Loving Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

supervision of one cop over another could have several meanings, April knew. It could mean her work wasn’t up to standard and needed watching. Which it didn’t. It could mean Mike was her rabbi, showing her the ropes. Which he thought he was. Or it could mean he was just constantly hitting on her. Which he also was.
    April hadn’t liked the arrangement. She didn’t like being second-guessed or watched, didn’t like being close to anyone or involved. Cops who were too involved made mistakes in the field. They got hurt. Mike had jumped in front of her gun once to save her life. She could have accidentally shot him. It still upset her to think about it. He knew as well as she did that involvement could mess up judgment, could be lethal. And still he worked pretty hard at involving her.
    “I’m nostalgic already,” she muttered, buttoning her jacket.
    Mike shot her a glance. “You mean that?”
    “Well, it’s not so bad here. Bad would be Brooklyn. Staten Island. Lots of things worse than being here.”
    They found the car in the police lot in a tight spot, squeezed inside carefully, and banged the doors shut at the same time.
    “Why didn’t you just get the pay, then?” he demanded.
    “You know why.” April slammed the car into reverse and made a number of tight maneuvers that almost resulted in disaster for two blue-and-whites and the Commander’s navy Ford Taurus.
    “Hey, chill out. It’s not the end of the world.”
    “I’m fine.”
    “Yeah, then why wreck the Captain’s car?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe I made a mistake.” It was the first time April had said it, maybe even the first time she had thought it. But now that the truth was out, it hit her hard. “I liked being a detective. I mean I
really
liked it.”
    She pulled out into the street and jerked to a halt, narrowly missing a speeding bicycle messenger. “Sorry,” she muttered as Mike’s lowered head hit the dashboard.
    “Get out. I’m driving,” he snapped.
    “I’m sorry.” April leaned over solicitously. “Are you all right?”
    “No, you nearly killed that kid. Get out.” Mike’s Zapata mustache quivered with outrage as he smoothed back his fine head of hair with both hands, checking his profile in the mirror.
    “I didn’t even get close to him,” April protested. “Get off my case.”
    She’d said it a thousand times.
Back off. Leave me alone
. What did she want with a vain, sweet-smelling, overheated, hairy, smiling non-Chinese person who would not stop calling her “darling” in Spanish no matter who was around to hear him? She wasn’t his darling.
    “Fine.” Now he probed a nonexistent bruise on his forehead. “Fine. You fucked up, and you want me to stay off the case. Fine, I’ll stay off the case.”
    “
I
fucked up? I made the list, didn’t I? You know how many good people didn’t make the list?”
    April pulled out into the street carefully and stopped on Columbus at the red light.
    “Fine,” Mike said a fourth time. “You wanted the rank more than the pay. You wanted a command of your own some day. Huh? Was that it? Maybe you like me so much you wanted to get away before you did something your
mother
wouldn’t approve of. How about that?”
    “Okay, you win. You can drive.” April unfastened her seat belt and flung open the door.
    “Get back in here. I don’t want to drive. It’s only two fucking blocks.”
    “Damn,” April muttered, slapping her seat belt back on. Yes, yes, and yes. She’d wanted the rank. A lot of cops didn’t give a damn. They got promoted to detective and made it to first grade. They got a lieutenant’s pay and were happy without the rank. But she wanted the rank. The catch-22 was this: To get the rank you had to take the test. If you were a detective and scored high enough to make sergeant, you lost your job as detective because each advancement in rank meantgoing back into uniform and out on the streets again as a supervisor.
    So, by forcing herself to study for and