Dead in the Water Read Free Page A

the towering trestle supports of an immense gantry crane. On his deck, a white boxcar container stenciled “Mazda/Santa Fe 2203022” rode like a fat woman on a parade float.
    The crab, a box that slid back and forth across the crane’s bridge several stories in the air, positioned itself over the white boxcar. Rigging whirred down from it like silk webbing from a spider, and men hurried to fasten the hoists to the container.
    Glenn let the engine hum for a few more seconds before he turned it off. He caressed the gearshift, gave it a couple suggestive jerks, and grinned at his partner. “New carb’s cherry, wouldn’t you say?”
    Donna shook her head and sighed. “You know, for what you’ve blown on this thing in the last six months, you could’ve taken Barb and the kids on the cruise with me.”
    He made a face. He was blond, brown, angular; his hobbies were his car and his Top Gun fighter-pilot image, which he’d honed to perfection. Ray-Bans, bronze muscles, straight-arrow khaki authority.
Viva
Officer Hunk: he and Donna were partners on the San Diego police force. He was senior to her, and the most conceited man she’d ever met.
    “Sorry, Donny-O. Hopping rust buckets is not my idea of an alternative to humping my Ford. And anyway, there’s no way on earth I’d take my kids on anything longer than a harbor cruise. You know I can’t stand the little bastards.”
    Donna nodded sagely. The only reason he’d driven her up the coast was because he was meeting his wife and kids for a weekend at Disneyland. He’d put in a couple of extra shifts so the little bastards could have all the junk food and souvenirs their greedy hearts desired. Tough guy. Like all the other tough guys on the force. Slammed any show of tenderness, then fell apart when a puppy died en route to the vet’s. Hooted and whistled during the confiscated kiddie porn movies at the keggers and then went home and cried all night because they just couldn’t take it anymore.
    “And I sure as hell wouldn’t want to spend my vacation around
you
,” he added.
    Tough guy. She kept her face blank. She’d told him ten months ago the only reason he was having trouble was the way her gunbelt nipped her waist. Tried to be cool, tried to be flip when she laughed off his fumbled confession. That night she put Lady Day, Miss Billie Holiday, on the stereo and sang herself to exhaustion; because they both knew it was her problem, too, and something more than raging hormones; and they both knew it would be deadly to do something about it.
    And they both were still working on that. But it was gettingworse, not better, and last night, he had been thinking hard about kissing her again; and she knew all about it because she was his partner and she could read his tiny cop pea-brain like a fucking book. Yes, he was conceited, and yes, he was unbearable, and yes, she had been thinking hard about kissing him again, too.
    She studied her nails, red and slick, not her usual set of hands. She’d gone to a manicurist yesterday for the first time since she’d become a cop, four years before. Her vacation was a relief, and a reprieve. But it wasn’t a solution. Their mutual attraction would still beckon with its own set of siren fingers when she returned. Donna was going to think a lot while she was out of his sphere of influence. She wondered if he was going to, too, and that frightened her. Because she really did love him, and not just in the girl-boy way. She’d take a bullet for him without hesitation, stand up for him, stand by him no matter what. She loved him like she’d never loved anybody before, a kind of transcendent, spiritual emotion that was subverbal: she couldn’t describe it, she could only feel it. And she sure as hell didn’t want to ruin it just to get her itch scratched.
    “Donna, Donna,” he said in a soft tone. She saw herself mirrored in his sunglasses and thought tartly, Not bad for thirty-four, you sultry raven-haired babe. But it