I had a bad one. A frakkin' earthquake, for Christ's sake, imagine that shit? A temblor hit us and the damn thing went off. You can dot every i, but there's always that one frakkin' thing.

Starkey smiled. She really did like Clare Olney and the pictures of his kids he kept on his desk.

It killed me. Zeroed out right there in the trailer park. Dead.

Clare Olney's eyes were frozen little dots as Starkey had more of the coffee. She wished she could spark up a cigarette. Starkey smoked two packs a day, down from a high of four.

The paramedics got me going again. Close call, huh?

Man, Carol, I'm sorry. Wow. What else can you say to something like that but wow?

I don't remember it. Just waking up with the paramedics over me, and then the hospital. That's all I remember.

Wow.

I wouldn't go back to a radio car. Screw that. Day to day, that's way more dangerous than working a bomb.

Well, I hope you like it here on Homicide. If I can help you with anything

Thanks, man. That's nice of you.

Starkey smiled benignly, then returned to her desk, glad the business of her bomb was out of the way. She was the New Guy at Hollywood Homicide, and had been the New Guy before. Everyone talked about it behind her back, but it always took a couple of weeks before someone asked. Are you the bomb tech who got blown up? Did you really get killed on the job? What was it like on the other side? It was like being dead, motherfucker.

Now Clare would gossip her answers, and maybe they could all move on.

Starkey settled at her desk and went to work reviewing a stack of murder books. This being her first homicide assignment, she had been partnered with a couple of veterans named Linda Brown and Bobby McQue. Brown wasn't much older than Starkey, but she was a detective-three supervisor with nine years on the table. McQue had twenty-eight years on the job, twenty-three working homicide, and was calling it quits when he hit thirty. The pairings were what Poitras called a training rotation.

Brown and McQue had each dropped ten ongoing cases on her desk and told her to learn the books. She had to familiarize herself with the details of each case and was given the responsibility of entering all new reports, case notes, and information as the investigations developed. Starkey had so much reading to do it made her eyes cross, and when she read, she wanted to smoke. She snuck out to the parking lot fifteen or twenty times a day, which had already caught Griggs's eye. Jesus, Starkey, you smell like an ashtray.

Eff you, Griggs.

Starkey palmed a cigarette from her bag for her third sprint to the parking lot that day when Lieutenant Poitras came out of his office. Christ, he was big. The sonofabitch was pumped-out from lifting weights like a stack of all-terrain truck tires.