Page 63 of Just Friends

“Probably.”

“You’ve only ever picked up girls for one-night-stands.”

Everything inside him tensed. Rebecca would want to leave and never speak to him again. Weasel couldn’t even look at her when he nodded. “Until you,” he said hoping that feeble little fact would keep him from getting his sorry ass dumped. Holding his breath, he waited, but she said nothing for a while.

“Why are you all the way over there?” she asked.

“What?”

“You’re usually next to me on the couch.”

Relief flooded through him, and he nearly fell off the couch. “You’re not repulsed?”

“It really wouldn’t be fair of me to judge you. I’m no saint. Besides, I’m hungover and tired. I’d just like to curl up here.”

“I’ll get you a drink,” he jumped up and hurried into the kitchen. He couldn’t believe the words out of her mouth. Grabbing a bottle of Gatorade, he returned to her twisting the lid off. “Hydrate,” he said sliding under the blanket and up next to her. He needed to get his arms around her but waited until she’d taken a long drink. She curled up against him, and he didn’t ever want to let go.

Twenty-One

After ten straight days of twenty-four-hour work, Weasel had enough. There’d been three drug dealers and a handful of buyers that he helped Ty arrest. Then a barroom brawl with nineteen people injured where he’d spent half the night interviewing people at the hospital. Then a domestic violence case where the victim was having second thoughts, and a raccoon terrorizing small dogs in a neighborhood.

Animal control was unresponsive because they were in jail from the drug bust. Forced to work with Dotson again, and be nice, to catch the damn animal because the chief had forbidden him to kill it. Unfortunately for the raccoon, he bit Dotson, and as funny as Weasel found it, he had to put it down.

Weasel worked around the clock because Nick, his counterpart, became incapacitated with the flu. Nick had struggled to work for three days while sick when he shouldn’t have and had ended up in the emergency room dehydrated with a high fever and delirious. The bags under his eyes had bags of their own. Weasel became perpetually pissed off and ready to shoot the next asshole who broke the law. It didn’t help that he’d only seen Rebecca twice in ten days. Once he was in Ellis Diner for lunch and the second time was two minutes in the parking lot behind Ellis after her shift. Weasel was going crazy to get his hands on her again.

The call came in to dispatch around ten forty-five. Weasel was still at his desk finishing up his reporting for the day. His radio sounded, and he responded.

“Anderson. Chatter from the EMT’s of a deceased male at Valley Skilled Care and Rehab Center,” the dispatcher announced.

“Foul play suspected?”

“Nope, but the patient’s last name is Gilbert, thought you might wanna know.”

Shit.“I’m responding to the scene.” Weasel grabbed his laptop and was in the car and across town in record time. It’d been two weeks since he’d been there and spent time with Stanley.

Standing over the body, he worked his jaw, to not grind his back teeth into powder. The administrator’s explanation lacked any real detail, only that the patient had stopped breathing on his own. But the worst of it was the fact that no one on shift bothered to notice for several hours. She didn’t see that as a big deal.

“Mr. Gilbert was a stroke patient; these things happen in patients with long-term neurological damage,” she said. “There isn’t anything to investigate. It’s an unfortunate tragedy.”

“That’s my decision, ma’am.”

“You’re family, so that’s a conflict of interest.”

“I’m not family.” The last time he’d seen Stanley, he declared an intention to marry his daughter. Stanley had expressed his blessing with a nod and patted Weasel on the arm. Now he had to break her heart with the news her dad was dead. “But I will turn my report over to Detective Nick Collins, and he’ll investigate. The M.E. will look at this.”

???

Cold wind burst through as Rebecca pulled open her apartment door to find Weasel there in the middle of the night, as usual, unannounced.

“You know, I’ve heard that most men just text, ‘you up’ first for a booty call.” She stepped aside for him to enter and something was off, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. He didn’t smile when he closed the door. “What’s wrong?”

Weasel took her by the hand and moved to pull her to the couch. “Come sit down.”

“What’s happened? You’re scaring me.” He peered down at her with such tender compassion in his eyes that she almost lost it right then. “Harlan,” she snapped using his real name, something she reserved for more intimate moments.

“Sweetie, I just came from the rehab center.”

“Why?”