finally free to leave. Sanchez was somewhere behind her. She stopped on the sidewalk to wait for him.
At three-thirty in the afternoon the entire block of Eighty-second Street from Columbus to Amsterdam was double-parked with police vehicles, marked and unmarked. Many, many years ago the police union had bargained for the right of officers to drive their cars from wherever they lived and park them around the precincts where they worked, instead of having to travel on public transportation. From time to time, the lack of police on the subways and buses during rush hours and the glut of illegal parking around precincts engendered a swell of bad feeling, followed by some token action. None was in force today.
In addition to the solid line of double-parked cars, uniforms swarmed all over the sidewalk. Several nodded to April and called out to her. News traveled fast. She’d upset a prominent case that had been cleared only the day before.
Since the ambulance doors had closed on the body of Milicia Honiger-Stanton, April had been questioned for many hours—despite a pounding headache and severe bruises—about the events that had occurred in the building on Second Avenue. For over two hours she had been isolated from Mike and Sergeant Joyce while each was questioned separately.
A mean-eyed Lieutenant she’d never seen before had a long list of doubts about her story. He kept asking why she had returned to the building today. His repetition of the question implied disbelief that she was following orders to take the dog there. How could that be the case? It was a day she wasn’t even on duty. She had been scheduled to take her Sergeant’s exam. What about that?
“I missed it, sir,” April told him.
The Lieutenant continued to scowl at her. Not for the first time she had been uncomfortably aware of how the stale air always hung heavy in questioning rooms. Sometimes innocent people panicked in the closed spaces, looking guilty under the pressure of having to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Over and over until they got it right. She was also reminded how hungry-making this kind of stress could be. Sometimes the questioners fed people to encourage disclosure. Sometimes they did not. They had not fed her.
“We know you missed the test, Detective.”
“I was working off the chart, but I
He laughed sourly. “Maybe in five years—if you’re telling the truth.”
April flushed. Five years might be the next time the test would be offered. That would be too late. By then, she’d already have Lieutenant’s pay, and it would be a demotion no one in their right mind would dream of taking. What a system. You could be
A lot of people in her position would not risk taking the test. She had the pay and the job. Getting the rank meant they could put her in uniform and send her out to supervise foot patrol officers in the Bronx. They could stick her with a desk job anywhere at all.
Maybe it was a power thing. Maybe it was a gender thing. Maybe it was an ethnic thing. All she was absolutely sure of was she wanted respect. She wanted the rank. She waited for the color to fade from her cheeks.
“I am telling the truth, and I’d like an opportunity to reschedule the exam now, sir.”
The Lieutenant’s fingers did a little dance on his knee as he thought it over. He personally might have nothing to do with it, but he scared her all the same because you never knew who had the juice to do what.
“We’ll see what can be arranged,” he said finally.
That’s what made her think she’d be out of there by dinner time. It occurred to her then that the only way to make it in this world was not by being honey for the bees, as her mother advised, but by fighting for her rights every step of the way.
Mike came up behind her, took her arm as if he had ownership, and steered her out of the crowd. “You did good work,
April forgot about the uniforms watching them from all sides. She squeezed his arm against her side. “Thanks for standing up for me in there.”
Sanchez grinned. “What’s a rabbi for?”
Oh, so now he was a rabbi again. “I don’t know what a rabbi’s good for. I’ve never been to church.” April laughed. “How about food? Are you good for food? That son of a bitch gave me a little water but not a thing to eat. Must have thought I deliberately set out this morning to murder a woman twice my size.”
“Fine. I’m good for food.” They strolled to Columbus and stopped on the corner. “What do you feel like eating?”
It was a loaded question. April hesitated. In five hours she would be meeting with Jason Frank to have dinner and Start working on the procedure to get Camille out of Bellevue, as well as appointing a guardian to see that she got the treatment she needed. April had promised Jason Chinese and was determined to pay for it.
The light turned green, turned red, turned green again while she thought about it. Finally she realized that what she wanted was to sit down with Mike and have a long, long talk about a whole lot of things: his dying wife, Maria, and his mother in the Bronx, what his hopes for the future were, and why he hadn’t taken the Lieutenant’s test a few months ago when Sergeant Joyce did. She wanted to breathe in his powerful spicy aftershave and … eat a burrito.
She glanced at him, a tiny smile teasing the corners of her rosebud mouth. Without a word, he nodded and steered her left for Mexican.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leslie Glass is the author of BURNING TIME, LOVING TIME, TO DO NO HARM, TRACKING TIME, JUDGING TIME, and STEALING TIME. She divides her time between New York and Sarasota.
Turn the page for an exciting preview of Leslie Glass’s suspense novel starring N.Y.P.D. detective April Woo and psychoanalyst Jason Frank!
LOVING TIME
Look for LOVING TIME by Leslie Glass at your favorite bookstore.
Raymond Cowles died of love on the evening of his thirty-eighth birthday. It happened on Sunday, October 31, after a long battle for his soul. As with many bitter conflicts, the end was abrupt and unexpected. In the same way as love had come on him unexpectedly and caught him by surprise after a lifetime of loneliness and despair, death crept up on Ray from behind without his even knowing that his release from ecstasy and anguish was at hand.
Since his twenties, Ray had flipped past the passages about love in the books he read. The movie versions of passion and lust seemed stupid and unbelievable to him. Love was supposed to happen to men like him when scantily dressed, big-breasted women flashed the look that said “I’ll do anything. Anything at all.”
Lorna had looked at him with those eyes; other women had, too. Many other women. Sometimes Raymond had even thought he’d seen it in the eyes of Dr. Treadwell. He never got it. Love to him was like a foreign language for which he had all the clues but couldn’t figure out the meaning. And he had learned to live without it as his own personal cross to bear, like a dyslexic who could never really read, or a patient with a terminal illness that wouldn’t go all the way and end his misery for a long, long time.
Until six months ago, Raymond Cowles thought he had all his problems solved. He had made work the focus of his life, tried to find the same satisfactions in his personal life other people experienced in theirs. He wanted to feel what other people felt, and when he couldn’t, he acted as if he did.
