Cold Hard Steele (Daggers & Steele Book 2) (28 page)

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell the Captain,” I said. “Mum’s the word.”

The big guy shook his head and walked off.

Shay nudged me in the ribs. “So…you finally figured out who Cairny’s dating, did you?”

“Give me some credit,” I said. “I may be slow, but I’m not stupid.”

Shay rolled her eyes, but she might’ve done it ironically.

I let it slide. “Come on. I’ll walk you out.”

I accompanied my partner to the station’s double doors and onto the precinct’s front steps. The city lanterns that hung every third of a block provided little light, but the waning moon still packed some punch—enough to prevent me from tripping on a pot hole and breaking my neck on my walk home.

Shay stood on the steps. A light breeze tickled her neck and lifted a loose strand of hair up across her face. With a delicate finger, she wrangled the strand and tucked it back behind her ear. She glanced at me as she did so.

I don’t think Shay intended anything special to be delivered with that glance. It was a glance like any other, one that could’ve conveyed curiosity or apprehension or nothing at all. But regardless of her intentions, the glance triggered something within me—the well of emotions I’d been struggling with, but more than that, too.

My mind sagged under a combination of feelings and memories. I felt a heightened awareness of the two long years I’d spent divorced from my wife, Nicole, and the maddening quiet that had reigned over my apartment ever since. I confronted the excessive number of hours I’d spent at Jjade’s, wallowing in beer and conversation and crowd noise to fill the various holes inside of me. And I succumbed to a new feeling, the feeling I’d so recently embraced outside Cynthia’s apartment, the one that rejected my emotional tethers to the past while acknowledging the changes I needed to make to avoid the same pitfalls as before. It was a feeling of possibilities, countless possibilities, and yet one solitary possibility all at the same time—a possibility that stood before me, glancing at me, and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Are you alright, Daggers?” Shay said.

“Me? Oh…yeah, I’m fine.” I scratched the back of my neck and took a deep breath.
Here goes nothing
. “But, um…it’s dark.”

My partner smiled. “That’s very astute of you. Did you just notice it? Because it’s been this way for a couple hours.”

I cleared my throat. “That didn’t come out the way I’d intended. What I meant was, since it’s dark, I could walk you home if you’d like. You know…for safety.”

“Oh.” Shay blinked. “Well, that’s very nice of you, Daggers. And I’d accept, but…”

I felt a constriction in my chest. Combined with my bruised ribs, it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. “But what?”

“I was actually thinking about getting some dinner first.”

“Oh,” I said.

Shay raised her eyebrows and tilted her head. “Would you like to join me?”

“Wait…are you asking me out to dinner?” I said.

“I don’t have anyone else to dine with,” she said. “And as annoying as you can be sometimes, I prefer your company to none at all.”

I nodded. “I’ve been told I grow on people. Kind of like a fungus.”

That made Shay smile, and that in turn made
me
smile.

“One condition though,” said Steele. “I get to choose where we eat.”

I performed an exaggerated eye roll. “Oh. Well, I
guess
that’s fair seeing as you didn’t get a fair choice on lunch today. Where’d you have in mind?”

“I was thinking that gnome place a few blocks away.”

“What?
The one with the terrible noodles? I thought you hated that place.”

“Not that dump,” said Shay. “The sit down restaurant with the little steamed goat dumplings and the seaweed soup.”

“Oh, that one,” I said. “Well, sure. I’m in. I love that place.”

“Really?” Shay looked at me askance. “It seems a little gastronomic for your tastes.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “I love dumplings. Anything I can eat with my fingers is fine in my book.”

“You know, technically you can eat just about anything with your fingers,” said Shay as we started walking.

I tapped my digits on my chin. “Good point. I might have to try eating more foods with my hands. It might open up new sensory avenues of tastes and textures. However, I can’t imagine the strategy would go over well. Certainly not at any of the places you drag me to.”

“Not so much.” Shay glanced at me again, smiled, and shook her head.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “I started imagining all the uncouth ways you might ruin a nice dinner. Chief among them was you whipping out that most recent Rex Winters novel and reading in the middle of the meal.”

“Don’t tempt me,” I said, raising a finger. “I’m still not done with it, you know.”

“So what do you think’s going to happen to the series now that the ghostwriter’s dead?”

I shrugged. “Who knows. It’ll probably revert back to Frank Gregg writing them, in which case I’d be better off not reading them anymore.”

“Maybe you could do it,” said Shay.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Be the ghostwriter,” she said.

I gave her a look indicating how half-baked I thought that idea was.

“No, I’m serious,” she said. “You’re clearly a die-hard fan of the series, so you know all the characters and plot lines intimately. You’ve got experience as a real life detective, which I’m sure could give you tons of ideas for future story lines. And you’re always complaining about how you don’t have enough spare cash and how you have nothing to do in the evenings.”

I scratched my chin. “Ok, while all of that’s true, here’s the thing. My job entails taking subtle clues and using them to recreate a picture of past events, sorting through lies and fibs and half-truths from dozens of sources, and generally putting my life on the line as herds of brain-addled thugs and bloodthirsty killers try to turn my body into fertilizer. Writing, on the other hand? That’s
hard.”

Shay smiled, and I returned the favor. I could tell it’d be late indeed before I got to polish off the last of
Rex Winters in Double Blind Danger
, and that fact didn’t bother me in the slightest.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hi. I’m Alex P. Berg, a mystery, fantasy, and science fiction author with a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering and a taste for heavy metal music. If you enjoyed this Daggers & Steele mystery, be sure to check out the next novel in the series,
Time to Steele
.

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