Triptych (Will Trent #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,5
fingers to his neck. “What happened?”
Michael felt a sting on his neck and put his fingers where hers had been. There was a rent in the skin, and when he got up to look in the mirror over the dresser, he saw a thin trickle of blood dripping from the fresh cut.
She stood beside him. “Did you scratch yourself in your sleep?”
“I don’t know.” He knew, though. He still hadn’t caught his breath from the dream.
Gina wrinkled her nose as she pulled his hand to her mouth. For a second, he thought she was going to kiss it, but she asked instead, “Why do you smell like bleach?”
He’d had to scrub it off him—that smell, that stickiness, that came from being around the dead. Michael didn’t tell her this, didn’t want to open up that conversation, so instead he squinted at the clock, asking, “What time is it?”
“Shit,” she groaned, dropping his hand. “Might as well get dressed. My shift starts in two hours.”
Michael picked up the clock to see for himself. Six-thirty. After processing the crime scene, tossing the woman’s apartment and going through the paperwork, he had gotten maybe four hours of sleep.
The shower came on, pipes rumbling in the wall as the hot water heater kicked in. Michael went into the bathroom, watching Gina slip off the shirt she’d slept in.
“Tim’s already up,” she said, taking off her panties. “You need to make sure he’s not getting into anything.”
Michael leaned against the wall, admiring her flat stomach, the way the muscles in her arms stretched as she took the band out of her hair. “He’s fine.”
Gina gave him a look, noticing him noticing her. “Check on him.”
Michael felt a smile on his lips. Her breasts had kept their fullness after Tim, and his mouth was almost watering at the sight of them. “Call in sick,” he told her.
“Right.”
“We’ll watch a movie, make out on the couch.” He paused, then tried, “Remember how we used to just kiss for hours?” Christ, he hadn’t had more than a peck on the cheek in months. “Let’s kiss like that, Gina. Nothing else. Just kissing.”
“Michael,” Gina said, leaning in to check the water temperature. She stepped into the shower. “Stop leering at me like I’m a hooker and go check on your son.”
She closed the shower door, and he waited a full minute before leaving, watching her silhouette behind the glass, wondering when things had started to go wrong between them.
He had met Gina before his unit left for the Gulf. No one was expecting to get hurt over there, but Michael and his fellow grunts had played it up, getting all the action they could before being dropped in the desert. Ellen McCallum was a petite, bottle blonde, not too bright—just the kind of girl you wanted to remember when you were stuck in some filthy, sand-encrusted tent a million miles from home, telling the guys about the girl back home who could suck the leather off a couch.
Michael had spent the better part of a week trying to get into Ellen’s pants when up walked Gina, her cousin. She’d pretty much ripped Michael a new one for messing around with her favorite baby cousin, but when he’d shipped out a couple of days later, it was Gina he was thinking about. Her curly brown hair, her delicate features, the smooth curve of her ass. He started writing to her, and to his surprise, she wrote back—real mean at first, but then she calmed down a little, almost got sweet on him. He was in Kuwait, supposedly keeping the peace, when some dumb-ass teenager fooling around with a handgun accidentally shot him in the leg. The kid was a lousy shot, but the wound wouldn’t heal. When Michael was sent to the base in Germany for surgery, it was Gina he called first.
They got married a week after he was discharged and two weeks later he signed up with the Atlanta Police Department. Gina graduated from nursing school at Georgia Baptist and got a good job at Crawford Long Hospital. Two years later, she went over to Piedmont where they paid her more. Michael got his gold shield and was moved from his patrol beat at Grady to Vice, with a pay bump to match. Soon, their life was rolling along better than Michael had ever expected. They bought a house just north of Atlanta, started putting money away for a rainy day, thinking about having a kid or two