1
A New Beat
Thirty-one days into her new job with the Savannah Police Department, Amber Cross screwed up. Not the kind of screw up that gets a person fired, or demoted, or reprimanded, but the kind that causes the police chief to seek out menial tasks to assign to the person. For a few days, it was walking two blocks north to the Ashford Tea Company to get iced coffee for the chief. That was a nightmare. With the humidity just above boiling pea soup, she’d often return to her desk covered in a sheen of sweat. Thankfully, someone higher up suggested that such orders could be misconstrued as sexist and borderline harassment, so new chores had been dreamed up to keep her busy and out of the way of “more seasoned” officers.
Three days before her twenty-fourth birthday, Fat Rick—she didn’t give him that nickname, that’s just what everyone in the department called him—steepled his thick, sausage-like fingers on the front of her battleship gray desk. Amber was careful not to look directly at his expansive stomach for fear that one of the buttons might fly loose at any second, straining under his tight barrel of a belly. A red stain smeared across the bottom of his 1990’s era paisley tie told her that his lunch had probably been pizza or spaghetti or maybe something drenched in ketchup. Whatever he’d eaten had presumably dripped. Or he might’ve wiped his mouth on his tie. Either scenario was plausible with Fat Rick.
“Yo ‘Ber,” he said, chewing on a toothpick. “Chief’s got a new assignment for you.”
Ber. Everyone here called her that. Not Amber. Not Officer Cross. Hell, not even just Cross, which she would’ve preferred immensely to the shortened version of her name that sounded like a sharp object stuck under a saddle. It was like the men in the department—all twelve of them—just couldn’t handle her not being “one of the guys” and insisted on giving her a flat, non-feminine moniker.
Fat Rick, or officially, Detective Rick Thompson, was not directly her boss. He was in charge of the Central Precinct, which included some of the rougher parts of town. He often had a shooting or a robbery to deal with, along with the occasional drug bust and the rarer sexual assault. His beat was like an episode of Law & Order, but with Spanish moss, antebellum architecture, and a bunch of old marble fountains. Being the head of the most difficult precinct in Savannah gave him a sense of seniority—and truth be told, he probably had dealt with more really bad guys than most during his long tenure on the force. But, even with all of that, Amber had been hired as a part of the K.E.Y.S. initiative. The Keep Everything Yours Safe program often rolled out holiday safety reminders, children in hot cars warnings, bicycle security tips, and other yawn-inducing news items. Amber’s job was to update the website, print flyers, engage on social media, and very occasionally, report to the scene involving any K.E.Y.S. violations.
At least, that’s what she’d been doing until … the screw up.
It has been said that the first citation an officer writes in her career, will often be the most difficult. After that, they’re like a Hallmark Christmas movie—all pretty much the same. Amber had been reluctant to issue her first ticket, even when the offense was obvious. Like all new officers, she was put on parking meters, school zones, church exit crowd control, parking lots, and pet poop patrol at various apartment buildings or parks. She passed over more than one pup’s owner for leaving an offensive pile in the grass.
“Ber,” Chief Decker had said to her on her third day, “If you don’t ticket somethin’ today, I’m going to recommend you be reassigned. I need men … and women … who can effectively police this town. Do you understand what I’m gettin’ at?”
Felton Decker reminded Amber of Morgan Freeman with a little Samuel L. Jackson (or was it Ving Rhames?) mixed in for good measure. He was well over six-foot-four, shiny bowling ball bald head, and wore a thick black caterpillar of a mustache on his lip. He always sat on the edge of his desk, or in his squeaky, mahogany chair so he wouldn’t tower over her.
“I do, sir.”
“Just pick somethin’ easy. Go find an expired meter. Don’t even have to be anybody there,” he said, raising both hands in a surrender gesture. “Stick a ticket on the windshield and disappear. Yeah?”
“Yes, sir.”
She had left the office with the intention of doing exactly that, but as she approached the intersection of East Congress and Habersham, a long, beige Cadillac barreled around her, clipped the mirror on her cruiser, shearing it clean off. The ancient boat of a car screeched through the turn onto Congress exceeding the posted limit by at least twenty miles per hour.
“Bingo,” Amber said aloud.
She flipped the switch to turn on her siren and gave chase. She had the offender pulled over by the time they reached Franklin Square and was fighting to calm her racing pulse. Picking up her radio, she called in the license plate number.
She made her first mistake in her haste to get the ticket written and hand it to the speeder. She got out of the car before the station could send her the plate info.
She made her second mistake at the driver’s window.
“May I see your license and registration, please?” She heard the nervous quavering in her voice and thought for a split second she might throw up.
The man in the car smiled, his magnificent teeth practically glowing from his tan face. He licked his lips and she saw his eyes flick down to her name,
