Page 31 of Under Cover

“It is!” he half sobbed. “Gone! It’s all gone!”

“No!” she sobbed back. “It’s still there, Glenn. It’s like… like you don’t know everything about your kid when they’re born. We don’t know if the kid is gonna be tall or short, or have my dad’s eyes or your mom’s. Neither of the kids—we guessed wrong for years until they grew up, remember that?”

“But we at least knew if they were a he or a she!” he yelled. “That—thatwe knew!”

“But we didn’t,” his wife wept. “And that’s not our fault. Don’t you understand? Our child—your child—loved going to games, loved playing catch, loved working on cars with you. That kid is still there.” She tried a watery smile. “She just wears a sequined dress to parties now.”

Glenn shook his head at his wife sorrowfully. “It’s not the dress, Patsy. You heard him?”

“Her,” his wife said firmly. “It’s got to be ‘her.’ I heard our child tell us that they needed to fix who they are on the outside to match who they are on the inside.”

“So you’re saying all these years we been wrong?” he yelled.

“No!” she yelled back. “Glenn, we raised our kid the best we could. We didn’t do anything wrong. But if we… we reject our kidnow, because we didn’t know everything about them and they’re trying to tell us and we don’t listen,thenwe’ve done something wrong.”

“I just want to get my son back,” he wept, the gun falling unnoticed to his feet. “That’s all. I want my little boy back.”

His wife finally reached him and took his hands in hers, and Garcia bent smoothly and grabbed the gun before anybody could notice it and shoved it securely in his waistband under his Kevlar.

“Glenn, we’re never going to get our little boy back, but we can have ourchildin our lives, if only we work at it.”

“I miss our kid,” he sobbed, and she wrapped her arms around her husband’s waist as he fell apart on her shoulder.

The lights came on as a pretty trans woman, wearing the hated white-sequined party dress and kitten heels, emerged from the bathroom. Her jaw was soft from hormone treatments, and her emerging breasts fit the dress nicely, but Garcia could still see the man’s little boy in her changing features.

He wondered if that made it harder on the parents struggling to see the child they thought they knew.

But then the girl said, “Daddy?” her voice alto but still the voice of a woman, not a young man, and Glenn and his wife turned toward their baby.

“Danny?” her father whispered, still hugging his wife like she was the only thing solid in the world.

“Sure, Daddy. Just… you know. Spell it with aninow.”

And he broke all the way, still sobbing in his wife’s arms, while his daughter, their child, came and was welcomed, engulfed in the hug.

Crosby glanced at Chartreuse, who made the signal to the bartender to turn lights off again, and then Chartreuse murmured into the microphone, “I think we can get this party started again.”

Several people brought out their phones, and Garcia had no doubts the place would be rocking by the time he and Crosby left.

But that didn’t mean they were going to leave the happy little family there in the middle.

Garcia guided the two women while Crosby used his bulk and height to quietly intimidate Glenn to the exit door. Together, they emerged into the alleyway, the cold almost a slap in the face of reality after the dark heat of the club.

“What—” Glenn the distraught father began, but Crosby took him by the upper arm and shook him gently.

“Mr.…?”

“Dickson,” he rasped. “Glenn Dickson.”

“Okay, sir. You know how people talk about a Christmas miracle?”

Glenn Dickson swallowed. “Yes.”

“You just lived one. You had a semiautomatic weapon in a crowded place. It could have been very easy for you to become a mass murderer if your wife hadn’t stepped in and brought you to your senses.”

“A mass murderer….”

The horror on Glenn Dickson’s face told Garcia everything he wanted to know about why gun control was so damned important.