Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)(21)

“The hell you will.”

Lucia smiled. She loved goading him to talk.

“Etch,” she repeated. “Like hache, see? It’s a good name.”

His protests didn’t matter. Even his male colleagues picked up the nickname. It fit, they said. He’d been Etch ever since.

Seven months into their partnership, they got a call for backup from the Pig Stand restaurant on South Alamo—two officers on a disturbance call, a fight between a woman and her jilted boyfriend. The officers on the scene were having trouble subduing the male assailant.

The Pig Stand was an old diner even in ’75. A slim box of glass and neon and brick, it sat on a triangle of asphalt where South Flores scissored into South Alamo. Its most remarkable feature was the giant concrete pig outside.

The two patrolmen who needed help were Ingram and Halff, old-timers in the department. Hernandez knew damn well they would never have picked a Latino and a Latina to be their backup, but they sure as hell needed help.

Judging from the broken furniture and shattered windows, the fight had started inside and moved out into the parking lot.

Ingram was lying on his back in the diner doorway. Etch didn’t know whether he was dead or just unconscious. Halff was on the pavement, being straddled and beaten by the assailant, a long-haired Anglo biker who must’ve weighed three-fifty. A woman knelt next to him, crying, trying to pull him off the cop. She had a bloody mouth and a black eye and her paisley dress was torn.

The biker was yelling at half-conscious Officer Halff: “I’ll do whatever the f**k I want to her! You understand? Whatever the f**k I want!”

Lucia started forward, but Etch said, “Let me handle this.”

“Etch—”

“No. Stay back. Call for an ambulance.”

He didn’t wait for her to argue. There was no way he was going to send a woman into a brawl like this.

Etch drew his weapon and approached the biker. He yelled the right commands in just the right tone of voice. He was cool. He’d done this before. He didn’t know that the biker was pumped up on Angel Dust, something nobody in San Antonio had seen yet. It wouldn’t be common on the streets for another ten years.

The biker reared and charged with such intensity Etch never had time to shoot. He saw a flash of black and he was on the pavement, the barrel of his own gun swimming in front of his face.

“I’ll start with you!” the biker yelled, pressing the muzzle against Etch’s forehead. “Cops in my business! I’ll do you first!”

Etch realized there wasn’t going to be any help. There wasn’t time. The biker would murder three cops and his girlfriend just because it felt good. Then he would probably shoot himself. Etch knew cops who had died this way. He just never thought he would be one of them.

“Hey, ass**le!” Lucia yelled, somewhere off to the left. “Maybe it’s because you got no dick.”

The biker lurched toward her voice. The pressure of the gun muzzle eased up a little between Etch’s eyes. “What?”

“You heard me,” Lucia called.

Etch could only see her feet behind the patrol car, but he understood what she was doing—crouching for cover, both hands on her weapon, elbows steadied against the hood of the car. Etch wanted to scream no. He couldn’t allow her to die, too. And yet he was totally powerless.

“I’ll kill this motherf*cker!” the biker warned.

“Yeah,” Lucia said. “Because you got no dick. No wonder your girlfriend left you.”

“You bitch!”

“That’s right,” Lucia coaxed. “I’m the one you should be mad at. I’m laughing at you—a dickless coward who beats up his defenseless girlfriend. How’d you do against me, ass**le? Come on, show me your gun.”

“I’ll kill you, you goddamn—”

He took the gun off Etch and pointed it at Lucia, which is what she’d been waiting for.

She shot him through the heart.

A month later, an official hearing cleared Lucia to return to patrol. The brass presented her a medal of bravery for saving three officers’ lives. She got an avalanche of press attention. She turned down offers of better assignments and went right back to patrol.

Etch and Lucia started meeting at the Pig Stand for dinner every night before their shift. Surprisingly, the manager was glad to see them. He comped every meal.

The changes between Lucia and Etch were subtle but seismic. She had saved his life.

“Thank you,” he told her one night, the first time he’d been able to say it.

Lucia looked up from her plate of onion rings. “No problem, Etch.”

He didn’t object to the name.

“How did you know the guy would turn the gun on you?” he asked. “How did you know what to say?”

She smiled ruefully. “I’ve made it a point to understand men.”

“Even men like that?”

“Especially men like that.”

He sensed more of a story there. He knew she was a single mom, raising a nine-year-old daughter named Ana. Speculation around the department was Lucia had to be lesbian. But Etch wasn’t so sure.

He’d never noticed the amber color of her eyes before, the way her short black hair curled behind her ears. She wore no makeup, but she had nice lips, the color of plums. He found himself wondering what she would look like in civilian clothes—a dress, perhaps.