Playing With Love (Hollow Point #3)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I believed Liza the other night when she said she was exhausted. She was tired of always having to be strong. However, last night watching her deal with Frank and to some extent Greg, I now had a better understanding and her exhaustion had nothing to do with a six-hour road trip where she played DJ between calls from Shannon and Jason, and snoozing. No, it had to do with the amount of shit she put up with as soon as we got to the hotel in Knoxville.

We’d checked in, gotten Allyson sorted in her room, dropped off our bags, and gone down to the bar in the lobby to wait for her colleagues to join us for a brief. Frank had already proven to be a dick, I reckoned he sucked at his job from the little time I’d spent in his presence. But it went beyond him being a lazy asshole. The man was completely incompetent and had to look to Greg to field Liza’s questions. Greg’s irritation with Frank was undeniable. He was over babysitting and wanted to dump Frank back on Liza.

It was Greg who had surprised me. He was friendly. He was smart as hell. He’d been with the ATF a hell of a lot longer than Liza and he was a training agent. So at first when he asked Liza to explain her every thought, I figured that was just his way to encourage deep critical reasoning and how to articulate ideas. But the more he did it, the more it began to feel like an interrogation and less like a seasoned agent mentoring a respected peer. The longer I sat there, the more pissed I got. Liza sensed this and sent me a text telling me not to speak.