“Good. Because I wouldn’t have believed it. Linn and I give each other orders, and we’re responsible for each other. That’s what I’m in the habit of doing, and I’m not likely to change the way I work, either. I’m not asking you to shuffle and roll your eyes. I’m asking you to do what I tell you, when I tell you, in any potentially dangerous situation, on the off chance that my experience might tip me off to trouble before you spotted it.”

“Does it work both ways?”

“I promise you, if you tell me to duck, I’ll do it. Don’t abuse the privilege.”

I looked back out the window, but this time, not at anything particular. “I don’t know,” I said.

And I really didn’t.

I’d thought I’d have to browbeat her into letting me help again, and I’d thought that without considering why it was I was so hot to do it. Then, when she’d turned high-handed on me, I wanted to prove to her that I deserved better—and I wanted to walk out after I did it, and wait for her to browbeat me into changing my mind and helping. I obviously hadn’t thought about what I was doing, because nothing was less like Sunny Rico than that.

Now she’d presented me with an option that, somewhere in the back of my head, I realized was exactly what I wanted. Or had wanted, not so long ago. And I couldn’t say yes.

What she was asking me to do was to be her new partner. She was asking me to be a cop. Unofficially, temporarily—but she’d as good as said that she considered what she was asking of me to be the equivalent of what she expected of Linn. She just didn’t expect me to be as good at it, that was all. Maybe that was what rankled, though a second’s worth of thought told me I wasn’t, and wouldn’t want anyone to believe I was. Maybe it was that I didn’t, even temporarily, want to be considered police officer material. Well, that was true enough.

But it occurred to me that what I wanted her to ask was something different. I didn’t exactly know what—maybe something with more of a sense of high adventure in it? No chance; she’d already pointed out that this wasn’t the Hardy Boys, and I didn’t think that she’d call it the Three Musketeers, either. This was her job—her hard, nerve-wracking, intermittently sordid job. No high adventure.

“You can think about it,” she said. Her voice cut through my confusion and made me jump.