Bending the Rules

“Yeah, they start ‘em young these days,” he agreed.

“It’s not as if they committed a violent crime—they didn’t mug an old lady or attempt to rob someone at gunpoint at the ATM machine.” Her eyes narrowed. “Or commit a burglary of any kind,” she said with slow thoughtfulness, and he could almost smell the circuits burning as she followed that thought to its logical conclusion.

“They didn’t commit a burglary,” she repeated, gazing around the table at the other occupants. Then she looked him dead in the eye. “So why are you sitting on this panel, again?”

Excellent question. When Greer had offered to put his name in for the mayor’s task force he’d given his lieutenant an immediate and firm “Thanks, but no thanks.” Then, like an idiot, he’d let Murphy—the old cop who had stepped in years ago to take him in hand before the de Sanges genes could screw him up entirely—talk him into changing his mind. Murph had insisted that if Jase wanted to wear those lieutenant bars himself someday—which he did—he needed to start making his name known to the powers that be. And a good way to do that was to be part of these task forces—even if this particular one was more about election-year public relations than the war on crime.

So here he sat, proving once again that no good deed goes unpunished.

Not letting his thoughts show, however, he merely met her suspicious gaze with the cool straightforwardness of his own, evincing none of his reluctance to be part of this dog-and-pony show. “Because this is how we so often see it begin. Baby street punks grow up to be full-fledged street punks. Today it’s tagging or stealing some other kid’s lunch money at school—if they even bother to show up at school, that is.”

“So perhaps we should make that a condition of my proposal. No school, no participation in the art project.”

Slick, he thought with unwilling admiration, but said as if she hadn’t spoken, “Tomorrow it’s mugging some little old lady in the parking lot at Northgate.” Pulling his gaze away from the Babe’s, he included the entire table of merchants in his regard. “Or right here in your own community.”

Okay, so maybe he was overstating the case a little, adding a dash of drama to get his point across. He was so tired, however, of watching punks bend the rules and not merely not be called on it but get special treatment for their efforts as well. That was just bogus. And it happened too often.

Still, he was surprised at the impact his words had. The business owners’ voices started buzzing around the table as they discussed the repercussions of allowing hardened criminals into their neighborhood business sector.

Wait a minute. His brows snapped together. Had he given them that impression, that the boys in this case were hardened criminals? Jesus, de Sanges, the Babe is right about that much at least. They’re kids who committed their first offense.

As if she could read his thoughts, she repeated to the group around the table, “They’re kids, you guys. Barely past puberty kids without a single police record between them. Please keep that in mind.”

“I’m keeping in mind that Detective de Sanges said that’s how all street punks start,” the man who had been introduced as the manager of Ace Hardware said.

“I didn’t say all,” Jase disagreed. “But I do see enough juvenile offenders to make it one factor to consider.”

“Surely,” Poppy insisted, “most of those that you see are involved in an actual robbery or mugging.”

“True. Most—but not all—are.”

“Does anyone else have an argument, either pro or con, that they’d like to throw out for discussion?” Garret asked.

“I’d just like to reiterate that these are kids who have never been in trouble with the law,” Poppy said quietly. “I’m not saying let them skip out of their obligations. Just, please, let’s not be the ones to give them their first police record.”

“Anyone else?” Garret asked. Getting no response, he said, “Does anyone plan on pressing charges?”

When no one said anything to that, either, he said, “I’ll take that as a provisional no.” He turned to Poppy. “Can I hear an official proposal?”

She straightened her shoulders, which had temporarily slumped. Shook back hair so thick and curly the entire mass quivered. “I propose we teach the three boys who tagged your businesses a sense of accountability by making them cover or remove the vandalized areas with paint and/or paint dissolvers that they provide at their own expense. I further propose—”

“Let’s do this one motion at a time,” Garret interrupted. He looked around the table. “Would anyone like to second that?”

“You can’t just turn kids that young loose with buckets of paint and a few brushes and hope for the best,” Jerry said to Poppy. “Are you willing to supervise the project?”

Jase figured this was where her idealism would meet the reality of giving up her salon appointments or charity boards or however she spent her days in order to ride herd on three kids who—if his own experience was anything to go by—would be far from grateful.

He sat back, waiting to hear how she planned to get out of it.

But she merely gave Jerry a serene dip of her head. “Yes.”

“I’ll second the motion, then.”

Garret looked at Jase. “Since we invited your and Poppy’s opinions, we agreed to give you both a vote in this as well.”

He was too astounded by the way Calloway had busted his expectations to respond.

Garret turned his attention back to his group. “All in favor?”

Poppy and seven of the eleven merchants raised their hands.

“Against?”

The remaining four raised their hands. Jase abstained.

“The ayes have it.” Garret gave Poppy, whose smile was so bright Jase was tempted to whip out his shades, an avuncular smile. “I take it you have more to say?”

“Yes. I further propose we take this opportunity to teach these boys a more constructive way to decorate the buildings in their neighborhood. A way that, in the end, will benefit the entire community by giving us something we’ll all enjoy looking at, and incidentally perhaps give them the self-esteem to redirect their creative urges in a more acceptable direction.”

“Again, I have to ask,” Jerry said. “You supervising?”

“Yes.”

“I second the motion,” Penny said.

“All in favor?”

Poppy and five merchants—one of them Jerry, the owner of the building she proposed the kids paint—raised their hands.

Garret looked around the table expressionlessly. “Against?”

The six remaining merchants raised their hands, and all eyes turned to Jase to break the tie.

He should abstain again and let them fight it out among themselves. What the hell did he care if they rewarded these kids?

Except…

He knew from personal experience what chaos could come from bending—never mind breaking—the rules. He fought the temptation to do so every day and saw no reason to pass that temptation down to another generation. Teach them young to stay on the straight and narrow—that was his motto.

Raising his hand, he threw in with the against group.

Chapter Two

Well, there’s a perfectly good fantasy blown to hell.

“I CANNOT believe I was attracted to that stiff for even a minute!” Poppy dumped her big tote onto the floor of Brouwer’s Café, a pub that specialized in international beers. Pulling a chair away from the table Ava had scored near the long wood-topped bar, she dropped into it.

“What stiff?” Ava demanded over the raised voices of the crowd around them.

“Poppy!” Arriving at the table almost on her heels, Jane gave her an incredulous look. “You beat me here. How did that happen? You’re never on time.”

“She’s mad at some stiff,” Ava said. “It must have motivated her.”

“Yeah, I gathered as much when you called.” Jane hooked her bag over the chair rail and sat down, giving Poppy a concerned once-over. “That you’re seriously hacked off, that is. What gives?”

At the thought of what—or rather who—”gave,” her heart sped up and her hands wanted to clench. She flattened them against the wooden tabletop. “Guess who’s on the committee with me?”

Ava leaned into the table. “What committee?”

“The one to do with those kids who were caught tagging the businesses she designs boards for,” Jane reminded her.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. You’ve got so many irons in the fire these days that I forgot about that for a sec. How did it go? Not great, I’m guessing.”

“Not great.” Her involuntary laugh tasted bitter and her fingers curled in toward her palms. “Oh, trust me, it was a tad worse than not great. It was a damn cluster f—”

The waitress, who’d had to weave her way through the throng of power-hour drinkers to reach their table, arrived just as she was about to cut loose with a truly grand-scale vent. “Get you ladies a drink?”

“I’d like the Leavenworth Blind Pig Dunkel-thing,” Ava said.

“Weizen,” the waitress supplied. “Dunkelweizen.”

“Yes. Thank you. One of those.”

“I’ll take a Fuller’s.” Poppy drew a deep breath and blew it out, but she was still so irate she barely glanced up from her hands, which were once again firmly splayed against the tabletop, her fingertips white from her effort not to make a fist. “And a large pomme frites with the pesto aioli.”

“Ooh. We’re eating, too?” Ava wiggled with pleasure. “I’ll have the Lembeck salad.”

“I’ll just have a Diet Coke with a lime, please,” Jane said.

Ava’s head whipped around to stare at her friend. “That’s it?” she demanded as the waitress nodded and moved on to the next table. “Please tell me your skinny butt’s not on a diet.”

“My skinny butt is not on a diet,” Jane obediently parroted. Then she grinned, her face radiant with newly-wed happiness. “In fact it’s spuds-and-sausage night at Dev’s folks and Mama K. hates it when I don’t eat enough to burst. I’m just reserving all the stomach room I can.”

That jerked Poppy out of her dilemma, and she grimaced at her own self-absorption. “You have dinner plans with your in-laws and you showed up for me?”

“Well…sure. We’re the Sisterhood, aren’t we?” Scooping her shiny brown hair behind her ears, she laughed. “Besides, this isn’t exactly altruism at its finest. The Kavanaghs never eat until around seven anyway, and Devlin’s riding over with his brother.”

“Which one? Bren? How’s he doing?” Jane’s husband, Dev, had returned from the Continent last year to pitch in at Kavanagh Construction, the family business, when his oldest brother’s cancer treatment called for chemotherapy. Jane and he had met when he’d headed the Wolcott mansion remodel, a project so huge it was still ongoing several months later. They’d had a rocky beginning and Poppy loved seeing her so flat-out happy.

“No, Finn, actually. But Bren is doing great. He’s finally done with chemo, his oncologist is very optimistic they got all the cancer and his hair’s even starting to grow back in.”

“That’s excellent news.”

Ava flashed a smile. “I saw him the other day and he’s got downy fuzz all over his head. If he wasn’t such a big guy, he’d look like a newborn chick.” Then she pushed back from the table. “I’ve gotta use the ladies’.” She leveled a stern look on Poppy. “Don’t you dare spill a single juicy detail until I get back.”

“There are no juicy details,” she muttered to her friend’s departing back. Her thoughts turned inward to the day’s earlier events, however, and she wasn’t even aware of watching Ava cross the room. Only in the most absentminded way did she track the redhead’s progress by all the male heads that swiveled to watch her go by.

“I never get tired of seeing that,” Jane said.

“What?” she asked. Then realizing what she was staring at, she nodded. “Oh. That. Yeah, I know.” They grinned at each other. Because fueled by eat-your-heart-out, revenge-inspired determination after being the butt of a humiliating bet when she was eighteen, Ava had changed a lifetime of bad eating habits. She’d refused to call it a diet, though, and she hadn’t made the mistake so many full-figured women did of trying to whittle herself down to a toothpick-thinness unsuited to her bigger-boned frame. She’d stopped actively losing weight once she’d reached a size twelve—or what would be a fourteen, they liked to tease her, if she bought her clothing in the less pricey shops that the rest of them patronized.

But the actual size wasn’t the point. Ava had curves, she wasn’t afraid to accent them and men all but tripped over their tongues whenever she went by.

Apparently she didn’t believe in wasting time when there was potential gossip in the offing, either. Back in under five minutes, she demanded even as she took her seat, “So let’s hear it. Who’s the stiff? And what on earth did he do to get you so bent out of shape? This is not like you.”

“Yes, well, you can thank Jason de Sanges for my mood,” Poppy said through her teeth. “That rat bastard wrecked—”

“Detective Sheik?” Jane snapped upright. “That’s who’s on your committee?”

“Oh, no. Not now.” Her eyes slitted. “Thanks to him, the committee is no longer necessary. He torpedoed my wonderful plan.” She explained how he’d slanted the information he’d given the committee to make the three teens sound like hardened criminals.

The waitress brought their drinks. After several sips of her British ale, Poppy felt the tension that had her neck muscles in knots start to loosen. She could thank Ava and Jane for that, because by allowing her, in the way of true friends, to unload on them they’d helped her shed a large portion of the stress she’d been carrying around. “I suppose I really shouldn’t let it get me so bent out of shape,” she admitted. “It’s not like I’m overwhelmed with free time anyway. Between my work with the kids, and doing the boards and figuring out what the hell I want to do with the rooms the Kavanaghs have finished, I would’ve had to scramble to fit this project in. It’s just…”

“It was a good plan,” Ava said.

“Yes! Not perfect, I know, but a lot better than dumping three kids into the system for a first offense. Maybe I could have made a difference in their lives.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. But I sure would have liked the chance to find out. Now I’ll never know.”

“You still have a crack at them during the cleanup project, though, right?” Jane asked.

“Yeah, but we all know that’s not going to thrill them. It was the opportunity to paint some honest-to-God community-sanctioned art that might have opened up a chink in their armor.”

Ava’s auburn brows pleated. “You know what? Detective Sheik may have done a lot more last fall than we first believed—but he’s still a pig.”

“Yeah,” Jane agreed. “And from now on he’s just plain Detective de Sanges. He doesn’t deserve to be called the Sheik.”

“No fooling.” Poppy took another sip of her ale, pushed back her pint glass to make room for the steaming basket of fries the waitress set in front of her and sighed as she grabbed one and dragged it through the little dish of aioli. “How can someone who makes me so hot just looking at him have turned out to be such a cold fish?”

THE SCENT OF deep-fat-fried fish wafted up from the paper-and-twine-wrapped package Jase juggled as he rapped his knuckles against an apartment door one floor down from his own. “Murph! You in there? Hey, I brought dinner. Open up before I drop the damn thing on the carpet.”

“Hold your water, kid,” a gruff voice said, growing closer as his one-time mentor and long-time friend approached the other side of the door. “I ain’t as young as I useta be, y’know.”

“No shit?” he muttered as locks tumbled and the doorknob turned. “Can’t say as I remember you ever being young.”

“Cute,” Murphy said, opening the door and reaching out to relieve him of the six-pack of St. Pauli Girl he’d tucked under his elbow.

“Not trying to be cute,” he said honestly. “I don’t remember. I was, what? Fourteen when we met? I thought you were a hundred then.”

“I was fifty-four!”

“Which might as well be a hundred when you’re fourteen.”

Murphy laughed. “I suppose you got a point.” He shot a glance over his shoulder at the blue-and-white paper bundling their dinner as he led the way to the little dining table outside his almost equally small kitchen. “Spud’s fish and chips,” he said as he pulled a couple of longnecks out of the six-pack and set them on the table. “What’s the occasion?”

“That bogus committee you talked me into joining is no more.” And he refused to feel guilty about the disappointment he’d seen in the Babe’s big brown eyes when the vote hadn’t gone the way she’d hoped. “Figured that calls for a celebration.”

Murphy slowly straightened from putting the rest of the beer in the refrigerator. Turning his head, he pinned Jase in the crosshairs of his faded but still sharp blue eyes. “I know you weren’t hot to be on this thing in the first place. But how the hell’d you manage that?”

“By injecting a little reality into a harebrained scheme.” He nodded at the package he’d unwrapped. “I’ll tell you all about it, but right now come sit down. Let’s eat before this gets cold.”

They each grabbed a wad of napkins and dug into the fish, eating with their fingers. They dipped the battered fish into plastic containers of tartar sauce, scraped thick clam chowder out of tiny cardboard cups with round-bowled plastic spoons and dredged their fries through ketchup, washing it all down with beer.

Eventually there was nothing left except a couple of grease spots and a splash of garlic-infused vinegar in the bottom of their cardboard dishes. Murphy stacked them, tossed in the empty plastic condiment containers and, wadding up the wrapping paper, added it to the pile. He pushed his chair back from the table, patted his comfortable paunch and met Jase’s gaze. “Good dinner. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“So tell me about this harebrained scheme.”

“Do you remember me talking about the Babe?”

“Sure. Rich girl who got you all hot and bothered a few months back.”

“She didn’t get me all—” He swallowed the lie. “Okay, maybe she did. But that’s old news.”

“So what’s the new news?”

“Turns out she was on the committee, too. And she damn near talked the rest of the people on it into rewarding the kids caught tagging.”

“How’s that?”

“She was all for letting them do a mural on the side of one of the businesses.”

“You’re kidding me. No making them clean up after their vandalism—just giving them something fun to do?”

“Well, no. She actually did propose making them clean up their mess first with paint they paid for out of their own pockets.”

Murph nodded. “Okay, good. That’s responsible. But—what?—they’ve been in and out of the system a hundred times already?”

“Uh, not exactly.” He shifted in his seat. Tipped his bottle up and drained the last sip of beer from it. Because he knew this was where self-righteousness got a little shaky. “It was their first run-in with the police.”

Murphy lowered his own bottle, which he’d been raising to his lips, and sat a little straighter in his seat. “Let me get this straight. The kids have never been in trouble. The Babe was going to have them clean up their mess with paint they’re responsible for purchasing. But she wanted to take it a step further and have them also paint a mural on the side of a building. So…what? She just tossed the idea out there on the table for someone else to implement?”

Crap. “No, she offered to supervise. She wants to ‘make a difference’ in their lives.”

The old man snorted. “Right. That’s likely to happen,” he said, deadpan. “Still, if she’s willing to do the work, why would the committee vote against the idea? It’s not like it’d be any skin offa their noses.”

Crapfuckhell. “I might have gotten a little carried away with my ‘tagging is the first step to crime’ talk. Could have maybe scared them off some.”

“For God’s sake, boy.” Murphy scratched his thinning iron-gray hair. “Why?”

Back straightening, he looked Murph in the eye. “You know damn well why. Once you start torquing the rules it’s a slippery slope. One day you’re rewarding kids for trashing people’s hard-earned businesses. Next thing you know you’re giving in to the temptation to just take that old-lady-bashing mugger around the corner and stick your service revolver to his temple to ‘help’ him cough up a confession.”

There was a moment’s silence in which his words clanged in his head like buckshot fired into a steel chamber—and he wished he could get the past few seconds back so he could cut his tongue out.

Then Murphy said dryly, “I’m gonna take a wild stab here and speculate we’re not still talking about a bunch of merchants deciding to vote down the Babe’s proposal.”

Burying his head in his hands, Jase groaned.

He felt Murph rub rough fingers over his hair.

“One of these days,” the old man said gruffly, “I’d like to see you give yourself a break and realize you’re not like your dad or grandpa or Joe.”

“That’s never going to happen…because I am.” Dropping his hands to the tabletop, he raised his head to look at the old man. “I’m a goddamn de Sanges male,

which is a lot like being a recovering alcoholic—I’m one act away from being just like the rest of the men in my family.”

“That’s bullshit, and you oughtta damn well know it by now. But, no—you’re too fucking stubborn to take your head outta your butt. You have never knocked over convenience stores. You have never kited checks or destroyed bars in a drunken brawl. And I’m guessing now is probably not a good time to tell you about this, but I’m going to anyways. I got a call from your brother today, looking for you.”

Everything inside him stilled. “Joe’s out on parole?”

“Looks like.”

“Shit.” Jase laughed without humor. Then, spreading his fingers against the faux wood, he lowered his head again and thunked it once, twice, three times against the tabletop. “I guess I’d better get in touch with him quick then, hadn’t I? Because God knows he won’t be out for long.”

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