Ten Plagues

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” O’Shea held up both hands to defend himself, one clutching the half-eaten sandwich. “Okay, pick another word.”

“Well, I’d say we’re …” Keren caught herself. She’d spent plenty of time with O’Shea in the interrogation room, and she knew how good he was. He could make people admit to crimes they’d just thought about committing. Sometimes the lawyers, who were sitting in on the questioning, broke down and confessed to crimes they’d committed, unrelated to the case at hand. He didn’t usually use his talents on her, though.

She switched to attack mode just to even the playing field. “What’za matter, Mick, your pathetic life so boring you have to entertain yourself by making stuff up about me?”

O’Shea nodded, studying her like she was a menu at Burger King. “Good girl, I almost got you, but you recovered. So …” He returned to his sandwich and the beginning. “What’s the deal with you and the preacher?”

Keren rolled her eyes. She decided the statute of limitations was up on O’Shea’s order to sit, so she plopped back into her chair. “There’s no deal.”

“C’mon, honey, give. This is your old buddy Mick talking. I’ve seen the way you look at each other when you think no one is watching.”

“How does he look at me?” Keren caught herself again. Man, he was good. “I mean, not that you’re right, but tell me, just so I know what you’re imagining.”

O’Shea laughed.

Keren’s cheeks heated up.

O’Shea had, in many ways, stepped in and become a father to her since her own parents had started going to Fort Lauderdale for the winter and traveling extensively in a Winnebago year-round—except she’d have never talked so rudely to her father.

“Is there any chance you might choke to death on a meatball?”

“You don’t have that kind of luck.”

Finally, just to shut him up, she said, “Have you noticed that the preacher man is turning back into a cop?”

“Yeah, and it’s driving him nuts.” O’Shea nodded. “He falls into the lingo, changes his tone of voice and the way he holds himself. His whole attitude changes. Then he freezes up when he says something particularly cold blooded, and I can see the guilt. The poor guy’s struggling.”

“He asked me for a gun the night LaToya was dumped.”

“That was enough to make anyone fighting mad,” O’Shea said grimly.

“He asked for the gun in the heat of the moment, and he regretted it afterward,” Keren continued. “Then, only days later, when we went into Caldwell’s apartment building, he asked again. And this time he meant it. It wouldn’t surprise me if he shows up with a piece at the next dump site.”

“Does he have a license?” O’Shea, ever the cop, asked.

Keren shrugged. “They usually let former cops have one. I don’t know about concealed carry. That’s a little tougher.”

“They’d give him one,” O’Shea said with certainty. “Wanting to blow someone away has gotta be tearing him up inside. The day we first met him, in the hospital, I got the idea he was kind of meek. Strong in his convictions, but no dynamo, if you get what I mean.”

“Well, you were wrong—as usual.” Keren waited for O’Shea to turn red. He obliged her, then she laughed in his face. “He’s a tough cookie, even in preacher mode. But now he’s losing it. He’s a decent guy who left the hassles of law enforcement behind, and now it’s like he’s being taken over by it.”

“Is that admiration I hear?”

“Of course I admire him. He’s …” Keren caught herself again and fell silent.

“He could rejoin the force,” O’Shea said. “I’ve asked around. He was a good cop. As good as it gets.”

Keren shook her head. “I’d hate to see him do that. He has such peace in his life at that mission.”

“ ‘I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,’“ O’Shea said.

Keren was always startled when O’Shea came up with something Christian. She knew he was a man of faith, and she’d especially liked him because he respected her own strong beliefs, but he didn’t wear it on his sleeve.

“And we’re the sword, is that what you’re saying?” She was used to the idea that she battled evil, but she’d never heard it put quite that way before.

O’Shea hunched one shoulder. “On this case, with Caldwell, I’d say for sure we’re the sword. Somebody’s gotta be the sword, cuz this guy needs a sword taken to him—bad.”

Keren nodded and stared into space, thinking about how desperately they needed to stop Caldwell.

Finally, O’Shea broke the silence. “So what’s the deal with you and the preacher?”

Keren threw her coffee cup at him. She wished it was stoneware full of boiling hot coffee instead of Styrofoam and empty.

Keren crawled out of the lousy cot in the police lounge the next morning around five. “I want my apartment back,” she growled to no one, because no one else was stupid enough to sleep here.

Except she didn’t want her apartment back. No way did she want to sleep in that room with her memory of Katrina Hardcastle and all those flies.

She showered at the station house. She’d brought half her wardrobe in by now, and when she got out to her desk, O’Shea was waiting for her like the specter of death.