A Fine Specimen (4 page)

She didn’t want to say
what was coming next, but Ray had insisted. She’d better just get it out and
get it over with.

The lieutenant was
already rising.

Caitlin bit her lip and
forced the words past the tightness in her throat. There was no polite way to
say it, so she just blurted it out. “Ray—um, Captain Avery—said to tell you
that you owe him. And that he’s collecting.”

To her astonishment, he
dropped back heavily into his chair as if he’d been suddenly weighted down with
lead. Or knocked in the head.

He looked
sucker-punched.

“I owe Ray,” he repeated
slowly, “and he’s collecting.”

He hadn’t betrayed his
feelings other than by narrowing his eyes, but he’d had the wind knocked clean
out of him, that was clear. Whatever hold Ray thought he had over Alejandro
Cruz, it was real, at least in the lieutenant’s eyes. She couldn’t imagine
anything else stopping the lieutenant, other than a bullet to the head.

They stared at each in
silence. Caitlin didn’t dare look away—a sure sign of weakness. She didn’t even
dare so much as blink. Though her chest felt constricted, she tried to breathe
normally.

She couldn’t read his
face at all. Though years of study in the behavioral sciences had taught her
how to read more or less every human expression in a number of different
cultures, she was stymied here, for the first time.

Faces are extraordinary
tools of human communication. She’d studied under Professor Hamilton Barstow, an
expert on facial expressions in cultures throughout the world. So she could
decipher even deadpan expressions by slight corrugations of the brow, by the
muscles around the mouth, by the tilt of the head. Neurolinguistics was a big
help too, studying the direction the eyes traveled.

And if the face didn’t
work, there was always body language, another field of expertise for her.

However, none of her
training, experience or book learning helped right now. There was simply no way
to decipher what Alejandro Cruz was thinking by any physical means. He’d
learned impassivity at a tougher school than the Department of Social Sciences
at St. Mary’s.

This was a master.

Caitlin did the only
thing she could do—she simply sat back and waited.

There was nothing she
could do or say to sway him in any way. She’d said her piece—repeating Ray
Avery’s words—and now whether Alejandro Cruz acknowledged his mysterious debt
to Avery or not was entirely up to him.

“Okay.” He slapped the
desk with flat hands and surged out of his seat as she gaped up at him. “Come
with me, Ms. Law Enforcement. We’re going out on a Code Seven.”

A Code Seven!
Wow! Ray was
right
! This was going to work
after all! She was going to get some field experience. And a Code Seven at
that!

Caitlin stood up too.
“All right,” she said, trying to still her hammering heart. “A Code Seven! Oh
my gosh, that’s so exciting! Thank you!” She was hastily gathering her things,
including the book that nearly lamed him. A pen fell out of her bag and she stuffed
it back in. “What’s a Code Seven? An emergency? No, that’s in hospitals, I
remember that from
ER
and
Scrubs
. Is a Code Seven a robbery?
Arson? A kidnapping?”

“No.” The lieutenant
strode out of his office and she rushed to catch up with him.

Caitlin tried to thread
her way quickly through the desks and past the officers loitering and laughing
in the large squad room. As she hurried past a desk, her book bag caught a pile
of CDs. They spilled to the floor with a clatter. “Sorry,” she mumbled as she bent
down. The lieutenant had stopped at the door on the far side of the room,
waiting while she scrambled to pick them up, red-faced.

“That’s okay, honey.”
Kathy Martello bent to help her. “It’s much too crowded in here. I’m always
bumping into things.”

Caitlin looked around
furtively, hoping the lieutenant wasn’t watching her too closely. Those dark
eyes were far too observant. Her hands scrabbled to pick the CDs up.

“Quick,” she whispered
to Sergeant Martello behind her hand. God forbid he hear her. Ray had described
the lieutenant as having preternaturally acute hearing.

Actually, his exact
words had been, “Alex can hear a fly fart in the next room.”

Sergeant Martello looked
at her kindly, brows raised, as Caitlin asked, “What’s a Code Seven? I’m going
out on one with Lieutenant Cruz.”

Kathy Martello
straightened suddenly, eyes wide, hands full of CDs. “You’re going out…on a
Code
Seven
? With the Loot?” she repeated, looking stunned.

“Yes,” Caitlin hissed,
fairly dancing with impatience. God! This was so exciting! “What is it? What’s
a Code Seven?”

“Whoa, I am sooo not
going there.” Kathy looked over to the lieutenant, standing with his arms
crossed, then looked back at Caitlin. She shook her head with a grin, miming
zipping her mouth. “You’ll have to ask the Loot himself what a Code Seven is,
honey.”

Caitlin Summers
approached him gingerly after picking up the mess she’d made. Alex watched her
as she made her way toward him, weaving gracefully among the desks. The usually
noisy squad room grew quiet as she walked by, heads swiveling, phones on
shoulders, fingers lifting from keyboards. When she finally reached him, she
stopped, clutching her book bag with white knuckles.

Fuck, but she’d thrown
him.
Ray said to tell you that you owed him.

Oh yeah. He owed Ray.
And how.

Well, looked like Ray
had finally called in his chips.

Ray was absolutely
right, no question. Alex owed the man, big time. Twenty years ago Alex had been
a worthless punk, a piece of shit running with a gang like a rat in a pack,
with maybe a year or two left to live, if he was lucky, before he got wasted in
a shootout or in a revenge killing by a rival gang.

For some reason known
only to himself and God, Ray Avery had seen something in him. Something Alex
himself had taken years to see.

Certainly neither his
alcoholic mother nor his drug-addled father had ever taken the time or the
energy to look beyond Alex’s size and strength and toughness to see whether
there was anything else there.

Ray had. Ray had singled
him out, roughed him up and generally knocked some sense into him. And then Ray
had hounded him until he had joined the Police Academy. Where Alex had
surprised himself and his instructors—but not Ray—by being a natural.

Alex would have given
anything he possessed to Ray, anything at all—certainly his life. That was
nothing. His life was Ray’s for the asking. But Ray had refused everything he
wanted to offer him, even thanks. All he said was that one day he would
collect.

Well, looked as if that
day was finally here, in the form of a very, very pretty woman who was going to
fuck with his schedule and his head and his dick for the next week. A crucial week,
during which he was expecting to have to all but camp out at the station house
as they ran Ratso to ground.

Alex ran a hand down his
face, stalling, but there was no question in his mind what he had to do. If Ray
wanted a pint of blood and a pound of flesh, Alex would gladly, unquestioningly
give it.

But Jesus, not this.
Somehow, this was worse.

He looked again at the
girl—no, dammit,
woman
—standing in front of him. She was looking at him
anxiously out of enormous blue eyes, the same color as her dress. The same
color as the sea at dawn. The same color as the spring sky…

Alex drew in a sharp
breath, willing his dick to stay down. It had taken enthusiastic note of how
incredibly pretty she was underneath her studenty getup. It didn’t care at all
that she wasn’t Alex’s type, all it wanted was to get into her pants…

Oh fuck. How was he
going to get any work done with this…this
distraction
next to him?

“Um, Lieutenant Cruz?”

“Alex.” If she was going
to fuck with his head and his week, at least they should be on first-name
terms.

She nodded. “Okay, Lieu—
Alex. Um, Alex?”

Damn but she was pretty.
Even her voice was pretty, soft and light. Was that a touch of the South he
heard in her voice?

She was watching him,
pale blue eyes unblinking.

Alex sighed. “Yeah?”

“Um, what’s a Code
Seven?”

Alex didn’t answer
immediately but instead stared out, jaws clenched, over her head at his men,
sending out the silent signal—
showtime’s over
.

His men snapped to.

In Alex’s mind, even the
women were his men. One look from him and it was like the scene in
Sleeping
Beauty
where the castle comes to life. Inside of a minute, there was the
usual hustle-bustle. Even the phones starting ringing again.

Alex gave one long last
look at the squad room. He longed to stay here, with his men. This was where he
belonged.

Today’s fuckup with
Ratso made him even more anxious to get moving on a report of Lopez’s finances
that had come in from the forensic economists at the FBI. He had a four o’clock
meeting with the shrink who’d carried out the compulsory psych evaluation on
one of his men who’d shot a scumbag last week. The SWAT guys were begging for
new ceramic plates to add to the Kevlar body armor and he was moving heaven and
earth to find the money for them. Today was not a day he wanted to be babysitting,
not even for pretty girls sent to him by Ray. Not even if the pretty girl in
question was waking up his dormant libido.

“What’s a Code Seven?”
he repeated, taking her arm and moving to the stairs. “Lunch.”

They were walking down
the big marble staircase Caitlin knew had been built in 1934, at the height of
the Depression, as part of the WPA. She knew everything about the building,
about its history and the role it had played in Baylorville. She’d been looking
forward to working here for the next week.

Now she had the distinct
feeling that if Lieutenant Cruz—Alex—had any say in the matter, she’d never
walk back up this staircase ever again.

The meeting had gone
more or less precisely as Ray had said it would. Caitlin had been dead set
against telling the lieutenant she was here to collect on a debt. Didn’t make any
difference what she thought though, because Ray insisted. Ray was another
super-alpha male.

Caitlin had hated saying
what she’d said. It sounded horribly like blackmail, but Ray had insisted and
he could be very…forceful. Though Ray was short and stout, with bright blue
eyes and a bushy white mane of hair—the physical opposite of the
lieutenant…Alex—they both shared the kind of personality it was hard to say no
to.

Ray had simply
straightened his shoulders, deepened his voice, sharpened his gaze and had
gotten his way.

That was probably part
of the psychological profile of a police officer, she mused. A
certain…persuasiveness. It was an interesting point and there was a lot of
literature to back it up, starting from Anderson Carter, who had noted that in
his groundbreaking study in the ’50s…

Caitlin emerged blinking
into the bright light of a Southern California June afternoon.

She needed to pay
attention here. Alex was very cool and very smooth. She’d just been herded out
of the police station without anything to show for it. He very definitely had
not said that she could spend time in the station for her research. All he’d
committed himself to was lunch.

Man, he was good. A real
player.

He put a large hand to
her elbow to turn her right and she instinctively followed his lead, behaving
humiliatingly like a little lamb in the presence of a wolf. This wasn’t good.
She knew better than this. She had to take back the initiative.

Over lunch, he was
probably going to start listing the reasons why she’d be in the way, why she’d
impede important police work, why there was no question of her interrupting his
officers. He would be extremely persuasive and he had a very dominant
personality. There was a real risk here of coming away empty-handed.

Pulling Ray out of a hat
like a rabbit would only work once. The Loot, as Kathy called him, was
perfectly capable of somehow twisting things around so that she spent time in
the Archives instead of the station house. Then, technically, he’d be off the
hook with Ray.

“You don’t need to feed
me, Lieutenant,” Caitlin said. “I don’t want to take you away from your work.
All I need is a few moments of your time and your permission to talk with your
officers.”

“I told you to call me
Alex.” He wasn’t even listening. “Here, let me carry that.” Before she could
even think of protesting, he’d shouldered her heavy book bag.

Caitlin thought she
would have to scramble to keep up with him, but he adjusted the stride of his
long legs to hers and she was able to walk at a comfortable pace by his side.

She tried not to watch
him as he walked along beside her, but it was hard to keep her eyes off him.
The man moved with a strong, easy grace, an alpha male animal in its prime,
head high, shoulders back, gaze direct. His jacket covered the shoulder holster
with its weapon, but he didn’t need it. He had the classic dominant male
posture. As he walked, he signaled he was master of all he surveyed.

This was his street, his
turf, and here he was the king. Everyone on the street acknowledged him in
classic submissive or acceptance behavior. Passersby on the sidewalk dropped
their eyes to the ground. A news vendor across the street waved, a woman behind
the counter of a bakery shop smiled at him. A taxi cab driver gave a tiny hoot
of his horn as he drove by. Alex nodded to everyone.

It was all very
pleasant, all very
civilized.

Caitlin had no doubt
that the street they were on had suddenly become the safest one in the Western
hemisphere. No crook in his right mind would attempt a mugging or a holdup in
the area with Lieutenant Alejandro Cruz walking around with his Glock 19, the
new weapon of choice of most police officers in the county—she’d checked—snugly
fitted into his shoulder holster. He probably had a backup weapon in an ankle
holster and his hands looked large and sinewy and strong enough to be
considered weapons themselves. He exuded mastery and danger as he walked
silently alongside her.

Were cops natural
predators, Caitlin mused? Or did the job turn them into predators?

There was a lot of
literature on the fact that cops and crooks were the obverse side of each
other, operating on different sides of the law, but similarly equipped by
nature to prevail. She could even see Alejandro Cruz as a crook. A super-crook,
the kind who could coolly steal a billion then fade into the night.

It would be really
interesting to see him a bit farther afield, not so close to his home
territory, so to speak, and observe his body language.

Law enforcement
communities are closely packed entities working toward the same goal, like a
wolf pack on the hunt. Most police officers spent more time at work—all of it
intense—than with their families. There were ties in a station house fortified
by adrenaline and sweat and shared danger. The strict hierarchy allowed it all
to work. So how did the alpha male—used to instant obedience and deference in
the workplace—function in the outside world? Was he able to impose the ironclad
rules of a small nondemocratic fiefdom to the broader world outside?

How would one set up a
field study? Caitlin’s heartbeat sped up as she began drawing up a plan in her
head for collecting data correlated to a map, to ascertain whether signs of
deference and submission decreased proportionately to the increase of the
distance from the station house. Surely there would be a mathematical
correlation—

A flash of blue, a
current of wind whipping at her skirt, a loud car horn honking angrily…

Caitlin found herself
hauled back violently and held tightly against a hard, broad chest. In
self-defense, her arms had gone up to shield herself instinctively and now they
were splayed on his chest, hands over his pectorals. He was in instinctive male
protection mode—one hand to the back of her head, one hand around her waist,
protecting her vital organs and bringing her flush up against the front of his
body.

They stood there for
long moments while the sound of the car horn faded into the distance. Caitlin
could feel the lieutenant’s steady, strong heartbeat—nothing like her own trip-hammering
heart. She could feel crisp chest hairs through the stiff cotton of his shirt
and she could feel…

Oh God. His penis,
stirring against her.

That often happened to
her on dates. A too-tight embrace for a goodnight kiss and her date’s cock
surged. Men were programmed that way. A little contact and wham! Off they went.
Or rather,
up
.

However, this time there
was something different. For each surge of his penis, there was an answering surge
of heat and blood in her womb. It was uncontrollable, unstoppable, pure
instinct, wildly delicious.

The lieutenant shook
her, hard.

Her mind jerked back to
reality, heart pounding. She’d almost been run over by a car and only Alejandro
Cruz’s fast reflexes had saved her. His partial erection was a known male
reaction to the adrenaline released by danger. Hers, on the other hand…

What was she thinking
of?

Finally, reaction set in
and she started trembling. The lieutenant’s arms tightened for a moment, then
he held her away from him with both hands. There was no expression on his face
except for anger. If she hadn’t felt it with her own senses, she’d never have
believed that he’d had a partial erection. With her…
for
her.

“Damn it, woman, what’s
the matter with you!” he blazed, jaw muscles tensely bunching. “Do you have
some kind of death wish? If you want to kill yourself, do it on your own time!
Not while you’re walking with me!”

“I’m sorry,” she
whispered, eyes wide, seeing the anger on his face. He looked furious, the skin
taut across his cheekbones, eyes narrowed until only a black glitter showed.

“Damn it, on this planet
a red light means stop!” He gripped her shoulder to turn her slightly, waving
at the traffic light with his other hand. He shook her lightly. “What the fu—
What on
earth
were you thinking of?”

You
, Caitlin wanted to say, but couldn’t.
I was
thinking of you, your power and how to measure it.

She was
still
thinking
of him. It was hard not to think of him as she was still
feeling
him.

All over.

She could feel the
steely imprint of his fingers on her shoulders, his hold only now relenting a
little. His arms had banded about her as he had pulled her to him, to safety.
She could still feel the hard muscles of his arms, the solid strength of his
chest, his cock surging against her.

But now the lieutenant
was holding her away from himself and she looked up into the furious face, all
harsh angles, an angry red flush under the olive-toned skin.

Distract the cobra.

“I’m sorry,” she
improvised. “I get so carried away by my thoughts sometimes that I get myself
into these messes. I was mulling over a point made by a colleague about the
relationship between armies and the police.”

He dropped his arms. She
watched, fascinated, as his jaw muscles bunched angrily. If he continued biting
his teeth so hard, he’d grind them down to stubs and need massive dental
reconstruction.

The department would pay
for it. She’d reviewed the PD’s employment contract and health plan before
coming. She knew exactly what was refundable under the health plan. Viagra yes,
birth control no.

He opened his mouth then
shut it with a snap. Lieutenant Cruz was biting back harsh words with all his
strength. “Well, I hope it was a thought worth dying for,” he ground out
finally.

“No,” Caitlin replied,
pushing her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. “No, it wasn’t. Not at
all. Just a minor footnote in a paper.” She stepped back to get a better look
at him, gauging his interest. He was listening. “My colleague was speculating
that throughout history, when the military divided up into army and police, it
signaled the beginning of civilization. Like when the Normans set up the
traveling judges for the shires. A police force, separate from an army, means a
society can begin the move toward democracy.”

“Well, that’s a dumb
thing to be so wrapped up in that you nearly become roadkill—” he began
heatedly, then stopped.

Caitlin watched him mull
this over. It wasn’t really such a dumb thing, after all. Most police officers
never really thought deeply about the history of what they did. They were so
busy becoming cops and then
being
cops that they never gave much thought
to the
idea
of cops. Mostly they assumed that the police had always
just…been there. But they hadn’t.

She’d often seen the
wheels whirring in their practical, reality-focused heads when she mentioned
this point, as they wrestled with the idea of when policing actually sprung up.
Policing started after the dinosaurs and before TV, obviously, but when?

He was standing there on
the corner, lost in thought. She tapped him on the shoulder and he looked down,
blinking. “What?”

Caitlin grinned and
pointed at the traffic light across the street. “On this planet, the green
light means walk.”

The diner was called the
Garden of Eatin’, and Lieutenant Cruz was clearly a treasured customer.

Caitlin was amused
by the fact that though a number of
attractive women diners and two of the younger waitresses stared at Alejandro
Cruz with open appreciation, he didn’t seem to notice them. Instead, he honed
in on a bony, middle-aged waitress and swooped down to give her a swift hug.

“Alex,” the waitress
said, pleased. A nametag with “Martha” written in pen was pinned to her flat
chest. She hung onto the lieutenant’s arms and smiled up at him. “Hey big guy,
haven’t seen you around lately. What is it—crime rate suddenly go up? You’re so
busy you can’t stop by to see your friends?”

“You know how it is,
Martha,” Lieutenant Cruz said solemnly, releasing her and stepping back. “Been
working hard putting the bad guys away. Keeping you guys safe.”

“Yeah, well, you weren’t
doing a good job of it the other night. Our cook was mugged by a coupla guys on
his way home.”

His gaze sharpened.
“Hank?” he frowned. “What happened? Was he hurt?”

Martha shrugged. “They
beat him up some. Cracked a rib and would have cracked his head if it wasn’t so
hard. Took two hundred bucks off him.”