She got out to the street and started to walk to the downtown parking garage when she realized she didn’t have her car. She was glad she had only had the one drink. She stopped under a light, in front of brightly lit restaurant that was just starting to close up.
Fenway pulled her phone out of her clutch and called Dez. It rang twice.
“Roubideaux,” Dez answered, her voice tired.
“It’s Fenway.”
“You okay, Fenway? It’s late.”
“I know where Olivia Jenkins is being held.”
“What?” All the fatigue went out of Dez’s voice. “How did you figure that out?”
“I got an address from a dealer,” Fenway said. “In the warehouse district. 28th and La Crescenta. Behind a bunch of other buildings.”
“You got this from a dealer?”
“I promise you it’s a fascinating story, Dez, but don’t you want to get over there with some officers right away?”
“Hang on, Fenway,” Dez said. “How do you know the girl’s there?”
“My dealer went to get some supply from the warehouse. They wouldn’t let him in, and there was a little kid crying in there.”
Dez exhaled. “That’s not enough for a warrant, never mind exigent circumstances.”
“I know for sure there are black market drugs in there. That’s gotta be enough for probable cause, right?”
Dez considered for a moment. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s enough for probable cause. All right. I’ll call Mark. We’ll see how we want to play this. You have the address?”
“I can text it to you.”
“Okay. I’m calling the station.”
“You going to wake up a judge?”
“For what, a search warrant? Come on, Fenway, a kidnapping means exigent circumstances. You know that.”
“I just thought we should cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s.”
“Not on this. I gotta go.”
Fenway hit End on the phone. She felt amped up, and wanted nothing more than to be at the warehouse when they found Olivia, even though she knew it wasn’t a good idea. She texted the address to Dez.
She tried to think of how she could justify her presence there, and realized the first step was going to get her car.
“Well,” Fenway said to herself, “speaking of bad ideas…”
She called McVie’s number.
It rang three times before he picked up. “Hello?” He sounded groggy.
“Hey, Craig.”
“Fenway? What time is it?”
“It’s about eleven,” she said. “I know where Olivia Jenkins is being held.”
“What?” Just like Dez, all traces of sleepiness left his voice. “Where are you?”
“I’m downtown at a dance club. I ran into a dealer who had come into the office a couple days ago to talk about the, uh, economic climate for the burgeoning pill trade in Estancia.”
“What did he say?”
“That the guy who he gets his Red Skies from took him to his warehouse and he heard a little kid crying in there.”
“Did you get an address?”
“Eleven fifty-seven 28th Street, right near La Crescenta. It’s supposedly behind a bunch of other buildings; I guess the building numbering is all messed up there.”
“The heart of the warehouse district,” McVie mused. “I know it. Anything else?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Fenway said defensively. “No way is a screaming little girl in that part of town after dark of her own free will.”
“There are a million explanations,” McVie said. “Any employee who works there could have had to bring their kid. Their babysitter could have fallen through, or they just came in to drop off a check or something. Did your guy actually see the little girl?”
Fenway narrowed her eyes. “Not really.”
“Is that a ‘no’?”
“But I know for sure there’s a ton of pills there,” Fenway said. “That’s enough for probable cause, right?”
McVie paused. “Yeah, I think that would pass muster with a judge,” he said.
“Dez is getting everything together,” Fenway said. “I think she’s going to take some officers over there and raid the place.”
“It’s not like a SWAT team, Fenway.”
“Whatever. Do you want to go watch?”
He sounded exasperated. “Fenway, I’m still on administrative leave, and even if I wasn’t, your presence there would endanger Olivia more than it would help her.”
“Me? What about you?”
“One of us is a pretty good shot. And the other one has rescheduled firearms training three times.”
Fenway was silent.
“You still there?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And I still need a ride home.”
“From the club? You too drunk to drive?”
She scoffed. “I wish. I took an Uber down here.” She almost told him about Zach, but then stopped herself. “After I ran into that guy with the pills and he told me about the warehouse, I thought I needed to get out of there and call Dez. I didn’t even get my second whiskey sour.”
“Oh, that’s right, your car is still up at Sea-Tac.”
She laughed. “It’s actually not. My father flew someone in his private jet up there to get it.”
“But you took an Uber there?”
“I was kind of planning to drink. I just never got around to it.”
McVie laughed lightly. “You asking me to come get you?”
Fenway hesitated and drew a figure eight on the sidewalk with her heel. “Not really. I mean, I know it’s past eleven. I probably woke up Amy with my call. You can stay home.”
McVie didn’t say anything.
“Craig? What is it?”
“No, you didn’t wake Amy up.” He paused. “I’m—uh—not at home. She and I thought it would be best if I stayed in a hotel for a couple days.”
“Oh.” Fenway’s heel paused in mid-swoop. “Oh, Craig, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. We tried. Maybe we’re still trying, I don’t know. This stuff doesn’t happen overnight.”
“Is she—” Fenway started, and then bit her tongue. It was really none of her business if Amy had cheated on McVie again.
“I don’t know what she is,” McVie said, with a touch of anger in his voice. “I’m not sure what’s going on, to be frank. I’m working fewer hours, we went on a bunch of dates, I even did that whole concert thing with her when I probably should have been figuring out why your dad’s private investigator didn’t show up.”
Fenway waited a beat. “Well, then, if I’m not bothering anybody, would you mind coming to get me?”
There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment.
“No, forget I asked,” Fenway said quickly. “You’re already in bed, it’s late. I can take an Uber home.”
“It’s not that,” McVie said. “It’s that, uh, we’ve been working well together lately.”
“Yeah,” Fenway said, “we have.”
“And the last time Amy and I were on the outs, you and I did something we probably shouldn’t have.” He cleared his throat.
Fenway waited for McVie to continue.
“I mean, if you remember, you and I fought the next morning. We jeopardized our working relationship before it had even started.”
“And I like working with you,” Fenway said.
“Right, me too,” McVie said. “And I don’t want to mess that up.”
“It’s just a ride home, McVie,” Fenway said, consciously using his last name. “It’s not like I find you so irresistible that I have to tear your clothes off whenever I think you might be available.”
Now it was McVie’s turn to be quiet again. Fenway pictured herself tearing his clothes off.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” Fenway said. “I just meant that, you know, I have at least a little self-control.” She tried to laugh, but it came out weakly. “I mean, I’m not going to pretend I’m not attracted to you. I just, you know, I know it’s not a good thing for our working relationship, and I value that more.”
“Sure,” he said. “Right. I mean, I’m not going to pretend that I’m not attracted to you either, but I’ve got enough smarts that I’m not going to do anything about it.”
“Right. It’s just a ride home.”
“Okay,” he said. “You’re at that dance club on Seventh Street?”
“I just left,” Fenway said. “I’m in front of Mustang Sally’s Barbecue, kind of around the corner.”
“I know it,” McVie said. “Ten minutes.”
He hung up and Fenway stood staring at her phone as the restaurant turned off a few of its interior lights. A woman in a white apron and white chef’s hat, both with noticeable flecks and smears of barbecue sauce and a scorch mark or two, walked to the front door and turned the lock on the double doors at the front.
Fenway took a deep breath, now that her adrenaline pumped slower in her veins, and she started to think.
Just what was she doing with McVie, anyway?
Three days ago, she had desperately tried to get McVie out of her head. She thought he would reconcile with Amy for good. She had been with Akeel, ready to have a one-night (okay, maybe a weeklong) fling with him and his great abs. And a phone call from Dez changed all of that in an instant.
She knew she had already backslid into getting hung up on McVie, but she couldn’t do anything about it.
And she probably should have been depressed to realize that, but she felt excited that McVie had left to come to pick her up.
The headlights of a beige Highlander swept around the corner. She recognized McVie behind the wheel. He saw her too, and she saw his eyes widen. He hadn’t seen her in the black dress with the slink and slither before.
He slowed to a stop in front of her. He wore a polo shirt, tight around his biceps and chest. Fenway blinked a couple of times, telling herself it was from the brightness of the headlamps and not from steeling herself.
He rolled down the passenger window. “Hey, Fenway,” he said.
“Hey, Craig.”
“Didn’t expect you to be so dressed up.” He cleared his throat. “You look beautiful.”
For a black girl, Zach’s voice echoed in her head. Fenway had to fight back the voice. “What did you think, that I’d go dancing in jeans and sneakers?”
McVie shrugged.
Fenway opened the door. McVie couldn’t take his eyes off her.
She slid into the seat, putting her purse at her feet, and looked at him expectantly.
“Thanks for the ride,” she said. “I know you were in bed.”
“Not a problem,” McVie said.
He didn’t move the car forward, resting his hand on the automatic gearshift.
“Oh, seatbelt.” She reached back and put the seatbelt on.
“No, it’s not that. I’m deciding something.”
Are you debating whether or not you want to make a bad decision with me? Fenway thought. She leaned slightly toward McVie and lifted her hand to place over his on the gearshift—then she chickened out and put her hand on the center console.
“Screw it,” he said. “You only live once.”
And he put the car into Drive and turned down Eighth.
“My apartment is the other way,” Fenway said, after a couple of blocks.
“I know,” he said. “But I had a summer job when I was in high school in the warehouses around there.” McVie looked over his shoulder and changed to the left lane to turn onto Burbank Road.
Fenway cocked her head to the side.
“That sounds like we’re going to the warehouse.”
“I will completely deny everything we’re doing tonight, Fenway. So we’re never going to talk about this again.”
“Some Boy Scout you are, Sheriff.”
The streets started to increase, one at a time: Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth. They crossed the tracks and the street signs changed from being spelled out to being numerical. Soon they were past 23rd. McVie made a right on 27th, and they passed Los Feliz and La Crescenta.
“That was La Crescenta,” Fenway said.
“We’re not pulling up in front, Fenway. That would be asking for trouble.”
“Okay.”
He slowed and turned in between two scraggly Catalina ironwood trees.
Fenway jumped a little in her seat. “Is there even a road here?”
McVie nodded, slowed to a crawl, and killed the headlights. “A gravel road that leads to an alleyway. Me and my friends used to, uh, skateboard through this area all the time.”
“Oh, for real? You were a skater boy?”
“I don’t like to talk about it.”
“You still have a ‘Skateboarding Is Not a Crime’ bumper sticker? I could get you one and you could put it on your cruiser.”
McVie looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “You’re not old enough to know about that, Fenway.”
Fenway scoffed. “Oh, please. I worked in a E.R. for a couple of years. You think I never saw a skateboarding accident? Or a parent who wanted to reminisce about their glory days while I checked for a broken clavicle?”
McVie smirked. “Spoken like someone who’s never done a Madonna while bombing a hill.”
Fenway shook her head. “I’ve seen too many swellbows and hippers to do any of that myself. But if you want to keep trying to impress me with your skateboarding vernacular, good luck.”
McVie came to a stop at the edge of a vacant lot and killed the engine, right behind a low, wide electrical box that they could see over. The box hid the body of the car from the other side, and a few more Catalina ironwoods cast disruptive, fingerlike shadows all around them.
“Where are we?”
McVie pointed over the electrical box. “Across that lot on the other side of that fence. That’s the warehouse you were talking about.”
“Police aren’t here yet,” Fenway observed.
“It should take them another ten or twenty minutes, at least,” McVie said. “Tuesday night shift is a little light, but they’ll get the manpower.”
“Looks dark.”
“If anyone is home, they’ll probably minimize the lights. They wouldn’t want to draw attention to themselves.”
Fenway nodded. “I don’t see any cars parked in front.”
McVie had a grim look on his face. “I don’t see any either.”
“What do you think? Think they’ll find anything here?”
McVie shook his head. “If we have a mole in the department, they might have already warned the people in the warehouse.”
Fenway sat silently.
They waited for ten minutes. The windshield started to steam up from their breath. Fenway wanted to make a flirtatious joke about something getting steamy, but she couldn’t think of a good punch line. McVie turned the car on just long enough to roll the windows down.
Ten minutes turned into twenty, then thirty. Fenway unbuckled her seat belt and stretched in the seat. The dress was meant for dancing, not for sitting in.
“Are they coming?” Fenway said.
“I know Dez,” McVie said. “She’ll be here.”
They continued to watch the warehouse, but everything was quiet and still. Then, they heard a low sound of engines in the distance, quiet and far away at first, then getting closer and louder. They saw the red and blue lights from the cars shining into the dark summer sky, then darkness again as the police vehicles got closer.
“Do you think they’ll see us?” Fenway asked.
“I really doubt it,” said McVie. “Between these trees and the electrical box, it’s really tough to see over here. They’d have to shine a light right on us.” He paused. “And, of course, we shouldn’t do anything stupid like open a door.”
“Look!” Fenway hissed, pointing. A door at the back of the warehouse slid open and two figures slipped out and crouched in the shadows, scurrying quickly into the trees.
“Did you get a good look at them?”
“It’s too dark,” McVie said. “I couldn’t make anything out.”
“They carried themselves like men, not women,” Fenway said, “but that was about all I could tell.”
“How tall?”
Fenway shook her head. “I don’t know.” She thought she saw motion in the trees but couldn’t see anything in the darkness.
“We’re staying put,” McVie said. “We’re too far away to pursue them ourselves, and even if we could, we’d put ourselves in danger of being shot by the good guys.” He sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Plus, it didn’t look like they had Olivia.”
In front of the warehouse, Dez was the first one out of the cruiser. She had on a Kevlar vest. She walked around to the back of the car, opened the trunk, and lifted a battering ram out. Mark opened the passenger door and got out. Like Dez, he wore a Kevlar vest, and joined four other officers, also in vests, fanning out in a semi-circle behind Dez. Two officers sneaked around the side of the building to the back door, not realizing two people in the warehouse had already left that way.
“She going to use that herself?” Fenway asked.
“Dez is the best door key we’ve got.”
“Not you? You with the muscles?”
McVie shook his head. “Dez has perfect technique.”
Dez walked up to the metal door, turned slightly to the side, lifted the two handles up, swung it back just in front of her hips, and drove the ram next to the lock with a loud clang, metal on metal, then the sound of the back of the door hitting the wall.
“POLICE!” Mark shouted as he ran through the door. The other four followed close on his heels as Dez dropped the battering ram to the ground and drew her gun to guard the door.
Very faintly, a child’s cry.
“Holy shit,” said Fenway, grabbing McVie’s hand. “I think they found Olivia.”
McVie squeezed back.
Dez started to bark orders into the warehouse, but neither McVie nor Fenway could make it out. They heard a shout from inside that sounded like “Clear!”
Dez ducked inside.
“Please be safe,” Fenway whispered, her eyes riveted to the front door, her hand still squeezing McVie’s.
There were muffled voices inside.
Dez appeared at the door with a crying little girl with large dark eyes, light brown skin, and a mop of tangled black hair. The girl wore a white shirt, filthy with brown stains, rust or dirt or excrement. Dez pulled the shirt off in a fluid motion and handed it to an officer who put it in an evidence bag, then pulled a small blue blanket out of the trunk and wrapped the little girl in it.
Just like Isla, Olivia looked like she could have been Fenway’s daughter.
“She’s okay,” Fenway choked out, a tear running down her cheek, still holding onto McVie’s hand.
McVie nodded, blinking hard.
Fenway turned her head to look at him.
She had felt triumphs in her previous career: the woman who had been thrown twenty feet by a drunk driver, who Fenway managed to stabilize in the ER while waiting for the doctor to show up; the little boy in anaphylactic shock that Fenway saved with the epinephrine IV (getting the vein on the first try, by the way); the woman who Fenway saved after a myocardial infarction on the Amtrak up to Bellingham when she was still a nursing student.
But this felt different—somehow, better.
Fenway pulled herself on top of McVie, straddling him, her dress hiking up her thighs, her high heels threatening to catch on the gearshift or the steering wheel, but missing them both. She took it as a good sign.
She leaned down and kissed McVie with an open mouth, searching for the same thing she had been looking for with Zach.
McVie started to say something.
“Shh,” Fenway whispered into his ear, putting a finger over his lips. “The cops will hear us. Stay quiet.” She tossed her hair to the right-hand side, spilling over her right ear, almost to her shoulder, and leaned down and kissed him again. This time, McVie kissed her back.
McVie was a much better kisser than Zach was.