“I don’t kid.”
“But it looks brand-new,” the kid protested. “It’s just last year’s. It’s not even a year old.” He sat down without being invited.
“It’s two years old, but I spent a year customizing it. Yeah, I guess it is brand-new.” Troland poured half a bottle of ketchup on his plate.
“Stretched and lowered, huh.” The kid watched him, eyes narrowed.
Troland’s plate became a sea of red.
“Hey, you really like that stuff.”
“Yeah.” Troland dipped his hand into it and licked his fingers. “Tastes better than blood.”
The boy laughed.
“The bike’s for sale,” Troland said flatly. He could tell by the way the kid walked he had money, probably even went to college. Poor kids didn’t look like that. “Want it?”
“Well, sure I want it. Who wouldn’t?”
Troland lifted the plate and stuck his tongue in the ketchup.
The kid watched him uncomfortably. “Uh, how much do you want for it?”
“You can’t afford it, out of your range.”
“I got enough out of my dad to buy a Fat Bob,” the kid said indignantly.
Troland nodded. That meant he had eleven grand. “This is better than a Fat Bob.”
The kid didn’t even pause. “Let’s have a look,” he said.
A few minutes later he was squatting in front of it, looking the Harley over, touching it here and there, smelling it even.
Troland answered all his questions in a dead voice. Yeah it was a real nice bike. He handed over the keys and let the long-haired freak go for a ride.
“You okay?” the kid asked when he came back fifteen minutes later.
Troland’s face was frozen behind his sunglasses. He had hardly moved during the whole process.
“You got a problem?”
“Uh, no,” the kid said nervously. “You just seem kinda—I don’t know.” He paused. “Ah, is it hot?” he asked finally.
Troland reached in his pocket for the registration and the receipt from the bike shop in San Diego where he had bought it. Two and a half hours later he was on a bus, heading back to Pacific Beach with the kid’s check in his wallet. Now he had plenty of money. All the way home, and deep into the night, Willy’s voice told him he did good.
15
“Yes, New York is still waiting,” April said as patiently as she could.
In San Diego they couldn’t say Woo. When April said, “This is Detective Woo from New York,” they said “Who?” She refused to play games.
“Never mind. Just tell Sergeant Coconut Grove it’s the detective from NYPD.”
Next to her Sergeant Sanchez laughed.
April lowered her eyes. Now he was not only staring at her, he was listening to her conversations, too.
Sanchez sat at the desk in front of hers. To stare at her properly, he had to sit sideways with his back to the window. If she sat facing the front of her desk and looked up just a tiny bit, she looked right at the middle section of his body. If she tilted her head just a tiny bit to the right she saw the upper part of him, his chest and shoulders and head.
His phone, like hers, was often plugged into his ear, but he sat leaning back in his chair, with his feet on one of the open drawers, looking at her. This was very disturbing for many reasons. One was that everybody knew it. And when people in a precinct knew things, they teased.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” people said when Sanchez was out in the field, and someone was looking for him.
It drove her crazy.
Just now the room was full of people. There was a black guy carrying on in the pen. They’d just brought him in. There wasn’t a mark on him; his shirt was tucked in. No one was even near him, and already he was complaining loudly about police brutality. Must be twenty-five people in the room, and no one was paying any attention to him. They always said that.
It was hard to concentrate with so many things going on. She was trying to talk to San Diego, and something had happened in Central Park so the room was filling up. She hadn’t been called in on it, so she didn’t even know what it was. And right in the middle of it, while she was waiting for her contact in the San Diego Police Department to get on the phone, Sanchez was looking at her so that anybody looking at him would know exactly what he was thinking.
She wished she could handle these things the way Sergeant Joyce did. Sergeant Joyce had already passed her test for Lieutenant and was waiting for her number to come up to get the promotion. She was only thirty-six, Irish, with wanna-be yellow hair cut like April’s. But she was tougher and had a sharp tongue. She could swing her hips and not look stupid, make a joke back when someone flirted with her. She was decisive and powerful. Sergeant Joyce would never get stuck lowering her eyes like some caricature of the demure Oriental.
April tapped her finger on the desk and switched her thoughts to Jimmy Wong, with whom she had worked on a case once, and got to know when she was in the 5th. That was two years ago. Jimmy Wong would never let anybody know he was interested in her. Never in a million years, not for a ten-million-dollar lottery. He just wouldn’t. He was on Night Watch in Brooklyn now, which meant he went out on whatever calls came in from the whole borough from eleven o’clock at night on.
April worked some days, some nights, but in the precincts the night shift of the detective squad ended at eleven. Jimmy Wong said he was waiting for a promotion to ask her to marry him, but she doubted he would ask her if she was transferred back to the 5th and got hers first. It would not stop her, though. Sergeant Joyce’s police officer husband divorced her, and left her with two small children, when she went into the Academy. April wanted to be like her. Sergeant Woo, BA, MA. Some day. She wasn’t sure she wanted to marry Jimmy Wong anyway.
“Yes, I’m holding,” she told San Diego, looking down so she would not have to make eye contact with Sanchez.
April had a list of things she knew and did not know about Sanchez. She also had a list of things she didn’t like about him. First and foremost she did not like being aware of him. And she could not help being aware of him. He draped his body in front of her and used some kind of after-shave that was very powerful. He didn’t just wear it on special occasions, either. It was there every day.
Once when she was in a Cosmetics Plus store, she smelled all the men’s cologne trying to find which one it was. She wasn’t much of a detective; she couldn’t find it. But maybe she wasn’t a bad detective. Maybe the chemistry of his body changed the smell so she couldn’t identify it once it was on him. She didn’t like thinking about the chemistry of his body. But she couldn’t help that, either. It was in front of her all the time.
She had given some thought to the fact that different kinds of men had different smells. This was the sort of thing no one would say, and she probably shouldn’t even think, but she thought about it anyway, and wondered what effect things like hair and smell had on a long-term relationship like marriage.
Caucasian men had a sour smell. When she was little, she had been told this was because they ate cheese. Asians don’t eat cheese. When she walked in a crowd in Chinatown, she could smell garlic coming out of the pores of Asians the way sour sweat did in other kinds of people.
Sanchez smelled so sweet she couldn’t tell what his true smell was like. The worst thing was that she had gotten used to it, so she knew when he was in the room without having to see him. The sweetness was kind of comforting, and she missed it when it wasn’t there.
Her thoughts shifted to the after-shave she had given Jimmy for Christmas. It was called Devin, was very expensive, and had a citrusy aroma. Jimmy made a face when he opened it and said it smelled like urine. He said he’d never use it. But after he had broken the cellophane on the box, she couldn’t take it back. It gave her a bad
