Page 93 of No Cap
“If you two don’t get your shit together,” I said between clenched teeth.
The badge on my hip was digging into her ass, and before the woman could retaliate for Ellodie’s words, or Hollis’s laughter, I stepped out from behind her and allowed her to take me in. The gun on my hip. The badge on the opposite side.
Her posturing was quick to deflate.
“Yes, sir.”
Then she was gone.
When we were out in the parking lot, I waited with Hollis.
“What are you doing?” she asked as she waved goodbye to Ellodie.
“Making sure both of you get into your cars without getting into any fights.” I sighed.
Hollis chuckled, but waited while we made sure Ellodie got to her car—which was funny enough a Toyota Corolla like Hollis’s, but ran much rougher.
The moment she was out of sight, I helped Hollis into the seat with her ice cream, and we drove back to her apartment.
“Since you have the day off tomorrow,” I said as I carried the groceries through the front of the building. “How do you feel about coming over to my place?”
She bent over, and suddenly the stupid little lights on her Crocs that I thought were just decorative turned on, lighting up the path in front of her.
It was by far the cutest thing I’d ever seen in my life.
She went up the steps, lighting the way as she went, and she answered. “As long as you have a bed that I can melt into for hours on end.”
I thought about my apartment, then laughed. “Yeah, that’s about all I have.”
It was as I was gathering up my files on the coffee table that she stopped where she was beside me, her eyes narrowed. “That.”
She pointed at the dead woman from a few nights previous. “I’ve seen her recently.”
“On the news,” I muttered, pissed about how her photo had been plastered everywhere by the two asshole employees.
“No, not there,” she said as she studied it. “I think at the hospital.”
My brows rose. “When?”
Hollis tapped her cheek. “Let me think about it?”
I did as she asked and we gathered her overnight bag, two pints of ice cream, and headed toward my place.
I was in desperate need of washing my clothes, had a stack of things that I needed to check out with the builder tomorrow, and a desperate need to fall into bed for eight hours after sleeping so shitty for three nights in a row.
It was just as well that she was thinking away beside me, because I got two phone calls back-to-back as we were driving the twenty minutes to my place.
One from a detective in another precinct with a possible connection on my train death, and the other from my lawyer friend.
After the assurance that she’d take a look at the papers Hollis had been served, we hung up.
“Still over there thinkin’, darlin’?” I teased.
She looked over at me, then popped the top on the carton of cookie dough ice cream and started to lick it.
My dick thickened in my pants.
“I don’t think it was at work,” she said as she frowned. “I swear all of my cases this week were car wrecks. But…”