“Thank you,” Kitty said. For the first time in days, she felt pleased with herself. Pleased for Luke, too. She turned, eager to share this development with him, but took no more than three steps toward the door before looking back at Dawn. “Why are you helping us?”

Dawn cleared her throat and showed her stained teeth again. “Because I don’t like that motherfucker. He’s too quiet. Slippery. Fuck that guy.”

“You think he’s dangerous?”

“All men are dangerous. Some are just better at hiding it.”

“Hard to argue with that.”

Dawn nodded and turned back to the mirror. She sneered at her reflection. “Good luck to you, honey. You look like you need it.”

Kitty mumbled another thank-you and left the restroom. A flush had bloomed from beneath the collar of her tee, and her legs trembled with something close to excitement. She walked past the cleaning cart, bumping it in her haste, turning it sideways, not correcting it. She took the stairs by twos, wincing at the ghost of pain in her bruised ankle, then swept past the gumball machine and across the main floor. Heavy metal drummed from the sound system with a similar urgency.

Luke had just started Bud number four. Kitty whipped it from his hand.

“The hell?”

“No more. You need a clear head.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

Despite the anguish, the unfairness, the fierce goddamn terribleness of everything, she smiled. It felt good. Uplifting. Wings across her face.

She said, “I found your man.”

19
Tera

Tera by name, terror by nature.

That’s what her colleagues used to say about her, with an ingenuity befitting their callow brains and oversized egos. Not that she hadn’t earned the epithet. Her daddy had been a cop until cancer wheeled him away at the too-young age of fifty-six. He’d learned, on his deathbed, that Tera was going into law enforcement, and the last piece of advice he gave her was to be uncompromising. Male cops, he’d expounded, didn’t respect female cops until they’d proved themselves, not with their know-how but with their grit. Tera had been posted to Carver City’s Eleventh Street Precinct the week after she’d scattered her old man’s ashes in the Ohio River. She’d swallowed a spoonful of them, too, so that he would always be with her, lightly coating her stomach wall. Day one on the job, a steroid-jacked lieutenant had slapped her on the ass with a file folder and demanded she refill his coffee mug. Tera did, then tossed the hot coffee into the lieutenant’s lap and grabbed him by the throat. “Slap my ass again,” she’d said, squeezing, “and I’ll take your fucking hand.”