Dim Sum Asylum(5)

“Let him up. He’s C-Town’s,” the inspector grumbled, holding my badge out to me as a uniform released my wrists. They hurt from being bound too tight, but I wasn’t going to argue. If I’d arrived on the scene late as they had, I’d have taken down any shooter I saw too.

The wind grabbed my hair and whipped the black strands around my face, stinging my eyes. I’d left it long around my jaw to piss off the Captain, but at times like these, I wondered if it wouldn’t be easier to cut it off. My long leather coat kept most of the chill out, but the knees of my jeans now had holes in them, and the cold gnawed on my legs. I thought longingly of the department vehicle I’d left parked on Kearny. It was too wide to drive hard through Chinatown after a fleeing thief, but at least the interior had been warm and out of the wind.

The cop tilted his head up to look me in the eye. “You okay? Who’s the gunman?”

“My partner,” I said, bending over to catch my breath. My lungs felt like I’d inhaled splinters, and my ribs ached where I’d been slammed into the pier. “Inspector Myron Arnett. Raided a dragons’ nest of eggs worth about eleven million yen. He’s responsible for the civilian loss.”

“Dirty? Damn,” the officer said flatly, staring over my shoulder at Myron’s twitching body. “What’s this world coming to?”

“Yeah,” I said shakily, taking my gun back from the uniform when he handed it over. Internal Affairs would want it, but they were giving me the courtesy of handing it over myself. That went a long way in my book. “Thanks.”

“Guess we should help the EMTs get those lizards off of him.” He didn’t look inclined to move. The force was spread too thin, and catching one of our own with dirty hands didn’t sit well among us.

No one moved. There was some throat clearing, and I heard one of the uniforms warn someone out of the crime scene perimeter, but that was about it.

“We could. We should,” I replied, watching the lizards getting their breakfast in. “Better yet, how about if you take her statement? I’ll see about notifying the deceased’s next of kin. The least I can do is let them know it was quick.”

Unclipping his notebook, the cop said, “I’m sorry about your partner, Inspector, but I’d have shot him too.”

“Thanks.” I nodded. “Hopefully the dragons will leave something behind. I’d like my Captain to have something other than my ass to chew on.”





Two


IT’S NEVER a good thing when my shift starts with me standing in Captain Gaines’s office.

It’d been more than a week since I shot Arnett, and Internal Affairs still owned me. Or at least they still shackled me. A lantern-jawed interrogator wrung me out for three days, then left me with a toddler-sized pile of paperwork to complete by hand. They’d taken my badge and gun, leaving me with a cramped wrist and generally pissed off at the world. I’d been separated from the rest of the squad, told not to go anywhere near the division.

I had no second thoughts about shooting Arnett. If anything, IA could hold me in limbo as long as they wanted, poking and prodding at me, but I would never have an ounce of remorse about my actions. The biggest regret I had was not shooting Arnett sooner. If I had, the young fae he’d killed would have been picking out her work clothes for the day instead of her family having to choose what she would wear on her funeral pyre.

Not one single regret except for the weight of her death on my soul.

It was almost too much to hope I’d be free, but I couldn’t think of any other reason Gaines would call me in. Except for the small matter of me blowing off a dinner he’d ordered me to come to—but a quick phone call to his husband excused me from that without me having to say a single word to the Captain.

I stood at the front of his desk with my gaze pinned to the wall directly behind him. I knew the wall intimately. It was close to the color of creamed peas and had a hairline crack running from the ceiling down to the large painting of a seascape hanging behind Gaines. It wasn’t a good painting, but the sloppy G signature on the bottom right of the canvas kept me from making any critiques. It was the same signature as on my birthday checks, and while I might lack common sense, no one could say I was stupid.

Even with me standing and Gaines lounging in his office chair, his head bobbed into my view, a tight military cut to his salt-and-pepper hair and the wink of gold from the rims of his glasses. Gaines’s tailored uniform made him seem enormous, a thickly muscled strongman from an old-time carnival show with his full heavily salted mustache a fat bush under his hook nose.

I’d spent the last week avoiding this talk, but eventually even the devil has to pay his due. And my time’d certainly come.

“Tell me something, MacCormick,” he barked, and I glanced down, inwardly wincing when I saw a vein jerking on his temple. “Explain to me again why you shot your partner? I’ve got IA’s reports, and I’d sooner shovel out stables than read through that pile of crap. Report’s too damned long to read. You’d think those assholes got paid by the word.”

“He indicated a desire to remove the dragon eggs from the nest we’d been tagged to barricade off from the general public, sir. I told him it was ill-advised. The species is under protection and the eggs were relatively protected where they were. Chances of reintroducing human-incubated crested dragons to a skein are slim. I’d assumed he was talking about protecting an endangered species, not removing the clutch for his personal profit.” I kept my voice even, but the Irish in me rose, lilting my words. “While I was retrieving the barricade tape from our issued vehicle, Inspector Arnett approached the nest and extracted what appeared to be the entire clutch.”