with his daughters. And that was a disappointment he couldn’t handle; he saw them once a week and valued his time with them. Missing out on seeing them for work was unacceptable.
Fred moved on to the Saturday Night Fever collection.
If I can’t have you
I don’t want nobody, baby
If I can’t have you—
“Shut the FUCK up, Fred.” Crawford took a few steps away from Fred; with Fred singing to him, they looked less like cops than a gay couple in the middle of an argument.
He had been holding the same cup of coffee for the last hour; he took a swig of lukewarm sludge and grimaced.
Fred turned and looked at him. “And what is your problem?”
Crawford folded his arms across his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said, none too convincingly. “Just stop singing.” He watched the woman across the street play with the diamond necklace on her neck as she shot them an impatient look. She was as tired as they were, and she got to parade up and down the avenue in a four-thousand-dollar necklace and Manolo Blahnik shoes instead of standing in the hot sun with a partner who wasn’t as funny as he thought he was. Crawford avoided her gaze and focused on his shoes.
“We’ve got to get back on the Stark homicide,” Crawford said.
Fred grunted.
“What?”
Fred kept his eye on Carmen but addressed Crawford. “You’re a little too interested in the case, don’t you think?” Fred took a sip of cold coffee. “Do you want to solve it to close the case or do you want to get back into someone’s good graces?”
Crawford tensed. He and Fred never disagreed about anything; they knew each other too well. But Fred was treading on rocky territory, and if Crawford were really honest with himself and his partner, Fred had a point. He was more than a little ticked that they had been pulled off the case; any breaks in the case would give him an excuse to talk to Alison and, hopefully, see her.
“That case is a bag of shit,” Fred repeated.
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s a Miceli hit, Bobby. Plain and simple. And we know that with Miceli hits, whoever did it is in the wind.”
Crawford shook his head. “I’m not so sure. I think we can find who did it.”
The conversation ended when Fred tensed. “What’s that?” he asked and pointed across the street.
A scraggly-looking man came out of the alley between a shoe store and an Italian deli and approached the female police officer. He reached for her throat and attempted to pull the necklace from it, only to find himself in a half nelson.
Fred was into the middle of the street before Crawford had a chance to react. When it finally registered what was happening, he leapt over a parked car and darted into traffic, doing a forward roll over a taxi and landing on the double yellow line flat on his feet. Cars screeched to a halt and horns blared as the two ran across the avenue. Crawford grabbed the gun on his hip and pulled his shield from beneath his shirt as he bounded up to the female cop and her quarry.
“You okay, Carmen?” he asked. Carmen Montoya was small but strong, and had the perp on the ground, a stiletto heel straddling his neck. He flailed beneath her as she checked her manicure. Carmen had been a classmate of Crawford’s in the academy, and while she had a little “junk in the trunk”—the term Fred liked to use to refer to her sizable backside—she was as tough and smart as they came. She smiled at him as she adjusted the strap on her five-hundred-dollar shoes. Fred took over for her and pinned the perp to the sidewalk, reading him his Miranda rights as he huffed and puffed from his sprint across Riverdale Avenue.
“Way to stick your landing,” she remarked, having witnessed his gymnastics across the cab. “Do I have to give back the shoes?”
Crawford let out a laugh. “I think so.”
She reached up and pinched Crawford’s cheek, leaving her hand there. “You so cute, Crawford,” she said in a Puerto Rican accent that she affected for his benefit. She had a master’s degree from John Jay and was on the sergeant’s list. “When we gonna hook up, papi?”
“When your four kids go to college and your deputy inspector husband is on a respirator,” he said, pulling the perp up from the sidewalk by his handcuffs.
She walked off, her backside packed into a black skirt,