“What happened to all this crap about being a lifer? Police work is in your blood? Don’t you have some kind of sacred duty to pass on the genes? You’re pushing forty, guy. Why don’t you find a nice cop lady to settle down with and have a dozen cop babies?”
“Love to,” Russo says. “Just point her out to me.”
I point to Ferro, the only woman in sight.
Russo gives a noncommittal shrug. “Ferro’s sharp. Good build. Great cop.”
“Good build? Are you buying a car?”
“No spark, is all. Got to have that spark. Can’t fake it, can’t force it, have to love it.” He raises his voice. “Ain’t that right, Ferro? No spark between us.”
“In your dreams,” she answers.
“Not likely. I maintain a strict regimen for optimum sleep hygiene. Deep sleep, no dreams.”
Ferro has had enough. She gathers up her things to move to another desk. “Delicious on the outside, crazy on the inside. You and Brenner truly are perfect for each other.”
“I just realized something,” I say to Russo. “You’re the voice.”
His smile widens. “Brenner tell you that?”
“Not to me, but to somebody else one time, he said, ‘I’m not the voice, I’m—’”
“—the hammer.” His smile stretches all the way to his ears. “Love the hammer. Good cop, bad cop. Nobody did it better than Brenner. But look, that was then…” His voice trails off, and his smile dims. In fact, it nearly vanishes. This is the closest I’ve ever seen him to not smiling. “It’s the one regret I have from Chicago, Shayne.”
“Not the two Amy’s?”
He waves off my joke, undeterred from his deep thought. “For so long, I spoke for Brenner. I did the thinking for him. Hell, he didn’t seem to mind, and I had more than enough opinions for the both of us, and then some. But…” Russo stares down at his feet. “By being the voice, I took his away. I’m not loving that.”
I want to laugh, because Ferro’s right; Brenner and Russo are so perfect for each other. But I force a straight face and say, “I dunno, he seems to do all right for himself.”
Just like that, the gleaming smile returns. “Which is why I asked you what he’s like at home. Because I’m curious to see what Brenner does with an actual life. He’s got a lot of catching up to do.”
Feeling a touch of pride, I say, “I’m pretty confident he’ll figure it out.”
With another booming laugh, Russo pats me gently on the arm. “Love it. Love that ignorance.”
“Wait, what?”
Squeezing my arm, he arrests my eyes with a fond gaze. “Shayne, he figured it all out the moment he met you. And that’s a quote, by the way.”
For a moment, I forget how to breathe. My voice comes out thin and wispy. “He said that? You guys…talk like that?”
Russo doesn’t get a chance to respond. The office door opens. Brenner strides to me, takes me by the hand, and pulls me into the office. As he shuts the door behind us, my mind scrambles to switch over to work mode. Brenner seems impatient. He probably wants answers. Did I find anything out about the black chin? My heart resists the subject, still repeating the words ‘the moment he met you…’ I want to hear more about that. I don’t want to think about the case. I want to—
Brenner backs me against the wall with a hungry kiss. After a stunned moment, I respond eagerly, my hands going straight to his hair, pulling him closer. He lifts me off the ground. I straddle his hips as we fall sideways, knocking into a filing cabinet, grasping at each other, breathing heavily. When he finally comes up for air, Brenner rests his forehead against mine. My hair drapes to both sides, blocking everything else out. Only Brenner exists.
“I’ve been up since you left,” he says, “waiting to see you, to say I’m sorry.” He gives a little shake of his head, our foreheads rubbing together. “It wasn’t fair, what I said last night. All that about me not really being me until I close this case. It’s not fair—and it’s not true—to say that I couldn’t be whole without…you know, that this case is the most important thing in my life. It’s not.” He pulls his head back enough to look me in the eyes. “You are. You’re what I need most, more than any case or any…I don’t know, closure, or whatever.” His stormy green eyes are frantic with emotion, as though he’s afraid that I’m not getting the picture. He needs me to understand. “I’m just saying, if I’m not the whole me yet, then that missing part—the rest of me—it’s got to be you.”
Staring into the storm of his eyes—that hurricane of emotion—my heart stalls. Even the fanged, bitter butterflies in my chest have paused to stare with dropped jaws. That nose-diving sound you hear is me dropping from the sky, with only clouds to break my fall.
I cling tighter to Brenner. “Let’s just go,” I plead. “Somewhere else. Anywhere else in the world.”
He blinks. “But…Detroit.”
“I don’t care.”
“You do care. Detroit—”
“Burn it,” I interrupt, kissing his forehead and cheek and lips. “Burn it to the ground. Let them have it. I can’t…” Emotion threatens to take my voice. My eyes burn. “Jay, I can’t keep you. Not here. There’s too much…”
“Hey,” he says sternly, wiping a tear from my cheek with his thumb. “Let them try. They’d have to get through you first.”
“Oh no,” I mock. “A little fox.”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what Arael Moaz and King Paul were thinking. That was their mistake.”
“But how many times can we get lucky?”
“As many times as it takes. Nothing’s gonna stop us now.”
He’s tossing me a softball so I can say, “Great song,” and we can change the subject. We are in the police station, after all. If somebody walks in… But I’m not ready to let go. “Great song, but how about ‘Run Away With Me?’”
He wipes both my cheeks, his lips curving with a devastating smile. “I can’t do that to this city, Shayne. Without you, Detroit wouldn’t just burn, it would lose its soul.”
Geez, for a guy with “no voice,” he sure does all right. I don’t deserve any of these words, of course, but I’m too emotionally wiped to argue. All I can do is grab him by the lapels and give a little shake, like, What did I do to deserve you?
That’s when I see Russo peering in at us through the window. He gives Brenner a thumbs-up and says, “Loving that.”
I unwrap my legs from Brenner’s waist. “What the hell? Did Russo coach you on all this?”
Brenner smirks. “No, but I might have practiced a little on him.”
“Oh, really?” I glance at his arms around my neck. “You practiced this on him?”
Russo barges in. “That’s what I’m talking about, y’all. The spark. Electric! Give me some of that.” After bumping knuckles with Brenner, he makes a sizzling sound and shakes out his hand, as though in pain from a shock. He slings a thick arm around each of us and smashes us against his sides. “So, we’re on for tonight, or what?”