Page 5 of Under Cover

Gail didn’t answer back. They both knew Iliana didn’t care where he went when they weren’t fucking, and that was not going to change.

But the thought gnawed at Crosby. He sat through the briefing with Clint and looked over their little unit: Natalia Denison, Clint’s second in command, a former ADA with a lawyer’s sharp mind and hand-to-hand fighting skills the likes of which Crosby had never seen, who wore a little silver goddess pendant that looked like something from an assassin’s catalog; Joey Carlyle, former Marine with the speed and stamina of a gazelle and the patience to stalk a perpetrator through miles of woodland in the snow without a single word of either complaint or victory in case he gave away his position; Gideon Chadwick, Navy covert ops, weapons expert, and psychology major; and Clint Harding, their boss, former top secret badass, who had an uncanny way of looking at evidence and figuring out what their suspect would want, where they would go, and what they would need.

Then there was Gail, who was small, sneaky, and uncanny when it came to judging what a suspect would do in the heat of a confrontation, and Crosby, who, as far as he knew, was only there because he’d run down a serial killer in the middle of a drug war and brought the guy in alive. Doing so had also stopped the war. It had started because two neighborhoods had been losing their young people at a terrible rate, and Crosby had figured out that they hadn’t been lost to gang violence, but to Cordell Brandeis, who was currently rotting in a supermax prison with over two hundred kills to his name.

It was either that or the thing that had made his entire department in Chicago want to kill him. Okay—maybe there were two reasons Crosby was in the SCTF.

These were good people, he thought seriously. They had families and kids and spouses or parents who worried about them and a special set of skills he could understand would work in the situations they’d been thrown into.

He’d been with the unit for a year and a half, and he still didn’t know—really—what the hell he was doing there.

And that right there was about what he’d been thinking when trouble walked through the door.

CLINT NODDEDat the guy who strutted into their small open-air office in the basement of an old police precinct and gestured him to the front of the conference table.

“Folks,” he said, his resonant fortysomething voice working with his gentle blue eyes and calm, Nordic demeanor. His hair was dark, but the rest of him was Swedish pale, and Crosby wondered sometimes if he slept in a coffin to avoid being burned to a crisp in the salty East Coast summers. “I want you to meet our new team member. I know we’ve all missed Kylie, but she wrote me this morning—she apparently got knocked up on her honeymoon and has decided to stay home for the duration. Gail, you’re our full-time e-genius, and since you’re still here at the admin building running point, this is Calix Garcia. ATF loaned him to us. He’s got an impressive resume, and I’d like to keep him around. Be nice.”

Crosby eyed the guy—lean build, tight black pants, dark eyes with bright pinpoints of intelligence and interest gleaming in their depths. He had golden skin and dark hair that was buzzed on the sides and only a little longer on top, and he looked about twenty years old but was probably closer to thirty given the lines at the corners of his eyes.

Garcia stood at the front of the room and gave everybody a brief nod and an easy smile. “Happy to be here,” he said, his confidence sending something sharp and aching to the pit of Crosby’s groin. “Can you tell me what the sitch is?”

And while Clint launched into the details of a gambling operation gone horribly wrong, with the ringleader leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, Crosby tried very hard not to think that the sitch was that he was in so, so much trouble.

New Guy Bennies

“SO, CALIX?”

Garcia had gotten up from the conference table to get coffee and jumpstart his brain. He’d put in for the SCTF six months ago and had just gotten his invite that week. It said something about the unit that once he was pulled, he was pulled. His captain had rung him up the night before and said, “Lucky you, you live in the same city, even if it’s a different borough. Otherwise you would have needed to relocate your entire life in, like, a day.”

Garcia would have done it too—although he loved his tiny house in Queens. His nana had willed him the place. She and his papa had lived there for forty years, and while Garcia’s parents had moved to New Jersey, he’d kept his love for the tiny two-bedroom shotgun-style house—and Queens—through adulthood. When Nana had moved into the old-folks home, where she still resided, thank God, she’d given it to Calix.

Calix had spent the last four years fixing the place up to look like it belonged to someone who knew where Queens was, and not nice little old people who were still trying to decide whether or not they wanted to live in New Jersey.

But he’d wanted to be in this unit so bad, he’d have given all that up to move across the country if they’d asked him. He could put up with a little bit of quizzing from Natalia Denison, a fortyish African American woman with one or two wiry threads of gray hair showing from the tight bun plastered to her scalp.

“Means ‘chalice of God,’” he told her. “Go figure.”

She laughed. “Natalia,” she said, shaking his hand, “means ‘Christ’s birthday,’ which was my favorite swear word all through high school.”

Calix grinned, liking her. “Mine was still ‘fuck,’ but mostly it was ‘fuck this stupid name.’”

This got a chuckle from Natalia—and from everybody else. Calix looked around the coffee station and found Gideon Chadwick—thirtyish, hatchet thin, tan, with hair that looked bleached and straw-brittled by the sun; Joey Carlyle—medium height, medium build, with brown hair, brown eyes, the severe cheekbones of Indigenous peoples, and a sweet face a grandmother would give her last dime to keep happy; and Clint Harding himself—early forties, over six foot tall, shoulders like a linebacker, and a Nordic face that was all cheekbones and craggy good looks all gathered to chat.

Only Gail Pearson and Judson Crosby were still at the table, Crosby’s dark blond head tilted over Gail’s bright blond one as they talked about something, probably case-related.

Garcia felt a little ping and tried to squelch it. This was the SCTF. He had no personal life anybody wanted to know about, and they definitely didn’t want his personal life groping them in the ass.

“Well, Gideon means trumpet of God,” Chadwick was saying, “but apparently Chadwick means stodgy professor. I donotmake a good impression in a bar in the Bronx.”

Garcia took the opening he was given. “Yeah, and in Queens we’d kill ya,” he said, and the group laughed.

And then Garcia’s mouth opened before he could stop it. “What about you guys?” he called to the two people still at the table. “Your names got a special meaning?”

Gail grinned up at him, fairy bright. “I’m my father’s joy,” she said, batting big blue eyes in a way that indicated she probably gave her parents fits.

Garcia laughed like he was supposed to, a stupid part of him soothed because she’d answered so pertly he’d probably been right that they were just concentrating on their work and not snubbing the new guy.

“What about you?” he asked, wanting Crosby to look up.