Chapter 6
Puppies and Teeth
“HEY, CROSBY, how’s it hangin’?”
“Low and inside, Chadwick, like a good curveball, right?”
Chadwick’s laugh at the tired joke set Joey’s teeth on edge.
Six months in, he was starting to appreciate a few things.
The job and how it varied day to day. The unit and how everybody wanted to learn, to get better, to make their world better.
The weather—it got cold in New York, even in the fall, and having gotten there in April and surviving the salt-mugginess of the summer, Joey was thrilled to experience the honest to God cold of October.
After six years of hot in South America, the cold he remembered from a childhood in Massachusetts was to be appreciated.
And Joey had started to appreciate Chadwick. A lot. Because he was wicked smart, wicked funny, and a wicked stone-cold killer.
Chester Schumer wasn’t the only psychopath they’d come up against, and Gideon Chadwick—who looked like a college professor and analyzed with the clear-eyed precision of a human computer assessing other humans—could draw his gun and fire without batting an eyelash.
And his marksmanship was outstanding. Joey had been the hotshot of his unit, but he and Chadwick competed weekly, and after six months were in a dead heat for small weapons.
They were both aware that the rest of the team had stopped betting on these occasions. You could only have a draw so many times.
And while Chester Schumer was one of three fatalities over that time (and the only one killed in hand-to-hand combat), after twice watching Chadwick literally shoot the hat off a suspect’s head and then watching the suspect drop to the ground in fear and surrender, Joey was starting to feel safe with the guy.
Sure, he’d drag Joey off to a rock concert or a stage musical whenever he could score tickets, and he’d literally forced Joey to read a book by Richard Feynman (that Joey reluctantly enjoyed), but that just meant that, like the combat skills and the brilliant analytical mind, Chadwick had depth.
Joey, who had always thought his ability to survive was the one thing that made him unique, was starting to appreciate depth. In fact he was starting to appreciate how being partnered with Gideon Chadwick seemed to give him more depth.
But what he didn’t particularly appreciate was how happy Chadwick was to spread the depth.
The Kathy thing hadn’t lasted long. Yeah, they’d done the thing.
She’d come up to Manhattan or he’d go down to DC for a weekend, but after two months, Joey had seen him getting bored, and with that sort of commute, it was easier to let it fade.
Joey didn’t ask, but he was sure it was done “amicably,” because that’s how you did things when you enjoyed something, but it was too much hassle to continue for long.
Joey hadn’t been happy about the Kathy situation, but Kathy hadn’t taken much of Chadwick’s focus when he’d been at work, or even off work, so he’d dealt.
But the Crosby situation… that was irritating.
Joey couldn’t even say why it was irritating.
Crosby himself wasn’t as bad as Joey had first thought.
He looked like he should be a meatloaf. He held himself with the sort of humility that recognized he would always be a meatloaf.
But while Chadwick and Joey held the small-arms title in their unit, Crosby held the long-range weapon title, from bolt-action to semiauto, from hunting rifle to extreme long-range sniper rifles.
Crosby had the fortitude, patience, physics awareness, and instincts to fire a projectile across several football fields and have it go exactly where he’d planned.
It wasn’t a stupid man’s specialty.
Neither was Crosby’s people sense, which was unfailingly on point.
Joey and Chadwick would arrive on scene, and Chadwick would start scouting a profile, and Joey would start scouting evidence and opportunity, and Crosby, without fail, would be talking to the actual victim or sometimes the perpetrator.
Nine times out of ten, Joey had watched him de-escalate a situation by treating somebody scared and freaked out and terrified into remembering they were a human fucking being.
It was that one time out of ten, when they were dealing with a psychopath, that Crosby needed the entire unit to back him up.
And usually he had Pearson. Joey would have said she was a psychopath, except she wasn’t.
She was terrifyingly good with knives and carried an illegal five-inch fixed blade in a holster in the small of her back and another three-inch at her ankle.
Of the three fatalities, one had been Denison—the perpetrator had been too high to even know she was cutting off the air in his windpipe with her garotte as he held a gun to Harding’s head.
One had been Chadwick’s sure shooting—the bad guy had been rushing Joey with his knife out while Joey was handcuffing the man’s brother, and nobody was close enough to take him down any other way. And the other had been Pearson.
She’d been grappling with a man twice her size, and when she’d broken away and pulled her defense weapon, he’d laughed and jumped right on top of her.
And had been dead before she’d sidestepped him as he hit the ground.
Joey had seen the aftermath. You’d think there’d be a lot of blood with a heart wound, but she’d hit it so cleanly, it had stopped beating before much blood had spurted.
Nobody on the team was afraid of battle—not even Crosby, who had fired a couple of shots to wound and had done it accurately without hesitation.
So Joey couldn’t pinpoint his irritation with the guy.
He was friendly, paid his bar tabs when everybody went out after work, contributed to the conversation, and was often even funny.
And he spent his Saturdays either taking seminars, working on classes, or helping with open cases with the rest of the unit.
He was like the guy at school who was the class president, the school valedictorian, the guy who tutored kids on the side for his church, and who, in person, was funny and decent.
Joey couldn’t stand that guy.
But here, now, listening to Chadwick greet him with genuine warmth and Crosby reply with a shy smile, he really couldn’t stand him, and that’s when it got him.
Oh fuck. Joey was jealous.
Not romantically (really?). Joey didn’t advertise, but he wasn’t particularly discriminating when it came to the gender of a sex partner. Mostly he thought of them as fallow deer who were to be set upon, devoured, and then left behind.
He didn’t… couldn’t think of Chadwick like that.
It was much more visceral than that. Chadwick was Joey’s.
Sure he could have other sex partners, as long as his main focus was Joey.
And while Chadwick didn’t seem particularly romantically interested in Crosby, he could be, and that would be a threat to Joey.
As Crosby made small talk about how badly New England sucked in the playoffs, and Chadwick asked him how close he’d gotten to playing pro ball, Joey realized how small that made him.
“Yeah, I was only a few games away from the end of the season,” Crosby said with a philosophical shrug. “We were set to win division and compete in the Citrus Bowl when that illegal tackle came out of nowhere. It would’ve been nice, but then I wouldn’t have ended up here.”
Oh Christ. He was so fucking earnest. Joey had read the guy’s file, trying to use Gideon Chadwick skills to see what Gideon Chadwick saw in him.
What he saw was that this guy had gone against his entire department to find a serial murderer who’d been trying to start a gang war, and his house had been so grateful for Crosby bringing the guy down single-handedly, they’d tried to kill him when he’d gone against another flatfoot who’d shot a Black teenager in the back.
Crosby had done more than just have the bad luck to blow his knee out like every other jock on the planet. He was there through character, hard work, and intelligence.
Joey hated that guy.
But he couldn’t be cruel or dismissive of him either.
Fuck.
“Well, we’re all glad you’re here,” Harding said. “But we’ve got to get you a better coffee cup.”
Harding glanced pointedly at Chadwick, who grimaced. Joey wondered about that. Pearson’s coffee cup was a cat holding a bloody dripping knife. Chadwick’s cup was a fox in a cap and gown. Everybody had personalized coffee cups except him and Crosby.
Except last week Joey had run down a suspect by following his trail through a park, noting the way his footsteps had disturbed leaves and left impressions in the soft ground. The chase had ended when Joey had executed a flying tackle and handcuffed the guy when they landed.
That Monday, Joey had gotten to work, and in the place where his usual cup—plain white porcelain with Joey’s name in Sharpie—usually sat was a cup with a cartoon wolf on it, wearing a slick suit.
And Joey had seen the cup and gotten it. He’d tracked that guy down like a wolf, and he liked a slick outfit after work.
Nobody said anything (except Pearson, who’d saluted him slightly), and Joey realized that the cup needed to be earned.
And Crosby didn’t have one yet.
Oh. Bummer.
Abruptly Joey hated him a little less.
And with that lessening of distracting emotion, he could pay attention to the situation Harding was rolling out.
“Meet Kent and Colin Gleeson,” Harding said, firing up the screen at the end of the conference room. “The Dogfight Brothers.”
“Brothers?” Denison was the one to say it.
Kent Gleeson was six two, Black, with two thick braids coming from his temples down his back, and heavily tattooed with handsome tribal markings.
Colin was White, five six, with brown hair buzz-cut into a ragged mullet and pale blue red-rimmed eyes.
They were as different as two humans could appear, right down to Colin’s yellow meth teeth and Kent’s gold inlaid grill.