Undercover Tales Read online

  We had a full team. Detectives, forensics … everyone. I saw one of my officers patting Brittany down. He turned her around as I walked up. She made a funny face, then hit me right in the puss with a big wad of spit. My guy turned her around and got her cuffed faster than you can blink. He looked like he’d like to teach her a little lesson, but I warned him off. “Leave her alone. She’s had a tough day.” I grabbed some napkins from a metal dispenser and wiped my face. If I’d let myself, I could have barfed. I hate spit where it doesn’t belong.

  I looked around and saw Sonny, Chris and Spiro facing the back wall. I could tell by their red necks that they were furious. I could have gone over and harassed them a little bit. But that’s classless. I don’t like cops who get all power-happy after they make a bust. My dad always told me that whenever I went somewhere that was a little intimidating, I should act like I’ve been there before. Same thing for busts. I’ve made ’em before, I’ll make ’em again. It’s just another day at the office.

  But, in reality, this wasn’t just another day at the office. This was a big day. The day I’d be recognized for two years of hard work. The day before everybody in the department got a bootleg copy of my multi-orgasmic performance. Oh, well, at least Sonny wouldn’t get to put it on the Internet.

  I saw an evidence technician sorting through a big load of videotapes. I could have gone over and told him to give me the one that had been in the machine. But if I did that, he’d know I was hiding something. My reputation as an honest cop is worth more to me than my pride.

  Captain Washington showed up and congratulated me. That felt nice. I told him about being high.

  “Did you have a choice?”

  “Hell, no,” I said, insulted that he’d even ask.

  “Then enjoy it. Just don’t make it a habit.”

  Yeah. Like that would happen. Although, I did have to admit that I had a new appreciation for how easy it is to get hooked. I was already thinking about how it felt to have Brittany’s tongue on my clit. I knew it would never feel exactly like that again, and that made me a little sad. But I know that your brain chemistry can start to change after just a couple of exposures to meth. I like my brain just like it is. That study they did where lab rats chose meth over everything else … sleep, food, sex ... hitting the little rat crank pipe until they starved to death, impressed me. I like having peak experiences as much as the next girl, and I’d love to feel that euphoria again. But, as Ray Milland said in The Lost Weekend, “One’s too many, and a thousand’s not enough.” He was talking about booze, and crank is a thousand times more addictive. I’ll just have to keep this experience stored in my memory bank and wish I could have had it in the privacy of my own home with my own wife. Oh, well, them’s the breaks.

  After The Bust

  I couldn’t sleep last night, so after tossing and turning for hours I got up. Luckily, Aliyah is used to my wriggling around like a kid itching with poison ivy, so she didn’t stir when I got out of bed. If I’m completely honest, I felt a little distant around her last night. It’s always like this when I have to hide something. She always knows when I’m hiding something, too, but she knows I never reveal anything confidential, so she stopped asking me years ago. Ideally, I’d take a few days off and we’d go somewhere fun and concentrate on each other. But I’m gonna be too busy to take any time off for a while. Making sure a big bust like this is handled by the book is very time-consuming. So instead of taking time off to connect with my girl, I’ll probably be taking more Provigil. That’s the bargain you make when you become a cop. The job takes over your life. It does for everyone, and if you don’t want that kind of commitment, you’d better get a job as a security guard. The pay isn’t as good, but you get to wear a uniform and carry a gun, if that’s a turn-on for you.

  Anyway, it was only four a.m., but I figured I’d go face my execution. I knew the evidence techs had worked on the lists all day, and there would be an exhibit marked something like, “Sergeant Randolph engaging in an act of oral sex with one Brittany Whosits.” There would also be another saying, “Sergeant Randolph snorting white powder, possibly methamphetamine.” I’d look over the list, try not to cry in front of the evidence tech, and go to my desk, waiting for Captain Washington to come in. He liked to learn about things as soon as possible. I should have told him the whole story at the scene, but I wanted one day where he was proud of me. I know he won’t care about the gay thing, I’m sure he knows. But he will be disappointed in me.

  Why couldn’t my parents have whipped me when I was bad? I can still hear my father telling me he was disappointed in me. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I’d rather be yelled at any day.

  The captain won’t be disappointed that I had to go with Brittany. He will be disappointed that I obviously enjoyed myself so much. You’re not supposed to enjoy disgracing the image of the department. And any way you looked at it, I had done just that. In vivid, living color I had snorted crystal and had three mind-blowing orgasms while drug dealers watched. That’s not really the image we like to project to the public.

  There’s a chance the tape won’t get out to the public. There’s also a chance it won’t get out to the rest of the force. But I’m not counting on that. No matter how tight we try to keep the evidence trail, things go missing. Especially things involving sex or anything else worthy of the tabloids. It’s just human nature.

  I walked into the station house and went directly to the evidence book. The officer handed it to me after I signed for it, and he looked completely normal. No trying to hide a laugh, no averting his eyes. I took the book and thumbed through it. I read every entry twice. There was nothing … nothing about my doing the crank or getting done. There was an interesting entry about a video monitor on Sonny’s table that had been hidden by a hollowed-out napkin dispenser. Pretty smart. “Is this everything?” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Were you the tech on the scene?”

  “No, ma’am. That was Gonzales. But this is his final report. It’s all here.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I handed the book back, and he initialed that I had returned it. Befuddled, I went to my desk and started working on the mountain of paperwork that I’d have to complete before I could take a day off. I wasn’t working at my normal rate. Not sleeping for three days isn’t good for a person’s brain, and being worried about something you have no control over doesn’t help either. But I kept slogging away until Captain Washington came in.

  I saw him enter his office, and I stared after him in a state of total indecision. I knew I should go tell him what happened. The tape was gonna show up. It had probably been mislabeled. Hell, maybe the front of the tape was something innocuous. There were a lot of them labeled, “Chris Tselios having lunch.” The camera wouldn’t have been on just to watch the guy eat.

  I was staring at the captain so intently that I didn’t notice anyone walk by my cubicle. But a folded piece of paper fluttered into my lap, startling the hell out of me. I opened it and read, “Meet me in the ladies’ room.”

  Huh? Not the usual interoffice memo. I got up and went to the only ladies’ room on our floor. There are only four women in our section, so it was a nice place to have a quiet conversation if you needed a little girl talk. I opened the door and saw … Brittany. Fuck. I didn’t even know her name. I just knew she was one of the new people in narcotics. I hadn’t even arranged for her to work at Sonny’s, one of my team leaders had done that. I mean, I knew we had someone there, but I didn’t pay a lot of attention to who it was since we hadn’t learned much in the six months she’d been there. Her reports were a snooze-fest, and I barely scanned them. The only thing I remembered was how high her tips were. She had to turn her salary and all of her tips in to the department. You don’t get credit for working a job while you’re undercover. Now that I’d seen her in action, I understood why she was raking in the dough. I also knew that she was honest. We’d never have known she was
cheating the department if she’d turned in twenty dollars a day.

  “Hi,” I said. What do you say to a co-worker who’s forced to give you head?

  She put an envelope on the sink. “I know I committed a crime, but I don’t want this to ruin my career.”

  “You got the tape?” My heart was beating so hard I thought I’d hyperventilate.

  She gave me a half smile. “I had to learn something. God, I never want to be a waitress again.”

  I picked up the envelope. “Are you giving this to me?”

  She nodded. “You can decide what to do with it. You’re the lead officer. If you want to turn me in for tampering with evidence … that’s your call.”

  We were both a little shy about making eye contact. “I wouldn’t do that to you,” I said. “I could just say I found it. Stuff like that happens all the time.”

  She looked somewhere in the vicinity of my left ear. “Will you turn it in? ’Cause if you’re going to, I’ve gotta do some damage control.”

  “At home?” I asked, even though it was none of my business.

  “Yeah. My husband doesn’t like me working Narcotics. If he finds out about the tape …”

  “Why would he find out?”

  She looked like she was about to cry. “He’s a lieutenant in the police commissioner’s office. He knows everything.”

  That caught me by surprise. I had no idea what to say, so I tried to reassure her that we were both in this together. “My girlfriend wouldn’t be very happy about it, either.” Coming out to a junior officer had to count for something, right?

  But the young detective gave me a challenging look right in the eye. “Would she divorce you?”

  My stomach dropped. She looked so sure of what the repercussions would be for her. “I don’t think so. But I guess I’m not sure. It would definitely put a strain on our relationship.”

  “I was with a woman in college and I told my husband about it. Big mistake.”

  Ouch . At least I hadn’t fucked some guy three times and looked like I was having a great time doing it. I held the tape in my hand, weighing it. Something so insignificant, with the potential to do so much harm.

  I looked at the woman again, holding her gaze for a moment. “If I was the only one on this tape, I’d probably turn it in. I’m a strong believer in following the rules. That’s the only thing that separates us from scum like Sonny.”

  She nodded, and I could see a flicker of hope in her eyes.

  “Do you know what else is on here?”

  “Nothing,” she said without a second’s hesitation. “I saw Chris put in a new tape right before you got to the restaurant. The machine was right by the storeroom. I was filling all of the sugar shakers. I’ve still got his fingerprints on my ass,” she said, a look of disgust on her pretty face. “That bastard never walked by me that he didn’t grab something.”

  “What about the buy? It’s on here, isn’t it?”

  “No.” She shook her head quickly. “Spiro got up and turned the recorder off before the buy.” She gave me a sly smile. “They’re not dumb enough to record that.”

  Now that I looked at her in normal clothes I decided she didn’t look like the nasty girl-next-door. She was a lovely, sweet-looking woman who’d put up with six months of shit for nothing but a bust she wouldn’t get a speck of recognition for.

  “Wanna go out for breakfast?” I asked.

  She blinked in surprise. “Uhm … why?”

  I didn’t blame her for being suspicious. For all she knew, I wanted another blow job. “I wanna go to that crappy little hardware store down the street and buy a magnet. Then I wanna pull this tape out and run that magnet over every inch. Then I thought we could burn it, and then …”

  She gave me a fantastically lovely smile and said, “Can I put the ashes in the river?”

  “With a lead weight,” I replied, smiling at the thought of sending them to the site of final repose for so many of Chicago’s most infamous.

  Quicksand

  Blayne Cooper

  Chapter One

  My two o’clock appointment, okay, my only appointment of the day, was late. Even though I was grateful that at least someone in this city might want to hire me, I was annoyed, and I showed it by rapidly tapping my pencil on my desk. Rat-tat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat-tat. Tat.

  Deciding to do something more productive than scuff my desk, I tossed my pencil down and scanned my modest office, making sure everything was tidy. You should know that I’m not neat by nature. Not by a long shot. People find out if they see my apartment. Or my closet. Or my car. Or ... Well, you get the idea. But the point is, I can fake it if I have the proper incentive, and today I did.

  My stomach fluttered as I stood and made my way to a small closet located at the back corner of the room. The previous tenants, a now-defunct real estate company, had used it to hold a couple of rusty file cabinets. I know this because they left them here when their lease expired and now I use them to hold my own paperwork, along with a few emergency changes of clothes, gloves, hoods, leashes, and wax.

  I was wearing an expensive linen suit instead of my normal jeans and Hawaiian print shirt. I gazed into the full length mirror that I’d tacked to the back of the closet door and checked my teeth for lipstick by running my tongue over them and making a weird, vampire-like face. When I saw only pearly white, I dragged my fingers through my hair, smoothing it. My sandy-blond hair is streaked from the sun and irrepressibly wavy. Usually I pull it up in a ponytail to keep it out of my face while I’m working. But when I do, I look like I could pass for nineteen, which sucks on about a million different levels. I’ve been meaning to get my hair cut up off my shoulders. But I guess my heart wasn’t in it, because I kept canceling the appointment.

  I’m thirty-two years old, and looking like a teenager when you’re a grown woman is an enormous pain in the ass. Most of the men who ask me out are either years too young for me, or San Diego’s finest geezers trolling for jailbait.

  Years ago, during my first week as a private detective, a prospective client came into my office, took one look at me, and starting spinning in circles like a dog looking for a spot to pee. I could tell that he expected someone else to pop out of the woodwork and introduce herself as the real detective. When that didn’t happen, he asked me where my daddy was. That pissed me off, but it also taught me a valuable lesson. Who wants to hire someone who looks like they still use Clearasil?

  So today I’m wearing my hair up in a sedate clip, stud diamond earrings, my nicest business duds, and to further assist me in my quest to look like I’ve had boobs for more than six months, a pair of stylish glasses. I don’t really need glasses, but I think they make me look more sophisticated. Sure, that’s about as smart as a teenager thinking smoking a cigarette makes her look older. But nobody’s perfect. And I quit smoking years ago.

  I smiled into the mirror. I looked at least twenty-three and a little less like the beach rat that I am at heart. I know that might not sound like much of a victory, but over the years I’ve learned to take them wherever I can get them.

  The knock at my office door made me jump, and with one last glance in the mirror, I shut the closet door and dashed to my desk as quickly as my high heels would allow. I don’t know how Stephanie Zimbalist did it for all those years on Remington Steele. My butt would be kissing carpet if I tried to run right now.

  “Come in,” I called out evenly, positioning myself behind my desk and squaring my shoulders. I glanced down at my calendar and tried to look as though I was pondering something very important as I flipped through the pages.

  The door opened and in walked the richest people I was likely to ever meet—Kale and Lokelani Poppenhouse. Russ Wilkens, a P.I. and friend I know from the beach … and a lot more … had referred them to me.

  Russ and I are both avid surfers and see each other several times a week at Black’s Beach at sunrise, the most peaceful time to ride the waves. In between those times, we occasionally hang out. H
e’s as close as I have to a best friend and we toss business each other’s way whenever we can. Russ wouldn’t tell me why he’d referred the Poppenhouses to me, saying it would just be easier for them to explain what they needed themselves.

  They’d only been in my office for five seconds, but I figured they must have liked what they saw so far, because Kale and Lokelani Poppenhouse were both staring at me and grinning like idiots. I gestured to the leather club chairs in front of my desk. “Won’t you sit down?”

  As they began to step around the seats, I remembered that I hadn’t introduced myself yet. Stupid. “I’m Belinda Blaisdell,” I said, beaming my most winning smile in their direction.

  Mr. Poppenhouse held the bottom of his necktie flat against his bulging stomach as he leaned forward to shake my hand, his enormous paw completely engulfing mine. “Kale Poppenhouse.” He glanced sideways and nodded once. “And this is my wife Lokelani.” I tried not to stare, but the amused, slightly resigned smiles on both their faces told me I wasn’t very successful.

  He was wearing a beautiful, gray Italian suit and it contrasted sharply with his wife’s bright floral muumuu and ivory-colored silk blazer. Their features were bigger than life, just like they were, but not ugly. Cartoonish would be a better word to describe them. I knew that they were Hawaiian from a life-style magazine article Russ had sent over that included headshots. Stereotypical thinking, I suppose, but I thought they’d be small people. How wrong I was. Even Lokelani was well over six feet tall and her husband dwarfed her. At five feet, five inches tall, I had the brief, and admittedly weird urge to jump up and start yelling “Da plane! Da plane, boss! Da plane!”