull up. She slips out the front door as he’s coming in the back. When he realizes there’s a dead girl in his bed and the other one’s gotten away, he hightails it out of town. We finally tracked him down to an old girlfriend’s place in the Bay Area.”

“So that’s what sent you up there.”

“Yeah. San Francisco PD picked him up for us. I flew back with him last night and he was arraigned this afternoon. I was hoping the bastard would be remanded over until the trial, but he made bail.”

“Well, way to go. Guess his next script will be Jailbird City.”

“What are you up to?”

“Getting ready to head out on a job.”

“Again? A real job this time?”

“What do you mean, real? I work.”

“Yeah, sorry. I know that. I meant a permanent job, I guess. With regular hours.”

“Like yours, you mean?”

“Point taken.” He sighed. “We’re a pair, aren’t we?”

A pair? If only. In the three months since they’d met, they’d had exactly two lunches, several dinner dates that ended up canceled either because Hannah got last-minute calls for jobs she couldn’t afford to turn down or he had to work overtime. At this rate, Hannah thought, she’d be on Social Security before they ever got to second base. And by then Russo, a decade older than she was, would be dead or too pathetic to do her frustrated libido much good.

On the other hand, he was still calling. Points to him for persistence.

“I was hoping we could go for dinner or catch a movie or something one night this week,” Russo said. “How’s your schedule looking.”