Bone to Pick by Kristi Rose

Author:Kristi Rose [Rose, Kristi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vintage Housewife Books

16

Mallory ate each burger in three bites, relieved that no one was around to witness her piggish behavior. She drove through a different fast-food restaurant to get fries and a large unsweet iced tea to help wash it all down.

When she arrived, she grabbed her drink and the folder and entered through the front door. The Hidden Lake Police Station was a one-story building that was spread out over two acres. Made of concrete with a stucco finish in boring gray, the place looked like a prison, with its narrow high windows and limited entries.

Inside was a sterile lobby with dull brown plastic chairs, nicked-up white walls covered with cheaply framed images of those currently in charge, and white laminate flooring. To the left was a short hallway with public restrooms, and straight ahead was a desk sergeant stuck behind a half wall and bulletproof glass. He met Mallory’s gaze when she walked in, and when recognition set in, he stood and smiled.

She beamed right back.

“Hey, Mal. How are you?” her cousin Fits asked, blinking rapidly and repeatedly for an interlude.

His real name was Adams McSwain—Adams was the maiden name of Cici and his mom, DeeDee. The nickname Fits came from the tics he’d been diagnosed with when he was five. Before that, people had seen him struggle and thought he was having fits. And the moniker stuck.

He preferred Fits to Adams any day, or so he said.

Falling in age right between Natalie and Mallory, he’d been more like a brother to them than a cousin.

“Don’t you look sharp!” She’d seen him in uniform before but never officially at work.

The role of cop looked perfect on Fits, as he wore the uniform comfortably. His hair was cropped close, his face clean-shaven, and his badge polished to a high gloss. Prior to going into law enforcement, Fits had worked in computers as a penetration tester. He was good at what he did, but it could take months or years to earn a bug bounty, and his side gig of true crime and cybercrime podcasting didn’t add much to monthly stability. And though he was occasionally uncomfortable with his tics, he had mentioned once on a ride along with Bo how isolating ethical hacking was.

Seeing an opportunity to fill in some spots, Bo had recruited him, and five years later Fits managed three different jobs happily, each filling his bucket, as he liked to put it.

Fits buzzed her in, releasing the lock that separated his space from the lobby.

Before the door even swung closed and relatched, they were hugging.

“How’s life?”

Under her hands, he shrugged, a following tic making the muscles in his back twitch and quiver. When they were kids, they lay outside under the summer night sky, looking for lightning bugs and counting the seconds between his tics, finding no rhyme or pattern.

“How’s Nat? I plan on going over today after work. Mom’s on a cruise, but it comes in later today. The hurricane ended it prematurely. Tell Nat to prepare. The other half is about to descend upon her.

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