Judging Time

Mike shrugged. It was too early for speculation.

Saul pointed to the door of the restaurant. 'Your girlfriend's in there.' He moved away from two guys with a body bag and stretcher.

'Huh?'

'Woo, April, is the OIC. Didn't anyone tell you?' Saul pulled a grimy handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his nose.

'No. No one told me a thing.' Mike shook off the snow collected all over him and slicked back his hair. He stamped his feet and headed for the door, thinking this was indeed his lucky day. He'd asked for relief from the piles of boring paperwork due on his last case, cleared a few days ago, and here he was, getting it. He'd wanted to see April and here he was seeing her. April was always talking about luck and how it could be changed by a person's behavior. He must be living right.

Inside the restaurant most of the lights were off, but Mike could make out a kind of Caribbean theme. Palm trees, whitewashed boards, crudely carved, brightly painted fish on the walls. Fan-backed chairs around tables with wicker bases. Overhead a dozen ceiling fans were ghostly still. The large bar was dark and the room was empty except for April, a black man who wasn't Liberty, and an ADA Mike had once worked with named Dean Kiang. The three of them were in deep conversation that stopped abruptly when he came out of the shadows.

'Hi,' he said. 'Mind if I join you?'

He had the satisfaction of seeing the young assistant district attorney freeze into one of those Chinese masks of wariness he'd seen so often on April. And April clearly hadn't been expecting him. The woman of his dreams almost fell off her chair at the sound of his voice.

An hour later they sat in the red Camaro in front of the now locked and dark Liberty's Restaurant, waiting for the car to warm up. The crime scene tapes were still up around the garden, but the plastic tent and the bodies of the victims were gone. So was Hagedorn with the green unit and the Chinese ADA, who had not seemed happy when Mike sat down at the table uninvited. April finished telling Mike everything she'd found out about the case before he'd arrived. She closed her notebook with a cold smile that tried to cover a bad taste she couldn't deny was bitterness. She wasn't even three hours into this difficult investigation and already the cavalry had galloped in to take it away from her. Mike was good, very good, but she couldn't imagine anything more annoying than having him there to second-guess her.

If Homicide had sent anybody but Mike, her desire for independence and the need to prove herself would have outweighed any other consideration. She wouldn't exactly have obstructed, but she would have revealed only the major facts and kept the details to herself. After all, who knew at this point what was going to be important in this case and what was not? Why spill too many beans and confuse people? Sometimes a stupid detective became invested in a certain bean too fast because it offered the easiest outcome, then tried to bully everybody else into seeing things his way. April had handled everything just right, she'd called an ADA instantly, and she was gratified that the one she got was Chinese. Dean Kiang was good-looking, seemed very professional, and she'd been pleased at the team they made. Then Mike had to stick his nose in and raise the tension level by claiming her loyalty. .

'I'm kind of surprised to see one of you people here in the middle of the night,' she said after a pause in which Mike didn't thank her for coming through without an argument, or for telling him the story on what they had so far. 'Isn't that kind of unusual?'

He raised the eyebrow that was crooked with bum scars from the previous June, when he'd jumped in front of April and the hostage they'd been trying to liberate just before an explosion that almost killed all three of them. Whenever he raised that eyebrow, April felt a thousand times less worthy than she was. She felt double and maybe triple stupid in ways she didn't begin to understand. Loyalty and love had gotten her all mixed up. And now they weren't even on the same team.

'What is this 'your people and my people,' querida?' Now both of Mike's dark eyebrows shot up.

April's cold fingers became still in her lap as she wrestled with the problem. Sanchez glanced at her hands speculatively. 'I thought we were all one people,' ' he murmured, resisting the impulse to take one hand and squeeze it.

Outside, the snow was beginning to falter. The flakes were smaller, not so puffy and dry. It seemed to be warming up as suddenly as it had gotten cold;

it might even turn to rain soon. The wipers squeaked over melting snow on the windshield.

With a shrug April relented. 'Sorry, I didn't mean to be territorial.'

Mike laughed. 'Yes, you did. Always have to do everything yourself, don't you?' he teased.

She opened her mouth, then closed it. Only a few weeks ago, when Mike had been in a similar position in a precinct squad, he'd been every bit as territorial about their cases. But why argue? She breathed in the familiar cologne that permeated his clothes and even the upholstery of his car. Mike's perfume—one couldn't get away with calling it anything else—was unlike anything April had ever smelled before or since. On the surface it was sweet and spicy, but underneath it had a pungent sort of kick that kept her off balance as long as he was around.

In the early days of their relationship this almost palpable aroma used to give April a headache. The squad room of the Two-O had reeked of it. In fact, it was Mike's smell that had first gotten her attention. She hadn't known where the powerful essence originated. Then she realized that when Sanchez wasn't around for a while it would disappear, only to return when he did. After that she noticed the pirate's smile with which he studied her and his interesting hair that was different from Asian hair. Mike rolled up his sleeves when he worked, revealing the hair on his arms. He had a fine layer of hair on the backs of his hands, and most likely on his chest, too. In spite of the prevailing taste among April's relatives on the subject, hair on a man's body did not seem altogether barbaric to her.

Jimmy Wong, April's last lover, had one lone hair on his chest growing from a mole near his left nipple, had never smelled of anything but garlic and beer. He'd never said he loved her, or called her darling. He had enjoyed torturing her by telling her anybody who was her partner was guaranteed to die in a shootout since he ranked her the worst shot in the entire department. Jimmy didn't approve of ambition in women and went so far as to threaten not to marry her if she made sergeant. Lucky for her she'd broken up with him before his threat could be tested. In addition to all this, a five-days' growth of beard yielded a very sparse display on his face. Why she'd ever liked him in the first place was now a mystery to her.

In comparison, Mike encouraged her to enjoy life, to advance in her career as far as she could, and called her darling in Spanish in front of everybody whenever he felt like it. His thick and luxuriant mustache was long enough to skirmish with his top lip and often quivered with emotion, causing palpitations in her stomach. During moments of deep concentration he sucked pensively on the ends of it. After April had started working with him, she learned that he was also the best detective she knew.

'You have a problem with my being here?' he asked now.

'Uh-uh. It's just your day off ... so I wondered who called you,' she said.

'You're in my thoughts, so you must have,' he murmured. That sounded good to him so he smiled. This was going to be a really big case, after all, and no one liked being left out of big cases. 'Oh, come on, you're glad to see me, admit it.'

She shook her head, didn't want to.

'Fine, don't admit it,' he said cheerfully, with every appearance of confidence in his ability to win all his battles with her in the end.

'I could handle this myself,' April insisted.

Mike hummed some Spanish love song. At her level of mastery of the Spanish language April was able to make out the words somos novios, which mean 'we are boyfriend/girlfriend. We are lovers.' She bit back a smart remark. They were not lovers. They were not engaged. They were hardly even speaking to each other. Then he seemed to remember the awful task in front of them and fell silent as he put the car in gear and pulled out without spinning the tires.

4

The Park Century was twelve blocks north on Fifty-seventh Street. Mike and April headed up Eighth Avenue without speculating whether Frederick Douglass Liberty would be at home to receive them at four