Read Online I Shall Not Want by Julia Spencer-Fleming - Free Book Online Page B

where’n the hell is everybody?” Noble reported.
    McCrea twisted the faucet off and dried his hands. “If you step back from the door a ways, Noble, I think Lyle might be able to get out.”
    Noble shoved his wall-like frame through the door. “Sorry, Dep.”
    Kevin and McCrea snickered as MacAuley and Entwhistle did the doorway dance. Finally the deputy chief squeezed past Noble and disappeared into the hallway, a string of profanities marking his passage.
    “What’s taking you guys so long?” Noble asked. “You know what they say. If you shake it more’n three times, you’re playing with it.”
    “Nah. We’re just giving Kevin some beauty tips. Much better now the fuzzy thing on your chin is gone, Kevin.”
    “Goatee,” Kevin muttered. It would have been a good one, too, if the chief hadn’t squinted at him in the dispatch room last week and barked, “No beards. Shave it off.”
    Noble rolled his eyes. “I got a tip for you. Don’t be late. If the chief don’t notice
her
,”—he wagged his head toward the hall, where the former public restroom had become the women’s room—“he sure ain’t gonna care how pretty
you
are.”
    In the mirror, Kevin could see himself blush. Everyone teased him about his freckles, but they didn’t bug him. The bright, spotty ones of his youth had almost faded away, leaving him with just a scattering across his nose and cheekbones. But God Almighty, he hated his fair skin! It was like a fricking mood ring.
    “We’ll be right there,” McCrea said. Noble grunted and lumbered into the hallway. When the door had shut behind him, McCrea said, “I have a tip for you, too, Kev.” His voice was light but serious. “It’s an oldie but a goodie. Don’t shit where you eat.”
    Kevin looked down at the sink. “Whaddaya mean?”
    McCrea sighed. “Kev, you didn’t give a rip what you looked like until last week, when Hadley Knox started showing up for the briefings. I admit, she’s a total babe. But you do not want to be fishing in these waters. I’d think everything that’s happened between the chief and MacAuley would have taught you that much.”
    “That’s different,” Kevin said. “MacAuley”—he dropped his voice involuntarily—“nailed the chief’s wife. I’d never put the moves on a married woman.”
    “It’s not about married or not married. It’s about sticking it to someone you’re going to have to see at work every day.”
    “I’m not—”
    McCrea held up his hands. “I don’t want to get into it with you. Just think about what I’m saying, okay?”
    The door thumped open. “Are you two waiting for an engraved invitation?” MacAuley said.
    They followed the deputy chief out, Kevin, as always, bringing up the rear. He kept his eyes fixed on MacAuley’s grizzled head until he had taken his usual seat in the squad room, an irregularly shaped space that had been knocked together out of several small offices about twenty years before Kevin was born.
    “Nice of you gentlemen to join us.” The chief sat on the scarred wooden worktable, his booted feet braced on two chairs.
    “Sorry,” McCrea said. If it had been, say, last November, he would have cracked a joke about them running a salon, or a book club, or something. But that was before the chief’s wife kicked him out. Before she died. Before the department imploded in a smoking mess of old wrongs and betrayal.
    None of them joked around within the chief’s earshot now.
    Kevin flopped his notebook open, and as the chief launched into the bulletins and BOLOs, he snuck a look at Hadley Knox. Eric McCrea had called her a babe, but that didn’t do her justice. Kevin had never seen anyone like her, with her perfect skin and her huge brown eyes and her round, pouty lips. Even in a tan poly uniform with no makeup on and her dark hair cut like a boy’s, she was better-looking than 99.9 percent of the other women in Millers Kill. McCrea had another thing wrong, too. Kevin knew he didn’t have