Nancy Holder - Daughter of the Flames

Despite her successful FBI background check, upstairs wasn’t fully aware of some of the rough patches Yolanda had been through. They didn’t need to know; Yolanda was trying hard to “overcome” her past, as she herself liked to phrase it. Izzy supported her in that, protective of the young woman and of her budding self-esteem.

So when she invited Izzy over to “fix her up”—i.e., to teach her how to trowel on a few layers of foundation and do something, anything, with her crazy hair—Izzy went. But Yolanda’s evil boyfriend had hung around, making gibes at Yolanda and coming on to Izzy when Yolanda had to use the bathroom. It was too depressing to repeat the experience, so Izzy had found reasons not to go over to Yolanda’s again. They socialized by going out for lunch during the workday and occasionally out to dinner. Because she didn’t want to go to Yolanda’s, Izzy didn’t invite her into her own home, either. Now that Yolanda had moved, maybe they could try again.

“It doesn’t matter if he’s on every cable channel,” Izzy said to Yolanda. “We’ve got rules for a reason. We do it wrong, the bad guys walk. It’s that simple.”

“Okay, well, I’m getting out of here,” Yolanda said. Then she looked past Izzy to the window and said, “Oh, hey. Hi.”

“Yo, Yo, Yo, Yolanda.” John Cratty, a plainclothes from SNEU—Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit—trotted up to the window with a doughnut-size box filled with plastic Baggies. It was bagged in a very large Ziploc-style container, and a little paper-and-metal tag, like the price tag at a yard sale, was attached to the zip-tie. His signature turquoise tape was attached to the tag.

His brown hair was long and dirty, and in his jeans and Kurt Cobain T-shirt, he looked like an underachieving, very low-end drug dealer. It was a good look for him.

Yolanda said, “Yo, yo, yourself. You brought your own stuff in again?”

“Van drivers had been on sixteen hours,” he explained. “I said I’d do it.”

“You’re so nice,” Yolanda cooed. She said to Izzy, “I can get it.”

Izzy glanced at the computer and said, “I already logged in. You’re off the clock, girlfriend.”

“No, I’ll catch it. I need to show a little more effort. I, um, spent a little time in the bathroom….”

Putting on makeup, Izzy silently filled in. And perfume. Whoa, is she seeing Cratty?

Izzy read the case number off the tag and typed all the specs into the computer—case number, detective on the case, date, yada yada. The NYPD had made over four hundred thousand arrests in the prior year; fifteen hundred of the Two-Seven’s arrests had been in the seven major crime categories: murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny and auto theft. By contrast, the Nineteenth Precinct, which was a much nicer neighborhood, had three thousand, nine hundred and forty-two arrests, most of them for grand larceny—theft of personal property of one thousand dollars or more.

She knew all these stats because the Dread Machine took her raw data and added it to the enormous NYPD database and processed it. There were two end results: updated stats for them that cared and a set of UPC tags for her. Since this was drugs, she ordered a good dozen of the tags.

She put one strip in the logbook and began to write in all the data.

Watching her, Cratty rested his forearms on the ledge of the window.

“You look tired, Ms. Iz,” he said. “You go out dancing last night without me again?”

Looking up, Izzy gave him a faint half-smile. “When have I ever done that, Justin Timberlake?”

She accidentally brushed the back of his hand with her fingertips as she picked up the bag, and remembered a time when her fingers had touched more than the evidence she was booking for him in a street bust. Not that they had gone to bed. It had ended before then. Not so much ended as fizzled out. Never started.

Which was a bit of a pity. When he wasn’t working the streets, Cratty cleaned up nice, with his square jaw and his hazel eyes and his sandy-brown hair. She’d had a brief crush on him about two years ago, but she’d known even then that he didn’t really think of her as a girl.

Most of the guys thought of her as one of the guys—someone to drink beer with after work, shoot some pool and ask for advice about the girls they wanted to date. Girls who had learned about hair and makeup back in high school, and frequently returned to the Secret School of the Feminine Arts for refresher courses.

Girls exactly like Yolanda.

Cratty whistled “Rock Your Body” to himself, grinning abstractedly at her.

“Hey, you see that Justin Timberlake special the other night?” Yolanda asked Cratty.

He gave her a look. “I’m a man,” he said. “A real man.”

“Well, you’re a real silly man,” Yolanda retorted. “Because he had these hot backup dancers.”

“Bet none of them were as pretty as you two girls,” Cratty replied, taking in Izzy, too.

“Yeah, but they were half-naked,” Yolanda said.

“HBO naked?” Cratty asked, more interested.

They launched into the vulgar sort of repartee that police precincts are known for, no matter all the seminars and counseling sessions about how to act in public. Police work wasn’t lollipops and teddy bears unless you worked in traffic safety or child abuse. It was harsh and nasty and cold. It was the front line and being on point. So personnel blew off steam, repackaging their hostility and angst in sexual innuendos and merciless teasing.

As long as it didn’t get out of hand, most women in the station house dealt with it in one of three ways: recognizing it for what it was and letting it go; showing the guys the line in the sand that they’d better not cross; or giving as good as they got. It was pretty much a tap dance any way you looked at it.

The dance was more extreme if you were a female cop, because suddenly you were challenging an army of alpha males on their home turf. They were already jockeying among themselves to be leader of the pack. They didn’t need any bitches getting in their way. Civilian women as a rule were less intimidating because their jobs were in admin support.

“You could see all that? ” Cratty asked Yolanda incredulously as she continued to needle him about what he had missed by boycotting Justin Timberlake.

Izzy hid her grin. Yolanda was giving him the business. After Izzy put on a pair of blue latex gloves, she laid a fresh evidence bag on the scale and zeroed it out. Now the scale would not include the weight of the bag when she checked in Cratty’s evidence.

She picked up her wire cutters and snicked off the zip-tie on the evidence bag.

She broke the red paper security sticker, reached in and gathered up the box.

Her stomach clenched; her skin felt too tight. Sweat broke out across her forehead. She wondered if she ought to excuse herself and head for the restroom. But she didn’t feel sick, exactly. Just…very tense.

“Iz?” Yolanda asked.

“I’m okay,” Izzy replied, and just as suddenly as the moment arrived, it left. “Really.” She smiled to prove it.

Yolanda glanced over Izzy’s shoulder and stabbed at the topmost page of the intake stack. “Where’d you go to school, J.C.? You spelled contraband wrong.”

“The streets are my halls of higher education,” Cratty shot back. “But give me the form back and—”

Yolanda exhaled impatiently. “By the book, Detective,” she informed him. “We’ll take it as is or you can redo the whole thing.”

Cratty huffed. Yolanda and Izzy smiled pleasantly at him, a wall of solidarity.

Izzy put the bag on the weight scale and peered at the digital readout. She said tactfully, “It’s a little light, John. I weigh the bag in at two hundred forty-eight grams.”