Niceville

back.
    “Lacy in the back?”
    “She’s got a client,” said the girl, with an edge, not looking up. Nickfigured she didn’t like cops. A lot of people didn’t like cops. Some days even he didn’t like cops. Nick held his temper, spoke in a reasonable tone.
    “I’m with County CID. She asked to see me. Said it was urgent. Tell her Nick—”
    The woman looked up.
    “I’m aware that you’re with the police, Detective Kavanaugh. Everyone who comes into this office knows what you are. You’re very well known on the street. Ms. Steinert is very busy. When she’s free, I’ll tell her you’re here.”
    Having, as she clearly felt, put the Pig back in his poke, she went back to her keyboard. Nick looked down at the top of her head, studying the part in her shining black hair. Her glossy black nails were too long for the keyboard and they had pink peace signs stuck onto them.
The footprint of the Great American Chicken
, thought Nick. Her tight black skirt was pulled halfway up her thighs. She had fine thighs.
    “What’s your name?” he asked, trying out his best smile on the top of her head. Something in his voice got through to her. She heard the edge in it.
    She looked up, now a little wary.
    “Gwen Schwinner.”
    Back to the typing, radiating dislike.
    “Nice to meet you, Gwen,” he said to the top of her head. “Call me Nick. How about you go get Lacy right now, Gwen? Pretty please.”
    Nick braced himself for a scathing look, but Gwen kept her head down, although she had stopped typing. Maybe she was working out what kind of scathing she was going to unleash on him. In the end, she sighed theatrically, got to her feet, and trudged wearily away from the counter—she had very nice hips as well as those truly fine thighs—and down the narrow plastered hallway to the closed door where Lacy Steinert was listening to a crack whore with lung cancer explain why it wasn’t her fault that she was a crack whore with lung cancer. She glared back up the hall at Nick, who waggled his fingers and smiled at her, and then she rapped on the wall, got a “come in,” and opened the door.
    The crack whore, forty miles of bad road named LaReena Dawntay, was dabbing at her red-rimmed eyes and snotty nose with a crumpled wad of tissue. Her coffee-colored skin was coarse and pebbly and her legs looked like scabby twigs.
    She glared up at Gwen and went back to sobbing. Gwen looked at Lacy, who looked back with an open friendly expression while handing a box of tissues across to LaReena.
    “There’s a Detective Kavanaugh here.”
    She said this in the same tone as you’d say “the toilets are backing up again.”
    Lacy Steinert was a compact middle-aged black woman with jade green Chinese eyes and sharp Cherokee cheekbones. She had started out as a state highway patrol officer, got shot in the hip by the eight-year-old daughter of a guy she was trying to Breathalyze. The round nicked her sciatic nerve and guaranteed her a future of severe and chronic pain.
    She invalided out to a liaison desk at Cap City HQ, which bored her to tears, so she got herself transferred to Cullen and Belfair County Probation and Corrections and now here she was at the Probe in Tin Town coping with crack whores named LaReena and fourteen-year-old gang bangers with the life expectancy—if not the smarts—of a mayfly.
    “Thanks, Gwen. Can you do me a favor?”
    “Yes, Miss Steinert.”
    “Can you get a cab for Miss Dawntay here? She’s got to go to Lady Grace for an infusion. Give her a voucher out of the box and tell the driver to be sure he walks her inside. You’ll go inside, won’t you, LaReena? You really can’t miss these treatments. They can help you live a normal life.”
    As if
.
    But LaReena Dawntay nodded, staring down at her hands. Lacy considered her for a moment—
dead in six months
—and then looked back at Gwen.
    “And then could you go next door to Wiggles and ask Mr. Featherlight to step across?”
    Going to Wiggles for any reason other than to toss in a Molotov cocktail did not recommend itself to Gwen Schwinner, but she merely nodded and offered a hand to LaReena.
    Lacy walked the two of them to the door and stood in the hall, watching as Gwen and LaReena went back up the hall, both women ignoring Nick Kavanaugh, who was leaning on the counter and grinning back at Lacy.
    “Nick. Come on back.”
    He pushed himself off the counter and came down the hall—not a big man but somehow filling it from side to