“Where the fuck were you at roll call?” McGowan growled when she came to his office. “You can’t remember to tell me when you’re going to be late? I should write you up. What is it? You still got chemo brain or something?”
“It’s called chemo fog, and no, I don’t.” Codella did not keep the coldness out of her voice. Cancer, he knew very well, was her psychological Achilles’ heel, and he liked to find snide little ways to bring it up, to remind her of her vulnerability. “I told you I had an appointment,” she said.
“What appointment?”
He wanted to make her say it, she thought. Well, fine. She would say it. “I had a medical procedure.”
“Jesus Christ, Codella. You have to stop all this doctor shit. It gets in the way.”
She just looked at him. She had only missed three hours of work in more than three months. Dan Fisk, McGowan’s lead homicide detective, had missed whole mornings due to his failed root canal, implant appointments, divorce and custody hearings—all of which he told her about ad nauseam as if she actually cared. McGowan never jumped on him. This wasn’t about reality, she knew. This was McGowan’s personal mission to cut her off at the knees. He leaned back in his chair. “But I guess you can’t help it, can you?” He grinned. “That’s the fucked up thing about cancer, isn’t it? Once it shows up on your doorstep, you can’t ever really get rid of it, can you?”
Are you fucking serious? she wanted to say. People could think those things—they did all the time, she could see it in their eyes—but they weren’t supposed to voice them. “When are you going to let me catch a case of my own?”
“That’s a whole different conversation, Codella. You want to go there?”
“I want you to answer the question.”
“Fine,” he said. “When you learn to play by the rules.” He tapped his fingers on his desk. He had a new haircut with short bangs that formed a reddish fringe across the top of his forehead. With his freckled skin and full cheeks, he had to work extra hard to look manly with that coiffure. Maybe that was why he was such a son of a bitch lately.
“I have always played by the rules,” she said.
He waved her away. “Go help out Fisk on the Hasbrouck case, and next time you go see your doctor, you tell me personally. You got that?”
I hate your fucking guts, she thought as she stomped down the hall to her office.