“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“I need a nice juicy murder to sink my teeth into. It’s been weeks and weeks with nothing good to work on.”

“You’re sick, Holland, you know that?”

“That hurts my feelings.”

“What feelings?” he asked with a laugh. “Help with dispatch, help with command, help with the reports and don’t step foot outside this building without my knowledge, you got me?”

The man she’d once called Uncle Joe rarely pulled rank on her. In fact, he let her get away with everything except murder itself in running her investigations and her division. Because he was often so accommodating, she decided to accommodate him. For now. But this coddling shit couldn’t continue much longer without her losing her mind.

“Fine,” she said to his back as he left the room. “But after tonight, we’re having a conversation about my clipped wings.”

He waved to indicate he’d heard her, and Sam kicked the trash can out of frustration. She hated being sidelined due to worries about her safety. Why didn’t anyone think she was capable of taking care of herself? She’d been a cop almost thirteen years! And here she was relegated to desk duty on one of the most intense nights the department had seen in years. It wasn’t fair.

And while it might not be fair, it was happening, so she put aside her frustration to go figure out where she was needed. In the dispatch area, she was drawn to the bank of televisions repeatedly broadcasting the ball sailing over Willie Vasquez’s head as the commentators talked about a moment that would land in the baseball history books, right next to Bill Buckner’s famous bobble that cost the Boston Red Sox a World Series victory in 1986. “This might even be worse than Buckner,” one of the broadcasters said grimly.

Her gaze shifted to the next television where Metro Special Response officers were in crowd control formations outside the stadium. Other images included a car on fire, another lying on its side, a shattered storefront and angry mobs of people in the streets.

All over a freaking baseball game.

Choking back her dismay over what was happening to her city as well as her inability to do anything about it, she buckled down to help out in central processing, which was overwhelmed with people being dragged in off the streets by increasingly irritated police officers.

Wanting to drown out the roar of the voices in the station as well as the disturbing images coming from the TVs, she put in her earbuds and let Bon Jovi take her away from it all as she typed reports and tried to stay focused on the menial tasks involved with processing hundreds of arrests.