Read Online Third Degree by Maggie Barbieri - Free Book Online Page A

she was too far away to reach and she thanked me.
    She turned to Crawford and addressed him. “What did you say your name was?”
    “Crawford,” he said. “Bobby Crawford.”
    She nodded slowly. She continued to appraise him from behind her dark glasses, and while I was used to Crawford getting admiring glances from the opposite sex, I sensed that this wasn’t one of those occasions. She was studying him for some other reason, its nature indeterminate to me. “And what is it that you do for a living, Mr. Crawford?”
    I didn’t know what that had to do with anything, besides her curiosity, but Crawford answered that he was a police detective. Lydia nodded slowly. “Here?” she asked.
    “No. New York City,” he said.
    She nodded again, and by the grim set of her mouth, I could tell that she wasn’t impressed. In fact, she seemed disgusted. Maybe she had had a run-in with a cop? Unpaid parking tickets? A jaywalking fine? All I knew was that she was not pleased to meet Crawford, even though she said so as she started off down the apple aisle, careful to avoid the glances of any other shoppers who were rubbernecking with gusto. The Hermès scarf and sunglasses notwithstanding, everyone knew exactly who she was.
    Crawford looked at me and mouthed, “What was that?”
    I shrugged and went with a full-blown lie. “You’re handsome. You’re going to get looks.” I pushed the cart down the aisle and toward the deli counter, Crawford following behind me.
    “That wasn’t what that was,” he said, looking over his shoulder to see where Lydia had gone, but she had disappeared into one of the vast aisles in another part of the store. When he determined that she wasn’t in earshot, he turned back toward the deli counter. “Is it our turn?”
    I showed him our number. Nine hundred and seven. The number on the neon counter read “three.” There were four other people ahead of us, waiting for cold cuts. “We’re going to be here a while,” I said.
    The deli man approached and moved the number ahead. “Four!”
    When no one answered, the woman at the head of the line interrupted. “I have forty-eight,” she said, proffering her ticket.
    “Five!”
    The man behind her offered his input. “I have ninety.”
    “Six!”
    Crawford let out a loud exhale.
    “Seven!”
    I looked at my ticket again. “I have nine hundred and seven,” I offered weakly.
    “Eight!” The counter guy was more exasperated than the customers were but clearly couldn’t find his way toward waiting on the lady who was first on line. “Eight?”
    Crawford steered the cart away from the counter and me out of the store. “Hey, what are we doing?” I asked as he grabbed my elbow and pushed me toward the car, leaving the cart behind.
    “We’re getting out of here, that’s what we’re doing,” he said. “We’re going to Tony’s.”
    My heart sank. Did we need cold cuts that badly? Couldn’t we have pizza instead? The last time I had been to Tony’s, his new wife, Lucia, had hurled an invective at me from the kitchen, suspicious that I wanted in on Tony’s sexagenarian deliciousness. Trust me—I don’t. I’ve got a guy who’s all that and more. Okay, so Crawford doesn’t have unlimited access to Boar’s Head cold cuts, but he’s got a lot of other things going for him. Not being in his sixties is one of them. And being taller than me is the other. Tony is pushing seventy, bald, fat, and short. Sure, he’s loaded, but that’s not going to cut the mustard with me. Lucia can have all two hundred and fifty pounds of him stretched across his five-foot-four frame.
    I had never actually laid eyes on Lucia, but I had incurred her wrath so much that once she had thrown a pot of meatballs at my head from her hiding place in the kitchen. Fortunately, it had missed me but it would have left a mark had it not. Tony seemed terrified of her, too; clearly, she was as dangerous as she seemed. My heart was racing as we pulled up in front of the