Businesslike. Serious. That was why he figured he was lucky. He didn’t think she’d have let him into her classroom, given what his chief had told him about her attitude, but anyone could walk on the public part of the beach, right?
As he got closer, he could see that the kids were sketching and taking notes, most seemingly engrossed in what she was saying. Not all, of course; one boy was daydreaming, and a couple of others seemed to be arguing, one giving the other a subtle punch in the arm. No serious misbehavior, though.
He seized the opportunity to study Erica more closely. Know thine enemy.
She was skinny enough that it verged on unhealthy—you could see that even through the thick sweater she wore. Khaki pants and duck boots—nothing to emphasize those mile-long legs. Practical. Not his type; he’d always liked curvy women who dressed up pretty.
And yet when you looked at her face—those huge eyes, those high cheekbones—you realized she was, in her own way, stunning.
She looked up, caught him staring and strode over, parking her hands on her hips. “Why are you here?”
He gave his friendliest, most ingratiating smile. “Reporting for duty,” he said.
She didn’t smile back. “Students, keep working,” she said over her shoulder. Then she faced Trey. “I thought they were assigning someone else.”
So she wasn’t even going to pretend she hadn’t requested that he be replaced. Fine. “I talked them into giving me a chance.”
She glanced back at the kids, who were gawking or goofing around rather than writing. One glare from her, though, and they mostly hunched over their notebooks again. Then she looked back at Trey, equally severe with him. “This is supposed to help?” she asked. “You’re distracting the students.”
Beside him, King stood and whined a little. Trey gave the settle command, which King did, but with a glance up at him that spoke volumes.
King was still a police dog in his heart, just like Trey was an officer, and he’d noticed something wrong. Trey dropped the leash. “Search,” he commanded without thinking it through.
Almost instantly, he realized that was inappropriate; he wasn’t on duty. But it was too late. King ran into the group of kids, several of whom reeled back in fear. King was large, focused and panting, which showed his mighty teeth.
“Get your dog away from them,” Erica said.
“Just a minute.”
“No, now!”
Suddenly, King sat. Utterly still, focused on one boy’s backpack.
Trey called him back, watching the boy. He said something to another kid beside him and shifted the backpack out of sight, blocking their view with his body.
“That kid has drugs in his backpack,” Trey told Erica.
“What?”
“That kid in the red jacket,” he said. “He’s carrying drugs. King found them. He’s a drug dog,” he explained as he reached into his pocket for King’s favorite tug toy and knelt for a quick play session, King’s reward for a job well done. He tried to keep from wincing as King’s enthusiastic yanks on the toy shot pain down his back.
Erica blew out a breath. “You’re sure?”
“Uh-huh.” He was still watching the kid. “You’ll find it, unless he manages to ditch it somewhere.”
She pulled out her phone and walked away from Trey, spoke into it for several minutes while Trey stood awkwardly near the group of students. He ought to reach out to them, try to connect. Coming in and catching one of them in an illegal act probably wasn’t the best start.
Erica walked back toward him. “Officer Greene is on his way over,” she said. “It’ll just take him two minutes to get here.” Then she walked into earshot of the kids. “Okay, gather your things. We’ll head back to the building.”
Trey usually felt good, triumphant, when King had made a find. But looking at the boy in the red jacket walking along, desperately searching from side to side for a place to dispose of his stash, he felt like a jerk.
In his normal life, he knew what to do in such a situation, his role well-defined, that of a K-9 police officer. Now he had no idea of how to act. He was way out of his element trying to be a teacher type rather than a cop. It made him remember his own days as a troubled teen, the problems he’d had with school due to his father’s frequent moves and his own shifts in and out of foster care.
“I didn’t mean to get him expelled or anything,” he said to Erica.
“When you told me that he was holding drugs, I had to call the police.” She bit her lip. “I hate it, though. The academy is often their last chance before juvie.”
Trey felt worse. He’d grown up with some kids who had gone the juvie route, and it had been the end of anything good for them.
There had to be some other way to survive this period until his benefits came in, some way that didn’t mess up kids’ lives and make him look like a chump in front of a pretty but annoying woman.
Maybe he could find a way to hurry the notoriously slow disability paperwork along. He’d submitted all the required documentation, finally, but the hearing process took a ridiculous amount of time.
As they reached the schoolyard, a police car approached, and he could feel the tension coming off these kids in waves. Normally, he’d have been in the car and he wouldn’t have felt it; he’d just have come in and taken charge, made arrests.
From the car emerged not only Officer Greene, but also... Abe, Trey’s chief? Why? Now he was the one who felt like he was in big trouble.
Trey moved with King toward the two men, ignoring his own qualms.
“Which one?” Greene asked.
He almost didn’t want to say. He’d never been arrested as a kid, but he’d gotten in plenty of trouble, and he found himself identifying with the teenager with the backpack, weirdly enough. Maybe it was because he was here to help kids, not to uphold the law.
He’d been trained not to identify with perps, though, and he called on that training now. “Tall one in the red jacket.”
Greene nodded, walked over and pulled the kid aside, while Erica shepherded the rest of the students into the building.
His chief patted his back. “Not the start I’d envisioned, but good job,” he said. “Get the bad seed outta there and the place will run more smoothly.”
Trey had the feeling they were all bad seeds to someone, but whatever. “You here to check up on me already?”
“Um, no. Not actually.” The chief looked uncomfortable.
Trey waited.
“There’s no easy way to say it. I have a potential new handler for King.”