hopped on behind him, rested her hands lightly on his hips. “Now shut up and take me out before the kids wake up.”
He did. And for a few minutes they were fine.
14
Houston
Buzzing at her feet. An angry hiss, as if an inch-high demon were stuck in her purse.
Her BlackBerry. Again.
Probably the office. She couldn’t be sure. Because she couldn’t see it. Because she’d left it in her purse so she wouldn’t check it during dinner. Of course, if she’d really planned not to check it she would have left it at home.
She should have left it at home. She and Bri hadn’t had a date night in months. Tough to make time for dates when she didn’t get home until seven thirty on weeknights and spent every other weekend chasing a serial killer and maybe something else too in South Texas.
Now she sat across from Brian at a white-tablecloth sushi restaurant in River Oaks, Houston’s fanciest neighborhood, surrounded by oil company executives and their second wives. She and her husband were sipping sake they didn’t like and eating yellowtail rolls they couldn’t afford.
Happy anniversary!
Because not going out together for six months meant overcorrecting when the big night arrived, trying too hard to prove everything was copacetic. Even though Rebecca knew the mistake she was making. Even though she could still remember when the perfect meal was fried eggs and hash browns and a kitchen counter on which to enjoy Brian’s company.
Because those hash browns might not even have been that long ago—eleven years wasn’t that long—but that couple no longer existed. Might as well have been Antony and Cleopatra, that’s how dead they were. The days of push-the-plates-in-the-sink sex were gone and not coming back.
She and Brian needed to be a different couple, a grown-up couple. They needed to celebrate their anniversary properly. To find a new way to be together. Maybe the new way wasn’t as much fun as the old way, but they needed to pretend it was, or else…
“You can look,” Brian said. “It’s okay.”
“What?” She feigned surprise. Badly.
“I know you want to check, just go ahead.”
* * *
She’d been intimidated when they arrived in Texas three years before. The Houston office had over three hundred agents, many more than Birmingham, investigating everything from money-laundering by Mexican cartels to big white-collar crime cases like Enron.
What Rebecca had pulled off in Birmingham didn’t mean much here. And the office was very male. The bureau claimed almost a quarter of its agents were women. But that number was misleading. Human resources and other back-office jobs leaned female. Only a few women were frontline agents doing real investigative work.
For the first time Rebecca saw the bureau’s casual sexism. It had been hidden at Quantico, because headquarters watched training so closely. In Birmingham, Fred Smith hadn’t put up with it. But here male agents hung out after work at bars where the only women were cop groupies.
Smith had connected her with two agents he knew, but one rotated out a month after she arrived. The other had suffered a heart attack and retired. Quickly she felt like a cog in a big machine, jumped from case to case on the orders of her bosses. Whatever momentum she’d had from Birmingham was gone. She worried coming here had been a mistake.
It was Brian who gave her the answer.
“What about the US Attorney’s Office? Bet it’s not ninety percent guys.”
He was right. From what she’d seen, at least one-third of the prosecutors in Houston were women.
“You’ve got a law degree, they’ll like that. And maybe they’re tired of dealing with all that testosterone coming out of Jester.” T. C. Jester Drive, home of the bureau’s main Houston office, although the bureau was moving to a new building off the Northwest Freeway.
“You think the way to get ahead is to ignore what my bosses want and beg the AUSAs for help?” The question came out more aggressively than she’d intended.
“I think if the prosecutors like you, it’ll make your bosses happy, Becks. Have coffee with them. Help them out when you can.”
“Extra work.”
“Not usually a problem for you.”
I’m not worried about me.
* * *
Brian was right. The prosecutors took to her. Within six months they were asking for her. Her immediate supervisor, a crusty Oklahoman, tried to complain, but his boss told him to stop yapping. They like her, one less problem for me. Rebecca had to admit, for a guy who had always bounced from job to job, Brian understood office politics.
But she