Chris raised his eyebrows as he looked down at her.
“You know, Hutchins, wounded officers are usually entitled to a few days off.”
“I’ve been wounded before,” Livvy said. “Worse than this.”
“But as long as you’re here, maybe you can find Brian Clifford and let him know he can go home and thank him appropriately. And don’t tell him anything about anything. He can read it in the papers.”
“Swell,” Livvy said. “I forgot all about him. I don’t suppose you…” She looked at his face, but he was already turning away. She thought she caught a half-smile.
“No, I suppose not,” she said. “Have a heart. I’m fifty-four. He’s a child.”
“You did say, didn’t you,” Chris said as he was sitting down, “that I should think of your face as a kind of armor?”
The Chief saved her from responding. “Hutchins. In here, now.
“Shut the door.”
Livvy sat in one of the straight-backed chairs and endured the Chief’s scrutiny. It lasted a little longer this morning, but even with her wounded leg she refused to squirm.
“Fatigue. By Saturday morning you’d been almost thirty hours without sleep. You did remarkably well before you got to the cottage. The clean-up crew that went in after you two and Jesse and the two bodies were out said that everyone else, even the guard you took down on the run and pulled into that stall had two solidly placed duoloads and no lasting damage. They may often be scuz but they’re still citizens.”
“Yes, sir,” Livvy said. There was nothing else she could say. She’d said it all in her first debriefing. Some barely recognizable bits of it were actually in the Chief’s official report.
“We could give you work – a lot of it – if you’d like to stay.”
“What does McGregor say? I mean, would we still be partnered?”
“McGregor. He
“Demanding? Ruthless is the word I’d choose,” Livvy said. She looked over her shoulder to where Chris was at his desk, checking, thumbing through some notes on a memopad. He wasn’t watching them. “I guess I can handle it.”
The Chief continued to regard her thoughtfully. “He also said you were a little clumsy in the field but that he’d become ‘accustomed to your face,’ whatever that means.”
“Clumsy?” she asked.
“Something about losing a shoe, or both shoes, at a critical point? It doesn’t matter. Oh, and I’ve decided the two of you can keep the dog, too.
“Go,” said the Chief, waving her towards the door. “Just try to keep them out of trouble.”
