Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 68867 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 275(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68867 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 275(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
I was pissed, they were spindly—meth really takes it out of a body—and I had all three scattered on the ground in seconds.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Hawkins screamed at me, in front of the girl. “That is not our job, and what if you got yourself killed?”
I had no answer for him, as the girl had wrapped herself around me after I zip-tied all three men, and she was currently squeezing my diaphragm. She was a soccer star at her high school and would have been able to put up a better fight, but the first guy punched her in the face and the second banged her head on the pavement, so she had been rendered nearly unconscious. I had already pledged to go to the hospital with her.
Chicago PD came and took custody of the guys, and then I went with Megan to the hospital. While there, I was met by Eli Kohn, our PR guy, and my boss, Ian Doyle.
“You’re gonna be riding with a new partner for the rest of the day,” Doyle told me, pointing to Jeff Crosby, who was jogging down the corridor toward us.
“Why?”
Doyle grimaced. “Because Hawkins is done for not backing you up for any fuckin’ reason, and Bill Collins drew his weapon on a young, deaf pregnant woman this morning.”
That was all over the news an hour later, and Sam Kage was praised for immediately putting Collins on unpaid administrative leave. That meant fired, and everyone knew it. Knowing Kage, even for the very short time I had, I didn’t think he cared that everyone thought he’d made the right choice. He seemed like the kind of man who followed his own code. But watching all the cell-phone videos of Collins pulling his gun on the terrified Asian girl with the ponytail, and her dropping her shopping bags with baby stuff in them and then signing wildly at him, was enough to make anyone sick. The chief deputy was not having that guy work for him. Ever. It clearly illustrated that instruction was one thing, as was riding along with your fellow training officers, but being out in the field, on the job, was a whole other piece that you could either do or not. Collins could not. Her hand movements had freaked him out. He hadn’t even been able to parse what he was seeing. In the moment, making life-and-death decisions, you had to be made of stronger stuff. You also had to have your partner’s back no matter what.
The following week, Jeff Crosby and I were in the process of apprehending a fugitive, working with an FBI task force out of San Francisco. They had intel on a meet that was going down at a chop shop. Inside, once the special agent announced herself, bullets started flying. Seconds later, Crosby yelled for me to get out, as we were taking heavy fire. But I couldn’t leave the FBI agent twenty feet from me on the ground. He was shot but alive, and if we retreated, he’d be dead without medical attention.
“Cover me!” I yelled to Crosby, but instead, he went for the door.
“Covering,” another FBI agent yelled my way.
I ran out there, retrieved the fallen agent, and dragged him behind a really gorgeous silver Mercedes-Benz AMG GT 55 RWD that I hoped no one would shoot up. It was far too pretty to have bullet holes.
Once everyone was in custody and Agent Demming was on his way to the hospital, having made sure to grab my hand in thanks before he left, Crosby found me and ripped me a new one about putting him in danger. Partners didn’t do that, he said. And I agreed, but not in the way he thought—partners didn’t do that; partners had each other’s back.
When we returned to the office, the supervisory special agent who had been on site with me, Deidre Merriweather, was having a closed-door meeting with Becker. When they finally emerged, she charged across the office toward my desk. Her smile when she reached me was a surprise.
Thrusting her hand out, she said, “Agent Demming is going to be fine due to your quick action, Deputy.”
“Just doin’ my job.”
“And it was appreciated,” she assured me as we shook hands.
As she made her way toward the elevator, Becker called Crosby into his office. That was the last day he worked there. Unlike the others, he wasn’t terminated, simply transferred—to Alaska, we were later told.
The next day, I joined the guys from SOG, Special Operations Group, the tactical arm of the fugitive response unit, in securing the family of Alex Hollister, a whistleblower who had arranged to roll on his employer, Canning Steel, for shortcuts they’d made in several of their plants that led to three, so far, structural collapses. Hollister’s family had been taken by individuals who, we assumed, had been hired by the Canning Steel fixer. But when we checked the house in Evanston where the people were being held, there were so many more individuals than had been initially reported.