‘No. Just give me two minutes.’
Not sensing the danger he was in, the valet continued: ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t park here. You’re blocking the-’
‘I said go back into your hole. Now!’
As the man skedaddled to the hotel entrance, muttering to himself, Laura got out of the car.
‘Come on, Cal. We got places to be.’
She said this so matter-of-factly, as though their disagreement was over something as trivial as whose turn it was to drive. For a moment, Doyle couldn’t help wondering why he was the only one feeling there was a problem here. He stepped around the car.
‘Listen to me, Laura. This is serious, okay?’
‘Callie, you’re making this out-’
‘No! Listen. To me, it’s serious, even if you don’t give a shit. And quit calling me Callie. The name’s Cal, okay?’
She rolled her eyes again, like she was a teenager being chastised by her father for staying out late, and who has no intention of sticking to the rules he’s laying down.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Cal. Whatever.’
He started ticking items off with his fingers. ‘First of all, it’s bad enough a story like this is going around the job. I’m not talking about the grunts: they’ll have their laughs and be done with it. But something like this gets back to the brass, then we got some explaining to do.’
‘Cal-’
He cut her off by jabbing another finger in front of her face. ‘Second of all, and more importantly, I have a family to consider. And before you start mouthing off about Rachel again, you should know that I love her and I have no intention of doing anything that would hurt her. Ever. Whatever you and Danny have between you, that’s your business. You want to hurt him, go ahead. Just leave me out of it. The heat you caused between me and Rachel last time was bad enough. I don’t want to go through that again. Point three-’
‘Last time? What last time?’
‘Last Christmas. You do remember that, don’t you?’
A dreamy smile appeared on Laura’s face. ‘Oh, yeah. Christmas.’
They had been at a party at a fellow cop’s house in Queens. Danny and Rachel were there too. Laura got drunk within the first half-hour. Kept making suggestive remarks to Doyle, pinching his ass — that type of thing. Rachel witnessed much of it in stony-faced silence. Danny seemed never to be in the same room. The last straw was the kiss: Laura with a sprig of mistletoe in one hand, the other clasped behind Doyle’s neck in an embrace that lasted far too long. By the time Doyle had recovered enough from the shock to push Laura away, Rachel had disappeared and gone home. The nights that followed had been pretty lonely ones for Doyle.
‘Point three,’ Doyle repeated, and then got cut off again when he heard voices at his side and saw that the valet had returned with a balding man in a pinstripe suit who was making threats to call the police if the car wasn’t moved.
Doyle dug into his pocket, pulled out his wallet and flashed his shield. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Call the cops. And then we’ll come by here and arrest you for possession of an illegal comb-over.’
As the pair retreated to consider their next move, Doyle tried again with Laura. ‘Point three is maybe we should think about calling it a day.’
It took a moment for this to penetrate. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I think tomorrow morning I’m going to speak to the boss about working with another partner.’
‘Are you serious? Why would you want to do that?’
‘Have you been listening to a word I’ve just said? You’ve gone too far, Laura. You’re getting too. . intense.’
‘Intense? Really? Because this is all on me, right? I mean, you would never throw me any signals of a less- than-professional nature, would you? You would never make any comments about my figure or my hair. Nobody would ever catch you asking what color panties I’m wearing today, would they?’
There was a silence while Doyle chewed on his answer. He
‘Maybe I said some things I shouldn’t have. But you’ve taken it to another level, Laura. You’ve endangered my job and my marriage.’
‘You go to the boss for another partner, and you endanger
Doyle started moving back around to the driver’s side. ‘Get in the car, Laura. Let’s do some work.’
‘Fuck you, Doyle.’
This stopped him in his tracks. It wasn’t the words: she was a cop, and cops use expletives all the time. It was Laura’s tone: it had a disturbing, menacing quality to it that he’d never heard from her before.
He looked across the roof of the Crown Vic at her; she glared back at him.
‘You take this to the lieutenant,’ she said, ‘make me look bad like that, and I’ll really start to let everyone know what’s been going on between us. See what your precious Rachel thinks about them apples.’
‘What?’ Doyle said. ‘Is that a threat, Laura? Are you threatening me?’
She remained silent, and Doyle started to retrace his steps back to her side of the car.
‘Is that what I’m hearing, Laura? Are you trying to blackmail me?’
He kept walking until he was inches away from her, astonished that he’d never seen this side of her before. In a heartbeat she had switched from partner to perp. He could quite easily have spun her around, slapped on some cuffs, and dragged her ass to jail. A quick tune-up in some quiet alley was not out of the question either, the way he felt.
And then, in another beat, it was as if a second button was pressed in her head. She suddenly softened, and the burning died in her pupils.
‘What are we doing?’ she said. ‘Look at us! How crazy is this? Jesus Christ, Cal, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any of that shit. Really. You just got me so. . worked up, you know? Forget what I just said. Please. I was just lashing out. Come on, let’s get out of here.’
She slid onto the passenger seat, flashing him a smile that seemed to carry no warmth. Doyle watched her every move, feeling that he no longer knew this woman, no longer understood her, that he was no longer capable of anticipating her next move. It was one of the most uncomfortable sensations he’d ever had.
‘It’ll be okay,’ she said. ‘Come on, Cal. Relax. Everything’s just fine. Get back in the car. You want me to drive?’
Doyle was frozen to the spot. He had been ready for a fight, and now it had been taken away from him. He didn’t know how to react to an enemy who worked like that, who was that unpredictable.
For a few seconds, Laura had let her dark side out, and now she was trying to cover up, to pretend that it was uncharacteristic. But it had been there, unmistakably so. And it had been scary in its concentrated spitefulness.
Wondering whether he needed to call in an exorcist, Doyle returned once more to the driver’s side and got behind the wheel. He looked at her long and hard, searched her face for answers. But all he got was a goofy smile.
‘Chill out, Callie,’ she said. ‘It’s hormones or something. No big thing. Let’s roll.’ She opened the glove compartment, pulled out a small bag. ‘Here, have some M amp;Ms.’
Feeling like he’d just teleported to a parallel world, Doyle put the car into gear and drove off. For now, he had nothing to say, nothing that would help to make any sense of this situation. But he guessed it wasn’t over.
‘We’ll talk about it later,’ he said. ‘Okay?’
She tossed candy into her mouth, nodded her head playfully. ‘Sure, Callie.’
As he drove, he tried to turn his mind to the job, to give it something rooted in the real world to work on. But his subconscious had other ideas. It kept showing him reminders of Laura’s face, her words, of a few minutes ago, and of how unbelievably vindictive she’d been. It kept tossing out imagined images of Rachel, crying and screaming at him, asking him why he would do such things. And it kept interrupting with questions like, So now that you know she’s a crazy-ass bunny-boiler, what are you going to do about it?
