breaths. “What should I do?”
“Cop a plea,” he said and started laughing.
“This is not funny, Crawford.” I bit my lip. “He’s coming. I have to hang up.”
“Tell him that I—” I heard him say before I flipped the phone closed and put it on the seat beside me.
The trooper tapped on my window, surprising me with the speed at which he had arrived, and I hit the roll-down button. He was a chiseled-jaw Ken doll, kind of cute in a plastic-doll kind of way, with intense blue eyes and, apparently, no sense of humor. His gun was drawn and hanging down by his side. To me, it didn’t look like your standard traffic stop, but how menacing could a woman in pajamas be? Judging by his behavior, very. “License and registration, ma’am.”
I didn’t have either one with me and had to confess that.
“Step out of the car, ma’am.”
I let out a little laugh. “I’m in my pajamas.”
He didn’t seem to care. The trooper stood next to the car, stone-faced, waiting for me to follow his order. When I got out, he asked me to place my hands on the hood of the car. The rain was heavier than when I had left the house and I was soaked instantly. The trooper began patting me down, and unlike my fantasies about being frisked, it wasn’t exciting at all.
It was starting to dawn on me that perhaps I was under arrest.
Crawford sat on the edge of his desk, facing away from the squad room, eating a Krispy Kreme doughnut from the box that Carmen had brought him when she arrived in the squad a few minutes earlier. Champy had gone out with a young detective to interview a witness in a homicide from the day before and, once again, things in the squad were quiet. He hadn’t heard from Alison in the last two hours and all of his calls to her cell phone went directly to voice mail. He felt guilty that he had laughed when she had sounded so nervous; it was apparent that something had happened since their last conversation. He ate the rest of the doughnut—his third—in one bite and dug into the box for another one.
“Easy, big fella,” Carmen said, noticing his excessive eating. She was at her desk, typing a “five” at her ancient computer. “She’ll call.”
He swung around. “Where do the Staties take you for questioning?”
Carmen shrugged. “Don’t know. Where was she when you last spoke?”
“She said that she was at Stew Leonard’s. I don’t even know who that is.”
Carmen laughed. “Not who, baby. What.” She stood and tottered over to his desk. Today, her sizable backside was packed into a pair of skintight black pants and four-inch high-heeled boots were on her feet. The buttons of her shiny red top strained across her bosom and she pulled the tail of the shirt down over her hips. “It’s a giant grocery store in Yonkers. Right off the thruway. You know, right after the fifty-cent toll?”
“Right,” he said.
“You think they took her in?” she asked, grimacing.
He nodded.
She exhaled loudly. “That can’t be good. Those Staties got no sense of humor. And you can’t reach out to them, they’re so fucking insecure, thinking you’re going to steal their collar or whatever.” She perched on the edge of his desk. “What makes you think they took her in?”
“Well, she was speeding, she probably didn’t have her license or registration, and God knows what she said when she got stopped. I think they took her in. You know how they are.” Crawford worked on his doughnut, licking powdered sugar off his thumb. “I have no idea where they would take her, though. Any ideas?”
“Not a clue,” she said. “I’ll call Ricardo and see what he can find out,” she said, picking up Crawford’s phone and dialing her husband. She put her hand over the receiver. “His cousin Javier has been a trooper for the last couple of years. Dios mio,” she said, fanning herself. “What a gorgeous man, that Javier. That man is built like a brick sh—” Ricardo must have picked up because her tone changed in an instant. “Hey, honey.” She explained Crawford’s situation, waited a moment and then hung up. “He’ll call us right back.”
Crawford finished the doughnut and took another one from the box. He held it out to Carmen. “Want one?”
“Trust me, Crawford. That will look better on your hips than mine.” She put her hands on her hips and wiggled from side to