Bending the Rules

Ava flashed a smile. “I saw him the other day and he’s got downy fuzz all over his head. If he wasn’t such a big guy, he’d look like a newborn chick.” Then she pushed back from the table. “I’ve gotta use the ladies’.” She leveled a stern look on Poppy. “Don’t you dare spill a single juicy detail until I get back.”

“There are no juicy details,” she muttered to her friend’s departing back. Her thoughts turned inward to the day’s earlier events, however, and she wasn’t even aware of watching Ava cross the room. Only in the most absentminded way did she track the redhead’s progress by all the male heads that swiveled to watch her go by.

“I never get tired of seeing that,” Jane said.

“What?” she asked. Then realizing what she was staring at, she nodded. “Oh. That. Yeah, I know.” They grinned at each other. Because fueled by eat-your-heart-out, revenge-inspired determination after being the butt of a humiliating bet when she was eighteen, Ava had changed a lifetime of bad eating habits. She’d refused to call it a diet, though, and she hadn’t made the mistake so many full-figured women did of trying to whittle herself down to a toothpick-thinness unsuited to her bigger-boned frame. She’d stopped actively losing weight once she’d reached a size twelve—or what would be a fourteen, they liked to tease her, if she bought her clothing in the less pricey shops that the rest of them patronized.

But the actual size wasn’t the point. Ava had curves, she wasn’t afraid to accent them and men all but tripped over their tongues whenever she went by.

Apparently she didn’t believe in wasting time when there was potential gossip in the offing, either. Back in under five minutes, she demanded even as she took her seat, “So let’s hear it. Who’s the stiff? And what on earth did he do to get you so bent out of shape? This is not like you.”

“Yes, well, you can thank Jason de Sanges for my mood,” Poppy said through her teeth. “That rat bastard wrecked—”

“Detective Sheik?” Jane snapped upright. “That’s who’s on your committee?”

“Oh, no. Not now.” Her eyes slitted. “Thanks to him, the committee is no longer necessary. He torpedoed my wonderful plan.” She explained how he’d slanted the information he’d given the committee to make the three teens sound like hardened criminals.

The waitress brought their drinks. After several sips of her British ale, Poppy felt the tension that had her neck muscles in knots start to loosen. She could thank Ava and Jane for that, because by allowing her, in the way of true friends, to unload on them they’d helped her shed a large portion of the stress she’d been carrying around. “I suppose I really shouldn’t let it get me so bent out of shape,” she admitted. “It’s not like I’m overwhelmed with free time anyway. Between my work with the kids, and doing the boards and figuring out what the hell I want to do with the rooms the Kavanaghs have finished, I would’ve had to scramble to fit this project in. It’s just…”

“It was a good plan,” Ava said.

“Yes! Not perfect, I know, but a lot better than dumping three kids into the system for a first offense. Maybe I could have made a difference in their lives.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. But I sure would have liked the chance to find out. Now I’ll never know.”

“You still have a crack at them during the cleanup project, though, right?” Jane asked.

“Yeah, but we all know that’s not going to thrill them. It was the opportunity to paint some honest-to-God community-sanctioned art that might have opened up a chink in their armor.”

Ava’s auburn brows pleated. “You know what? Detective Sheik may have done a lot more last fall than we first believed—but he’s still a pig.”

“Yeah,” Jane agreed. “And from now on he’s just plain Detective de Sanges. He doesn’t deserve to be called the Sheik.”

“No fooling.” Poppy took another sip of her ale, pushed back her pint glass to make room for the steaming basket of fries the waitress set in front of her and sighed as she grabbed one and dragged it through the little dish of aioli. “How can someone who makes me so hot just looking at him have turned out to be such a cold fish?”

THE SCENT OF deep-fat-fried fish wafted up from the paper-and-twine-wrapped package Jase juggled as he rapped his knuckles against an apartment door one floor down from his own. “Murph! You in there? Hey, I brought dinner. Open up before I drop the damn thing on the carpet.”

“Hold your water, kid,” a gruff voice said, growing closer as his one-time mentor and long-time friend approached the other side of the door. “I ain’t as young as I useta be, y’know.”

“No shit?” he muttered as locks tumbled and the doorknob turned. “Can’t say as I remember you ever being young.”

“Cute,” Murphy said, opening the door and reaching out to relieve him of the six-pack of St. Pauli Girl he’d tucked under his elbow.

“Not trying to be cute,” he said honestly. “I don’t remember. I was, what? Fourteen when we met? I thought you were a hundred then.”

“I was fifty-four!”

“Which might as well be a hundred when you’re fourteen.”

Murphy laughed. “I suppose you got a point.” He shot a glance over his shoulder at the blue-and-white paper bundling their dinner as he led the way to the little dining table outside his almost equally small kitchen. “Spud’s fish and chips,” he said as he pulled a couple of longnecks out of the six-pack and set them on the table. “What’s the occasion?”

“That bogus committee you talked me into joining is no more.” And he refused to feel guilty about the disappointment he’d seen in the Babe’s big brown eyes when the vote hadn’t gone the way she’d hoped. “Figured that calls for a celebration.”

Murphy slowly straightened from putting the rest of the beer in the refrigerator. Turning his head, he pinned Jase in the crosshairs of his faded but still sharp blue eyes. “I know you weren’t hot to be on this thing in the first place. But how the hell’d you manage that?”

“By injecting a little reality into a harebrained scheme.” He nodded at the package he’d unwrapped. “I’ll tell you all about it, but right now come sit down. Let’s eat before this gets cold.”

They each grabbed a wad of napkins and dug into the fish, eating with their fingers. They dipped the battered fish into plastic containers of tartar sauce, scraped thick clam chowder out of tiny cardboard cups with round-bowled plastic spoons and dredged their fries through ketchup, washing it all down with beer.

Eventually there was nothing left except a couple of grease spots and a splash of garlic-infused vinegar in the bottom of their cardboard dishes. Murphy stacked them, tossed in the empty plastic condiment containers and, wadding up the wrapping paper, added it to the pile. He pushed his chair back from the table, patted his comfortable paunch and met Jase’s gaze. “Good dinner. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“So tell me about this harebrained scheme.”

“Do you remember me talking about the Babe?”

“Sure. Rich girl who got you all hot and bothered a few months back.”

“She didn’t get me all—” He swallowed the lie. “Okay, maybe she did. But that’s old news.”

“So what’s the new news?”

“Turns out she was on the committee, too. And she damn near talked the rest of the people on it into rewarding the kids caught tagging.”

“How’s that?”

“She was all for letting them do a mural on the side of one of the businesses.”

“You’re kidding me. No making them clean up after their vandalism—just giving them something fun to do?”

“Well, no. She actually did propose making them clean up their mess first with paint they paid for out of their own pockets.”

Murph nodded. “Okay, good. That’s responsible. But—what?—they’ve been in and out of the system a hundred times already?”

“Uh, not exactly.” He shifted in his seat. Tipped his bottle up and drained the last sip of beer from it. Because he knew this was where self-righteousness got a little shaky. “It was their first run-in with the police.”

Murphy lowered his own bottle, which he’d been raising to his lips, and sat a little straighter in his seat. “Let me get this straight. The kids have never been in trouble. The Babe was going to have them clean up their mess with paint they’re responsible for purchasing. But she wanted to take it a step further and have them also paint a mural on the side of a building. So…what? She just tossed the idea out there on the table for someone else to implement?”

Crap. “No, she offered to supervise. She wants to ‘make a difference’ in their lives.”

The old man snorted. “Right. That’s likely to happen,” he said, deadpan. “Still, if she’s willing to do the work, why would the committee vote against the idea? It’s not like it’d be any skin offa their noses.”

Crapfuckhell. “I might have gotten a little carried away with my ‘tagging is the first step to crime’ talk. Could have maybe scared them off some.”

“For God’s sake, boy.” Murphy scratched his thinning iron-gray hair. “Why?”

Back straightening, he looked Murph in the eye. “You know damn well why. Once you start torquing the rules it’s a slippery slope. One day you’re rewarding kids for trashing people’s hard-earned businesses. Next thing you know you’re giving in to the temptation to just take that old-lady-bashing mugger around the corner and stick your service revolver to his temple to ‘help’ him cough up a confession.”

There was a moment’s silence in which his words clanged in his head like buckshot fired into a steel chamber—and he wished he could get the past few seconds back so he could cut his tongue out.