Anticipation

“Today’s your lucky day,” Harlan Worth announced as Serena closed his office door behind her.

“Yeah. So I gathered running the gauntlet.” She slumped into the chair in front of his beat-up desk and sipped the sludge disguised as coffee, still half a cup away from being fully humanoid. Where was it written that police station coffee had to be so bad? She vowed she’d never sleep through another alarm again and not have time to make her own coffee at home.

Worth steepled his fingers. “We’ve got a lead on Slick Nick for you.”

Finally. She’d been chasing Nick Malone, a money-laundering suspect, for months. However, she’d wait until she heard the particulars of the lead to decide whether it had validity. “Let’s hear it.” She pulled a small notepad out of her purse. She wrote everything down. More than once she’d reviewed her notes and found some obscure detail or minutia that had proven to be key.

“Got to love your enthusiasm, Riggs.”

Chasing dead ends had taught her not to get too hopeful. “I’ll see if I think it’s something to get excited about.”

“Seems Slick Nick dumped a girlfriend and you know how you women get.” She let the comment pass. If she took exception to every sexist comment uttered in the 151st, she’d be a raving lunatic. Besides, Harlan, despite his bluster, was one of the nicest men she’d ever met. He’d been married to Nancy Worth for over forty years and still worshipped the ground the woman walked on. “She’s selling her stud-muffin down the river.”

Stud-muffin? Harlan was stuck in the eighties. Serena focused on the rest of what he’d said. Depending on just how pissed off they were, ex-girlfriends could provide a wealth of info. Maybe this was something to get excited about.

She knew Nick Malone was a little over six feet with short, dark hair, blue eyes, and a medium build. That had only narrowed it down to over half the men in greater Boston. She needed a photo and a means of positive ID. The guy had been smart enough never to get caught or arrested. No fingerprints, no photo ID, and he went by several aliases. “Please tell me we have a photo.”

“We have a photo.” Harlan pushed it across the desk in her direction. “For what it’s worth.” The photo was out of focus, the man in the picture little more than a blur, with no discernable features, other than dark, short hair.

“Oh.” Yep. As disappointing as every other lead in this case. She drained the cup and bit back a grimace. She was saving every dollar for a down payment on a town house, but she might have to break down and buy a decent cup of coffee at the nearby coffee shop when she overslept. This stuff was either going to kill her or put hair on her chest—both bad options.

Harlan flipped through his notes, which Serena knew was unnecessary. The man possessed an amazing memory. “According to the girlfriend, he’s a top-notch dresser. Likes nice clothes. Said he’s obsessed with them ocean movies.”

Huh? “Beach movies?”

“Nah. Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve. She says he wants to be like that Clooney guy.”

Serena cracked a smile. “There are worse men to want to be like, although I personally think Matt Damon’s the looker in that lot.”

“You seen the movies?”

“Yeah.” The ending in the second one, Ocean’s Twelve, irritated the heck out of her. “So, we’ve got a perp who fancies himself a master criminal.”

“Hey, at least he’s got professional ambition.” Harlan unwrapped a Twinkie. “Breakfast of champions.” He took a bite and swallowed with minimal chewing. Watching Harlan eat reminded her why she was still single. Men could be real pigs. That and you needed to trust them to marry them. “We also know that our boy has a tattoo.”

“That works.” Finally something to really smile about. A perp could alter haircut and color, pop in colored contacts, change the way he dressed, but it was hard to get rid of a tattoo or a scar. “Arm? Neck? Chest? Back?”

“This is good.” Harlan grinned, looking like one of Santa’s elves gone bad with his full, round face, slightly pointed ears and a blob of cream filling at the corner of his mouth. She made a sign and he swiped off the cream. “It’s on his ass.”

Serena rolled her eyes. No wonder the boys had been in rare form this morning. “That’s great. To make a positive ID I’ve got to yank this guy’s pants down?”

Harlan chased the Twinkie with a slurp of coffee sludge. “You could try asking him nicely. According to the girlfriend, he’s quite a looker, but she says he’s a tiny mite when it comes to the johnson—course that could just be the woman-scorned thing.”

Serena laughed. That must be the little something Bennigan had in common with Malone. “That’s just great! This’ll make for some interesting conversation. Excuse me, you look like someone I know. In fact, you remind me of Danny Ocean. But I need to know, do you have a tattoo on your butt and a little penis?”

“Hey, it’ll guarantee a positive ID.” Harlan smirked. “Another little tidbit for when you’re trying to get those pants down to check out the tattoo—your boy likes a good spanking. You might want to dust off your dominatrix outfit.”

Sometimes she just found out more than she wanted or needed to know about people. Being in a job where she was surrounded by the worst of society was often demoralizing. “I didn’t need to know that.”

Harlan wagged a stubby finger at her across the desk. “It might come in handy. You’ve got to work on always having a backup plan, Riggs. She says he’s particularly partial to one of those little riding whips with the split leather on the end.”

“Jesus. Was there anything she didn’t tell you?”

“She was singing like a bird.” Harlan grinned.

“Please, tell me we’ve got an address.” Slick Nick was a shadow man. She hadn’t been able to find out where he lived. An address would be a huge plus. That she would definitely smile about.

“Sorry, Toots. You aren’t that lucky today. She said they always went to her place or a motel and they always took a cab. But, she did say he has an important meeting at that hotel near the airport, The Barrister. He’s going to be there for a three-day meeting from the twenty-fourth until the twenty-sixth. Just think, you can spank him till he talks and he’ll like it.”

Okay, it looked like dominatrix was about to be added to her repertoire. Serena was the department “go to” girl when light undercover was required. She liked it and she excelled at it. She’d handle the dominatrix thing without a problem.

Color her cynical, but this seemed like a surfeit of information where before they’d only had one dead-end after another. “How do you know she’s not setting us up? That’s a lot of information for her to know.”

“Nuh-uh. She’s setting him up, big-time. Apparently he thought she was just a dumb blonde and didn’t really go to any trouble to hide his day planner. So she found it and took a look.”

Serena grinned. “I like the sound of this woman.” Well, except for her poor judgment in dating a crook. Growing up with a petty criminal for a father had left Serena with zero tolerance and had been a major influence on her decision to be a cop. Criminals were criminals—bottom line. And women who had anything to do with lawbreakers were almost as bad as the men themselves.

If Serena’s mother had left her good-for-nothing father, they would’ve still been poor, but at least they could’ve claimed a little dignity. Pretty damn hard to have dignity when your old man was in and out of prison all the time and your mother lied to cover for him.

Serena had bailed when she hit eighteen. A high-school graduate with thirty-two hundred bucks in her pocket, saved from working nights and weekends, she’d tried to get her mother to come with her. Her mother had stayed because, according to Mom, Serena’s dad needed her when he got of jail. Again.

Serena had shaken Cleveland’s dirt from her feet, headed east and, even though she talked regularly with her mom, she’d never gone back. She couldn’t face the squalor and her mom’s resigned hopefulness. She definitely wasn’t interested in her father’s lies that this time he was going straight.

Becoming a cop had been Serena’s way of denouncing everything her father stood for. Plus, her father truly hated cops. Her job might keep her in contact with criminals and all the emotional dysfunction that went with a criminal’s lifestyle, but she was fighting all that instead of living it. “The girlfriend’s more than a blond bimbo. Bad news for Slick Nick. Good news for moi.”

“Don’t you want to know what kind of tattoo he has on his ass?” The elf-gone-bad’s eyes fairly danced with mischief.

Serena blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. She wanted to grow her hair out, but she might not make it through this growing out stage. And PMS just made it worse. She should come with a warning today: Bad Hair Day, PMS Bloating and a License to Carry Concealed. “I’m thinking there is a limited number of men that fit his general description with any kind of tattoo on their butts, but sure, go ahead. I can tell you’re dying to spill it. And doubtless the guys all know already. They were in rare form this morning.” Secrets in the station just didn’t happen.

“Right cheek. It’s a heart with MOM inside it.” Harlan cracked up. “Apparently that’s the side he prefers for his spanking.”

“I TOLD YOU NOT to call me before ten in the morning,” “Slick Nick” Malone said into his cell phone. Couldn’t a guy get a decent night’s sleep?

“Wake up and pay attention, Nicky, because I’m beginning to think you could fuck up a wet dream.”

Nick curled his fist around the phone. One day he’d find out who this cop was and then he’d pop him. For now it was useful having a guy on the inside. But sooner or later, he’d make him, and then the voice on the other end was history.

The cop was always so foulmouthed. His language deeply offended Nick. But Nick thought his cop-in-a-pocket knew that and went out of his way to needle him with it. When he was a kid, Nick’s neighborhood had been a dump—graffiti-covered buildings, foul language not only spouted all around him but spray painted for the world to see. Back them, no matter how many times he’d washed his hands or how clean he’d tried to keep his clothes, he’d always felt the filth of his surroundings. Eventually he’d managed to put the neighborhood behind him and all it represented. He wore nice clothes. Kept his language clean. Stayed in nice places. Ate at nice restaurants.

The woman in the hotel bed next to him, Susie maybe, was still asleep, her mouth gaping open slightly. Phone in hand, Nick slid out of bed, still naked from the night before, and crossed the room, then closed the bedroom door behind him. He stretched out on the suite’s love seat, the brocade upholstery rough against his back and bare butt.

“What are you talking about?”

The voice laughed, an ugly sound so early in the morning. “Your girlfriend or should I say ex-girlfriend, Debi, has been flapping her trap.”

Apprehension grabbed him by the balls and squeezed. He swung his feet to the floor and sat up. “What?”

“She visited the station and filled us in on all kinds of little nifty details like who you’re meeting and where and when.”