Page 99 of Sean's Sunshine

“No brother of mine sucks dick,” Carruthers spat, and to their surprise, it was Clara who reprimanded him.

“Do I need to refer you for sensitivity training?” she asked crisply. “Because in this department we don’t discriminate.”

Carruthers’s face contorted. “Yeah, you wish. Go spawn another monster, sweetie. I’m tired of hearing about your harelipped little bastard.”

Jackson gaped at the man, who stalked away, his obviously mortified rookie partner at his side, and then snuck a look at Sergeant Kensington.

She was stricken, her eyes red-rimmed, her lower lip trembling, everything about her annihilated in one cruel statement. Jackson looked back at the two cops heading for the elevator and then turned to Henry.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

Henry started talking a mile a minute to Kensington. “Here, you just… watch this, eat a cookie. What we need is written up on the subpoena. We’ll be right back.”

He caught up with Jackson as Jackson was rounding the corner.

“You were supposed to stay put,” Jackson muttered.

“This way we can have adjoining cells,” Henry said, and Jackson could hear the fury in his voice. Yeah, if he was a better person, he’d tell Henry no, but he was not.

Which was a good thing because there was amessof cops waiting for the elevators, all of them laughing and elbowing Carruthers in the ribs.

“Good one!”

“God, I wish she’d stop showing those pictures. That kid gives me the creeps!”

“Stupid cow. Can’t she just do her job?”

Jackson counted six of them, including the rookie, who looked like he might be going to cry. Rivers tapped the rookie on the shoulder and gestured with his chin, away from the elevators, out of sight of the bane of his existence.

The kid—God, so young. Did they have to recruit so young? Male, Caucasian, brown hair, green eyes, still had the occasional spot—winced as one of Carruthers’s cronies said something particularly crass about Kensington and her baby, and then nodded and slipped away without notice.

He could always say somebody called his name as they were getting on the elevators. Plausible deniability—it was a thing.

The elevator doors opened, and all the laughing, joking good ole boys got on. Jackson and Henry waited a beat to make sure nobody else got in with them and followed, Jackson pressing the Close Door button as he did so.

Instead of turning around to face the doors—that strange human custom—Jackson and Henry stayed, shoulder to shoulder, to face the five assholes who had conspired in the nastiest way possible to make a decent cop’s life a living hell.

About the time the five guys facing them realized there was something amiss, Jackson hit the Emergency button, the elevator stopped between the first and second floors, and all hell broke loose.

IN RETROSPECT,it could have gone so very, very wrong. They were, in fact, facing five guys with guns, tasers, and nightsticks. But they were facing them in an enclosed space, and, well, Carruthers swung first. Jackson ducked, Carruthers’s fist hit the stainless-steel elevator door, and the melee was on.

Jackson and Henry did good fighting back-to-back. They called out plays—“Duck!” “He’s coming for you, Jackson!” “Here’s his stick!” At one point, somebody hit the Go button on the elevator, and it made it to the third floor. The doors started to open, and Jackson and Henry met eyes and took stock.

Four of the officers were down, clutching broken noses, sprained wrists, and groins. Or one groin. Carruthers’s groin. Jackson might have given the fucker a ruptured testicle, but he was okay with that. One guy was still up, glaring at them, as together they stepped backward into the surprised group of people waiting for the elevator. Quickly, before those people could react to what was inside the car, Jackson reached in, hit the Close Door button, and sent the car all the way up to the sixth floor.

“Wait for the next one,” he said as he snatched his hand away. He and Henry didn’t even spare a glance at the crowd before bolting for the stairs.

When they got down to the first floor, to their surprise, the rookie was standing with a file folder in his hand.

“Quick!” he urged, shoving the folder at Jackson. “Clara’s holding the door.”

They followed his direction from the stairwell to a half-hidden utility exit, where Clara stood making sure the door—which apparently needed a key to open and had an automatic lock—was kept open enough for them to shove it wide and sprint outside.

They paused first to make sure she was okay. “You won’t catch hell for this?” Jackson asked worriedly. When they got to the car, they’d take stock of their injuries, but mostly everything was minor.

“Not after I file a complaint,” she said with a small smile. “If you guys could do that for me, the least I can do is talk to my IA officer.”

“That’s a tough thing to do,” Jackson said soberly.