cushy. I was always scared to death they might reassign me to traffic detail. I knew a school crossing guard who got her toes run over by a Volkswagen.”
He understood what she was saying, just as he understood that statistically air travel was safer than driving in a car, but those statistics didn’t make planes or police work any more appealing to him. He touched her hair with the tips of his fingers and wondered how she got it so silky. He felt the heat return and searched for a diversion. “Tell me more about being a cop. Did you like it?”
“Yup. It was the right thing for me to do at that point in my life. It wasn’t dramatic like on television. It was a job, and it gave me a sense of purpose. I think I basically have a blue-collar mentality. I like jobs that are physical. I wouldn’t be good sitting behind a desk all day making decisions or analyzing computer printouts.”
“I bet you were a good cop.”
“I was okay. Until the end.”
More silence stretched between them while Stephanie ran through the end in her mind, just as she always did when she thought of her life in Jersey City. She could feel Ivan watching her, feel the invisible support his presence always brought, and she knew he wanted to know more. She was surprised to find that she wanted to tell him more. He was a good partner. A good listener. A good friend.
He stretched his legs and leaned back on one elbow. “Are you going to tell me about it?”
“About being a cop?” She was hedging, she thought. Old habits die hard.
“About the end. Why did you quit?”
“Going for the jugular, huh?” Stephanie asked.
“I’ve been patient.”
She nodded. It was true. He’d been patient. And besides, the wound had healed. The embarrassment and disillusionment of her past had faded beside the glorious vitality of love and lust. “Okay. You want the long story or the short story?”
“The long story.”
Stephanie poured out the last cup of coffee and sipped slowly.
“When I graduated from the Police Academy, I didn’t look a day over sixteen, so I was the perfect person to plant in the schools. It was very small-time crime. All they wanted was to find out who the abusers were so they could get them into rehab and get rid of the pushers in the hallways and playgrounds. As I got older I gradually did more counseling and PR than undercover work.
“Then last fall two college kids I knew got hold of some bad stuff and died. They were good kids. Played basketball and thought they needed an edge, I guess. Turned out there was a lot of this junk floating around on the local campus. They needed someone with experience to find out where the stuff was coming from, and I was assigned to the project.”
She made a disgusted sound. “It was stupid of me to accept the assignment. I let my emotions and my ego override my good sense. I didn’t fit into the college scene, and I didn’t have the professional maturity to play with the big boys.
“Anyway, I graduated from high school to college and went undercover for four months. I was working with a federal agent named Amos Anderson, and one day he set up a meeting with a dealer at one of the Prentice Avenue piers. It was February, and the wind was blowing so bad across the pier the seagulls were flying backward. We stood there waiting, and after a while a big black limo pulled up and four people got out. Three kneebreakers and a suit, and as soon as I saw them I started to sweat. We were out there on this godforsaken pier with no place to go, and my knees were knocking together so bad you could hear them in Hoboken.
“The man in the suit walked right up to us, holding his hat on his head with both hands. ‘Windy,’ he shouted to us. ‘Yeah,’ we answered. ‘Lonely out here on a Sunday.’ ”
Stephanie gave her head a disbelieving shake. “No kidding. Who else but two crazy cops would be standing on a deserted pier in gale-force winds with a chill factor of twenty below?
“So the guy looked at Amos and said, ‘I understand you want to buy.’ Amos was such a pro. He came from Miami, and he’d been through this a hundred times. He just shrugged and said, maybe. They started talking, and in