The Short Drop Read Free Page A

disclosing a sensitive Agency operation. Lying in a hospital bed in Germany, jaw wired shut, she’d listened to one of her superiors explain the reality of her situation: “Unfortunately, it’s the price of doing business in this part of the world,” he told her, as though she’d been assaulted by a couple of Taliban fighters and not a pair of sergeants in the United States Army.
    But it wasn’t until he patted her hand like he was doing her a favor that he went on her list.
    Her tongue ran across her teeth again. Never leave accounts unsettled. Her grandmother had taught her that.
    By comparison, Dan Hendricks was an excellent partner. Twenty-two years in the Los Angeles Police Department showed in the simple, assured way he went about his business. Especially in close quarters, since he was only five foot seven and weighed maybe one thirty if you strapped a Thanksgiving turkey to him. Beyond that, he was tidy and wasn’t incessantly vulgar. And best of all, he didn’t need her to be a tough bitch, just good at her job. The problem, she was discovering, was that once you learned to be a tough bitch it was hard to turn it off.
    Not that Hendricks couldn’t take it. The man could teach a master class in bad attitude. He was, without question, the most relentlessly negative person she’d ever met, and if he knew how to smile, she couldn’t testify to it. She had no doubt that being black in the LAPD—an organization with a historically awful record of race relations—could embitter even the most resilient person. But George Abe went way back with Hendricks, and he’d assured her that her partner’s negativity had nothing to do with being black in the LAPD. It was just Hendricks.
    A phone rang, and they both reached for their cells. Hendricks answered his. The conversation was brief.
    “Looks like that time is now,” he said.
    “He’s here?”
    “On the way. He wants you inside. There’s no telling how Vaughn’s going to react.”
    That was the truth. There was history between her boss and Gibson Vaughn.
    None of it good.

CHAPTER THREE
    The rush had died down enough that Gibson could hear himself think. He glanced in the back and saw the last table preparing to leave. When they were gone he would commandeer a booth and spend another frustrating day looking for a job. It was Sunday, but he took no days off from job hunting. The mortgage on the house where his ex-wife and daughter lived was due in fifteen days. Fifteen days to find a job.
    At least he couldn’t have asked for a better place to work. The Nighthawk Diner reminded him of home. His father had considered himself something of a diner connoisseur and passed it on to his son. To Duke Vaughn, diners meant independence and small-business owners, not franchises and corporations. The American commons, he called it. Land owned by one but to which the community holds an indisputable right. Not a romantic populist ideal, but a place where the mythology of America met its blacktop reality—for better and for worse.
    His father could, and would, opine at length about the great diners around the country, but the Blue Moon on West Main in Charlottesville, Virginia, had always been home base. If Duke Vaughn had been a professor, his classroom would have been its pockmarked counter. Father-son talks over breakfast had been a hallowed Sunday morning ritual going back to when Gibson was six years old. He’d learned the birds and bees over a slice of cherry pie—and remained embarrassed to admit how many years passed before he got his father’s joke.
    Duke Vaughn had been royalty at the Blue Moon. Gibson never once saw his father place an order, but it came the same way every time: two eggs sunny side up, hash browns, grits, bacon, sausage, and white toast. Coffee. Orange juice. A man’s breakfast, his father called it, and there was no metaphor that Duke couldn’t conjure from the meal. Gibson hadn’t set foot inside the Blue Moon since his father’s