Read Online Judging Time by Leslie Glass - Free Book Online Page A

ready to do battle?" Mike pushed his chair back from their window table at the Anytime Diner on Eighth Avenue and tried a smile.
    "Not yet." April glanced at her watch, then resumed turning the pages of her Rosario. "We have a few minutes," she murmured.
    "Mad at me?"
    His question made her look up. Her eyes felt puffy and dry, as if the part of her that was supposed to make tears had been claimed by the night's victims. She could hardly see a thing, and now she'd be on duty until 4 P.M. These all-nighters on turnaround days really stank, especially when one was a boss and had to follow up on everybody's ongoing cases, as well as organizing new ones. Now she had some sympathy for her former supervisor, the once-despised Margaret Mary Joyce, who had two children, nine detectives, hundreds of cases to oversee, and a former husband who divorced her for getting ahead.
    She yawned behind her hand and tried to focus. "How could I be mad at you? I can't even see you." She squinted at him. "What's your name again, Sergeant?"
    "That's good. I didn't know you could tell jokes, querida."
    "I can't." She soured her face so he wouldn't laugh too hard.
    "Yeah, you're mad. I can tell. Look, I got the call. I didn't know it was your case, okay?"
    "I'm not mad. I'm tired. I accept the lie that your presence here is a big accident. So forget it."
    Mike eyed the potential leftovers on her plate. "You going to eat those potatoes?"
    She pushed the crisp hash browns in his direction, shaking her head.
    "You should eat more, querida. You're always sorry when you don't. I'm glad you're not mad." He reached across the turquoise linoleum tabletop for the ketchup bottle, then dumped a lake of crimson in the middle of her plate.
    "God, if I were a lady, I'd swoon," she muttered.
    "My table manners a problem, or does this trigger something important?"
    April blew air out of her nose, thinking of some of the delicate habits of her people. Before she'd left Chinatown, she'd assumed that rotting garbage on the street and a dozen people speed-eating from the same plate were normal. Her family and friends dug into the communal serving platters with their chopsticks. They hoisted succulent morsels across great expanses of table to their own rice bowls, then lifted the bowls to their faces and shoveled food into their mouths, making great slurp, slurp, slurping noises with an urgency that might lead an outsider to think this was the last meal anyone would ever get.
    This, however, was not the case at Mike's mother's table. At Sunday lunch six weeks ago, the one time April had eaten there, Mike's mother, who was as well fleshed and smiling as Sai Yuan Woo was skinny and scowling, had worn a purple dress that looked like taffeta and was cut low enough to show off her ample bosom. Maria Sanchez served fastidiously. She filled al the plates with the different foods from the platters in the center of the table, using a separate serving spoon for each platter. When everybody's plate was piled high with food, the four people at the table ate slowly. They put their forks and knives down frequently to savor the tastes and talk in the manner of people who had eaten not long ago and would soon eat again.
    No, the ketchup had given her a flash to the body of Merrill Liberty lying in the bloodied slush. When April had seen her, not even a half hour had passed since the woman had died. Her body was still so warm to the touch, it made April think her soul might not yet have departed, might still be hanging around there trying to tell them something. April figured Merrill Liberty had been standing when it happened. Her blood had pulsed out of the hole in her throat with the last of her heartbeats, soaking the front of her dress before she fell. April felt a pricking sensation behind her eyes.
    Patrice had said it must have happened almost the minute they left the restaurant. He told April he usually went to the door with them. Sometimes he walked with them out to Mr. Petersen's