Sons of the City Read Online Free PDF Page A

doin'?”
    “Sure,” I said. “You guys are restoring my faith in the Police Department.”
    They laughed and went back to work on the stickers. It was funny—with the four of us standing there talking, you could almost forget that Little Napoleon was in the car. I gazed at the line of row houses across the street, and thought that if anyone looked out their window, they’d just see four cops bullshitting in the middle of an empty supermarket parking lot.
    Steve had used up all his stickers, and now was turning his attention to me. “You may be interested to know,” he said, “that Michelle’s on her way over here.”
    “Your sister?” I asked, as casually as I could. Nick and Buster were trying not to smile.
    “Yeah,” said Steve. “You know she’s in the Twentieth tonight, right?”
    “No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
    “Ortiz went home sick. We were short a sergeant, so they called Michelle over from the Twelfth.” That was a neighboring district, and we often used each other’s sergeants.
    “What, when did this happen?” I asked. “I was just talking to Sammy, he didn’t say anything.”
    “Couple of minutes ago,” said Steve. “Michelle just paged me, she said Donna’s showing her around the district. I told them to stop by here.”
    “You want her to see how we do things in the Twentieth, huh?”
    Steve smiled. “So, you going to ask her out?”
    I gave him a blank look, like I didn’t know what he was talking about. Nick and Buster had big smiles now, they were just having a good old time.
    I was a little nervous, I hadn’t counted on seeing Michelle again so soon. We had met only three nights ago, at a retirement party for a detective from Central. It was held at River Fever, a huge club down in Essington that overlooked the Delaware. A real pickup place—the dance floors were jammed with hungry-eyed guys and girls from across the river in Jersey. But the retirement party had reserved the outdoor deck, which was actually pretty nice. It had a bamboo bar, and palm leaves, and a warm breeze coming off the river.
    Everyone at the party was standing around, talking shop, and someone introduced me to Michelle. We just started talking, and by the end of the evening we were at a table by ourselves, in the dark, away from the others. It was one of those deals where you feel you’ve known the person forever, where everything just seems so natural and relaxed.
    Like her brother and father, Michelle had the family’s dark eyebrows and high cheekbones, and blue eyes that were so alive they just seemed to talk to you. Her face was narrow, like a model’s, but it wasn’t hard, it seemed to have a gentleness to it. And she had shoulder-length brown hair that was so luxurious it looked like something out of a shampoo commercial.
    She told me she had just made sergeant the week before, and was starting her new assignment at the 12th. She knew she’d be filling in at the 20th from time to time—which meant she’d be supervising her brother.
    “Think that’ll be a problem?” I had asked her.
    Michelle just smiled. “I did it all the time when we were growing up.”
    I asked Michelle how much older she was than Steve. “Four years. But what you really want to know is how old I am now, right?”
    I nodded with a sheepish smile.
    “I’m thirty-one,” she said. “And you’re what, about thirty-five?”
    I nodded again. “Good guess.”
    “You’re kind of a serious person, aren’t you?” she asked. “Why do you say that?”
    “I don’t know, you just have a way of looking at people that’s so intense. The way you kind of scrunch up your forehead.”
    “I didn’t know I did that.”
    “Well, you do. But it’s not a bad thing. I kind of like it.”
    Sitting there in the darkness by the water, we totally forgot about the party, forgot anyone else was around. About midnight, when she said she had to go, I asked her whether she wanted to get together sometime.
    “Sure,” she