14 Breach of Duty by J A Jance

Author:J A Jance [Jance, J A]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Twelve

Some holes are just too damn deep to dig your way out of, and this was one of them. Sue and I ate our hamburgers in the parking lot of the Hurricane Cafe. In utter silence. Sue consumed hers without so much as a word of thanks. My burger was probably fine. I’m sure it wasn’t the cook’s fault that it tasted like shoe leather in my mouth.

“Sue, I…”

“Shut up and eat,” she ordered. “I don’t want to hear it.”

With the burgers gone and still without exchanging any words we headed south toward Boeing Field. Once or twice I glanced in Sue’s direction. Grim faced, she sat with her arms folded across her chest, staring straight ahead.

I’m no stranger to the silent treatment. Karen used to dish it out all the time, but then she was my wife. Having to handle the same ploy from a partner at work was an altogether new and unwelcome experience.

“Who are the other dicks?” Sue asked finally.

The word “dick” is acceptable in polite conversation only when used by a fellow detective. In that regard it’s similar to use of the “N” word. Street gang kids may toss the word back and forth among themselves with impunity, but let some outsider use it and all hell will break loose. “Dick” works exactly the same way. It also happens to be a word that Sue Danielson seldom uses in casual conversation. As a consequence, when she used it now as the first ice-breaker in our war of nonwords, I didn’t answer right away. Instead, I took a moment to try to decide whether or not there were any hidden traps lurking beneath the surface of her question.

“The other detectives,” she prodded impatiently when I didn’t answer fast enough to suit her. “Who did Kramer assign to our case?”

“Lawson wasn’t ours to begin with. City of Renton has that one,” I told her. “Wayne Haller and Sam Nguyen drew Seward Park.”

“Wayne Haller is your basic Irish setter of a detective—good-looking but not too bright,” Sue said after a pause. “He’s never going to set the world on fire. Sam, on the other hand, is really squared away. I vote we call him.”

I had to agree that Sue’s assessment of the other two detectives was right on target. Haller is fine in a pleasant but dim sort of way. Sam Nguyen is a bright go-getter. He had been a rookie cop in Saigon and his father a high-level South Vietnamese bureaucrat before the city fell to the North Vietnamese. Through his father’s connections, Sam, his mother, and three younger brothers all managed to get out. They had turned up in Seattle months later, all of them virtually penniless.

In an era of newly arrived and mostly impoverished immigrants, the English-speaking Sam had found work as a translator at Seattle PD. Eventually, he had turned that first job as an interpreter into one that came with a uniform. He had been the oldest rookie in his class at the academy. He had also been the first one to make detective.

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