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“Not fat, Lopez,” I said. “Fast. F-A-S-T.”
“I don’t know. Sort of fast, I guess. Who’s to say?”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“If I said, ‘Hey, Arturo, let’s you and me have a race to the elevator,’ would you have a chance of winning?”
“Maybe?” he said, wincing.
He finally lowered his head. “No, not a chance.”
“See, it’s not really the weight, Arturo. It’s the ability to get around. Things go down fast on the street, and we have to watch each other’s backs out there. No one is going to want to partner up with you if you can’t catch up. If you really want to be a detective, you need to lose some weight, dude. You need to start running and working out or you’re going to be working somewhere else.”
“I get you, Detective. I will. I promise,” he said as he left.
“Noah Robertson!” I called out.
A good-looking blond guy walked in. He was impeccably dressed in a modish soft-gray bespoke suit with a white silk shirt and silk navy tie, with a matching pocket square. His gelled hair was sharply parted à la Cary Grant, and on his feet, I saw, were fancy euro shoes that looked a lot like black velvet slippers. He was tall and tan and slim and looked more like an actor or a Hollister model than a cop.
I’d already read that there had been some kind of sex harassment deal at his last assignment, which explained his presence here. I didn’t ask about it. He was just another of the problem children I’d inherited, as far as I was concerned. All I cared about was here and now. It was A Brand-New Day, after all.
“Robertson, why are you here?” I said, squinting at him.
The elegant young man stared at me for a beat.
“I want to be a detective, obviously,” he said.
“Yes, but why?” I said. “Let me guess. Because you’re a clotheshorse and the uniform doesn’t live up to your high sartorial standards?”
“Well, I am a clotheshorse,” he said with a canny little smile. “But I only want what you want, Detective. To help people who need helping. Get bad guys off the street. Maybe get a chance to use my brain in the process.”
I nodded. I liked his answer. But I wasn’t finished.
“If that’s the case, Robertson, then why were you hiding in the corner with everybody else when I came in?”
He looked out my window for a moment, thinking, then gave me his little smile again. “I was waiting for an inspirational leader to arrive,” he said, holding up a finger.
Elegant and able to bullshit on his feet. That might come in handy, I thought.
“Be careful what you wish for, Robertson. Now go back out in the hallway.”
“Naomi Chast!” I called out after he left.
Chast was a pretty, medium-height young woman with tightly tied-back strawberry-blond hair and an almost too lean, wiry triathlete’s build. She was wearing a crisp NYPD polo over her department-issue navy tactical pants.
She seemed professional and kind of normal, I thought as I thumbed through her paperwork. But that was impossible. If she were normal, why would she have been sent here?
When I looked up from her file, she was suddenly glaring at me.
“Oh, I see. You’re cleaning house, huh?” she said with her hands on her hips. “Well, let me save you the trouble. Transfer away. You think I want to be in this chickenshit outfit, you’re crazy. You don’t think I know how all this political crap works? Let me tell you a few things.”
As she continued to rant, I flipped another page of her file and found a note handwritten by the squad’s previous leader.
Impulse control? it said. ADD? Anger management issues?
Yes. Yes. Yes, I scratched next to it, and underlined it twice.
CHAPTER 13
