He fixed his gaze on Ellie for a long moment before he finally blinked and turned back to Jayne. “I think losing her license is enough for one day. Are you going to drive now, or should I call for a tow?”
Both Brett and Jayne ignored Ellie’s snort as she rounded the car and climbed in on the passenger side.
“Guess that means I’m driving,” Jayne said with a short chuckle. “Thanks, Brett.”
Ellie sat staring out the passenger window and yes, okay, sulking a little, while Jayne adjusted the mirrors and driver’s seat. Just when Ellie thought they could finally leave, Jayne leaned out the window and called Brett back.
“If they’re going to make her take a safe driver’s course, where does she do that?”
Brett’s voice, flat and emotionless, filtered through the window. “The letter from the Motor Vehicle Branch will list all the accredited instructors in the area, or she can find a list online.”
“Okay, thanks!” Jayne waved out the window, started the car, and pulled onto the road with all the caution of a sixteen-year-old kid going for her first lesson. “Would it have killed you to thank him?”
“For what?” Ellie scoffed. “Revoking my license? Yeah, thanks a lot, Ponch—really appreciate that!”
“He didn’t revoke your license, the Motor Vehicle Branch did, and they probably should have done it a long time ago. How many tickets have you had?”
Ellie winced. “You mean lately or in total?”
“Ellie!” Jayne’s lips pinched tight for a second before she huffed out a breath and shook her head. “This is all on you; you can’t blame him for any of it. Hell, he did you a favor by not ticketing you for today.”
“I didn’t ask him to let me off.” She sounded like a spoiled child, but she didn’t care. When it came to cops in general—and particularly this one, for some reason—it was a knee-jerk reaction to respond this way. “His choice, not mine.”
Ellie held up her hand to pause whatever Jayne was going to say so she could answer her ringing phone.
“Hey, Reggie…Yeah, I know, but we ran into…um…a bit of a delay on the road. Besides, I’m with Jayne, so of course we’re late.”
“Hey!” Jayne cried, but they both laughed. If it hadn’t been for Brett pulling them over, they actually would have been on time for their hair appointments with Regan, which would have been a small miracle, since Jayne was never on time for anything.
“If Granny over here can manage to find fourth gear without putting us in the ditch, we should be there in five. It’s like she thinks the H-shape changes every time she drives.”
“Nice, Ellie.” Jayne stepped on the clutch, glanced down at the shifter, and only ground the gears a little trying to find fourth. “Mock my driving all you like, but of the two of us, which one still has her license?”
Touché.
Chapter 2
“I don’t make things difficult. That’s the way they get, all by themselves.”
—Detective Martin Riggs, Lethal Weapon
Every cop had at least one unsolved case sitting on his desk, and Brett was no different. For a year now he’d doggedly followed every tiny lead he could dig up on the hit-and-run, but he always ended up at the same place: nowhere.
The suspect vehicle, reported stolen a few days before the accident, had been found easily enough, but the driver had vanished. IDENT had been all over the truck and had ruled out as suspect every print they’d found. Painstaking dissections of the scene and both vehicles, as well as interviewing the victim and reviewing surveillance tapes, had given him nothing.
Bupkis. Nada. Zippo. Zilch.
And if that wasn’t annoying enough, the victim in the incident was Ellie, and the lack of movement in the case had only fueled her contempt for the police department. Pulling her over today hadn’t helped matters, but she’d been doing almost twenty clicks over the speed limit.
She was lucky it was he who’d pulled her over and not Constable Hudak, who would have been too happy to not only ticket Ellie but to impound her vehicle without so much as a second thought. He could have written her up today—hell, he probably should have—but a couple things changed his mind.
The first was that she’d just lost her license, and even though that was her own damn fault, he didn’t kick people when they were down. The second was that he knew she expected him to write her up. In fact, she wanted him to do it, because then she