he couldn’t help but imagine her shaking out the bun and letting her hair down. Nicky, sweetie, how about you and me . . .
“Jungle juice?” she asked.
“Methadone,” the big marshal grunted.
The pretty Polynesian nodded slowly, adding another term to her lexicon of street slang, and returned her focus to the wet street.
Ranucci set the sandwich in his lap, exchanging it for a paper cup and straw he held between his knees. He’d already drained it twice.
Cutter poured him some more water from a plastic bottle.
Nicky drank it all immediately. The water gave him a little courage. “Ma’am,” he said, earning himself a side-eye from the big deputy beside him.
Deputy Lola looked in the rearview mirror. “Yes?”
“Can I ask what you are?”
Her eyes were stones in the mirror, unreadable.
“What I am? I’m a deputy US marshal.”
“No,” Nicky said. “I mean, I was just wondering if you were Samoan or Hawaiian or what.”
She made a buzzer noise. “Wrong,” she said. “None of the above. Cook Island Maori.”
“Maori,” Nicky said, giving a little nod like he understood, though he did not. Then it dawned on him. “Like the New Zealand guys with those scary tattoos, who do that dance.”
“Very good,” Deputy Lola said.
“I read they were savages until the eighteen hundreds, when the missionaries came.”
“Savages?” Lola chuckled.
“That’s what I read,” Nicky said. “I read they were cannibals.”
“You know,” Deputy Lola said, staring at him in the rearview mirror. “Those are my people you’re talking about. I’m one of those savages.”
Nicky gave a nervous chuckle. “But you’re not a cannibal.”
Deputy Lola’s eyes grew wide as saucers in the mirror, showing their whites. At the same time, she drew her lips back in a horrifying grimace that nearly made him piss his pants.
“I could be,” she said.
Ranucci looked away, then gave the chains another rattle.
“How about it, Marshal? What do you say about the cuffs?”
Cutter looked him in the eye long enough to make him uncomfortable—which didn’t take very long—and then gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head, less than Mount Rushmore moved in the wind. “You’re doin’ great.”
Lola spoke over her shoulder again. “Sure you don’t want a burger?”
Yeah, she was hot all right. She looked like she could kick his ass, but it would almost be worth it for the physical contact . . .
Deputy Lola snapped her fingers to bring him out of his stupor. “A Big Mac or something? Jailhouse bologna can’t be very tasty.”
“I’m good.” Ranucci used the shoulder of his tan scrubs to wipe mustard off the corner of his mouth. “Guys in my cellblock would smell it on my breath and beat my ass. Snitches get stitches. Know what I mean? They’d figure I did something to earn the reward.”
Ranucci’s mouth watered at the idea of an actual hamburger. He closed his eyes and tried not to imagine food beyond what he got in Cook Inlet Pretrial. Life inside was hard enough for a wigged-out junkie. It would be impossible for a snitch with a burger on his breath. He groaned, and craned his neck again to reach the last of his sandwich, since he wasn’t about to get any help with the chains.
Deputy Cutter was obviously the boss, but for some reason the big guy had opted to sit in the back of the SUV with the prisoner and let the pretty Hawaiian drive. Maybe the two of them had something going. Ranucci had enough experience with cops to know that the senior guy rarely took a seat next to a junkie. Hell, Nicky Ranucci wouldn’t have sat next to himself if he could have avoided it. And there was the whole partner thing, friends, confidants, badges with benefits . . . He’d heard about the PD’s no booty on duty policy. Policies like that didn’t happen without a reason.
Deputy Lola shrugged, working something out in that beautiful head of hers as she made the block.
“So,” she said, “Twig’s cousin owns that car lot?”
“As I understand it,” Ranucci said. “They’re not close or anything. Fact is, Twig don’t trust him. You know—”
The big guy cut him off. “Does Sam deal heroin?”
Ranucci chuckled. “Nah. He just has the poor luck to be related to an asshole like Twig. I never even saw the guy until a couple of days ago. Twig was trying to score some black tar from my dealer for resale, earn a little money to live on. Know what I mean? My dealer thought he might be a cop, so we followed him