Ethan’s good.

Then he sent another text, this one to Mike.

Gotta do something before I come in. Be there as soon as I can.

He got a text back from Cher as he was sending the one to Mike.

Thanks, baby.

After that, she put a bunch of x’s and o’s intermingled with some flowers and ended all that, for some strange and hilarious reason, with an emoji of a ghost and one of a flashlight.

This meant he was smiling when he made the call he had to make and put his phone to his ear.

“Yo, son, heard you caught that homicide,” Dave Merrick said in greeting.

His father was a retired BPD detective. In other words, with a son on the force and just because he was who he was, he kept in the know.

“Yeah, Dad. Listen, you got some time this morning?” Garrett asked.

“I’m retired, Garrett. What else do I got but time?” Dave answered.

“Gotta swing around,” Garrett told him.

“You had breakfast?”

“Cher filled me up.”

Dave was silent, which reminded Garrett that in the last few weeks, he had not had a lot of time for his old man.

It was highly likely Dave had heard about Garrett seeing Cher.

But he hadn’t heard it from Garrett.

On this thought, the woman behind him in a BMW and a hurry honked. Still crawling with the traffic in front of him, he looked in his rearview mirror to see her gesticulating at him irately, as if he alone was holding up the proceedings.

He started to say something to his dad, but within two seconds, when he didn’t make the nine cars in front of him vanish by magic, she honked again and he saw her mouth moving in a way that wasn’t hard to lip-read as she continued to gesture. Half a second later, when she caught his eyes in the rearview mirror, she honked at him again and threw both of her hands up in angry exasperation.

He looked to his right to see kids heading into school, some on foot, some parking their bikes on a rack outside, many of them turned to watch the woman.

Seeing this, he put his truck in park, asking his dad, “You gonna be there, I swing around?”

“Yep, son. I’ll be here,” Dave replied.

“Great. Be there in ten, maybe fifteen,” he told him as he threw his door open.

“See you then.”

He disconnected as he angled out of his truck, his phone beeping with a text from Mike that Garrett glanced at and saw said, Gotcha.

He moved toward her car, and the woman stopped gesticulating and stared at him as he looked beyond her to gesture to the cars waiting to swing out and pass them in order to keep traffic flowing.

He then shoved his phone in his inside jacket pocket, which gave him the opportunity to push his jacket back, exposing his badge on his belt as he dropped his hand and put it on his hip.