“As long as I finish this report before I leave today, I don’t care who takes off what,” Detective MacGregor said. He peered at his computer screen over the half glasses he’d picked up at the nearest Walgreens. They were cheater glasses, but the way MacGregor kept leaning into the screen they weren’t helping much. He was MacGregor number one, or Old MacGregor until we found a nickname for the new guy.
“You need new glasses, Mac,” Stiltskin said as he went back to his desk with the coffee.
“I’m fine,” MacGregor said, moving closer to the screen and then away from it, as if trying to find the perfect distance.
“Come on, Adam, let’s hit the locker room, so we can both get back to work,” I said. I even started to move that direction, but he moved in front of me, blocking the way.
“Everyone’s fine with us doing it here.”
I looked down at the smaller man and searched his face, but he truly had taken everyone at face value. They said they were fine with me stripping off in front of them, so as far as Adam was concerned it was okay.
I looked at the larger room to the unit members who hadn’t spoken up and said, “Can someone help me explain this to him?”
Athena chimed in with, “Havoc is shy, it would make him uncomfortable to change in public.”
“Why?” Adam asked, looking from her to me.
Stiltskin left his coffee at his desk and came to stand near us. He was short enough that he had to look up at Adam; I wondered if he got a crick in his neck when he gave me eye contact. He lowered his voice, so that he wasn’t talking to the entire squad room.
“Wouldn’t it embarrass you to strip out of your shirt in front of everyone?”
Adam seemed to actually have to give that some thought before he said, “It might, but other people have been making fun of me for being a man of slight build for most of my life. Havoc doesn’t have that issue.”
“Just because Havoc and I both have more muscles than you do doesn’t mean we’d be comfortable taking our shirts off here in the squad room,” Stiltskin said.
“But why, if you both look fit and muscular with your shirts off?”
Officer Odette Minis said, “It’s not professional to take off your clothes at work.” She had her uniform hat under one arm, so her tight cornrows showed in the bun at the back of her neck. Her hair was almost the same pale honey brown as her skin. If she’d had brown eyes, she’d have been monochrome, but her gray eyes looked almost bluish in the dark blue uniform. She was one of the uniforms who had scored so high on the psychic and magical assessment that she was ours as a test run. If her week of being with us in uniform went well, she’d be temporary plainclothes like Officer Goliath MacGregor, but she already had one thing he didn’t seem to have. We had plenty of psychics and witches, but common sense, that was rare everywhere.
Adam nodded. “Okay, I understand that.” He stepped aside so I could lead the way to the locker room.
I mouthed a thank you to Officer Minis as we passed. She nodded and smiled.
“I guess I’ll have to actually go to the gym if I’m ever going to see Havoc’s six-pack,” Athena called after us.
Officer Minis’s smile went up a notch. I watched her gray-blue eyes give me the up-and-down look. I fought not to return the look, because I’d noticed the first week that her uniform fit her well. I had done my best not to think too much beyond that. I was happy that I’d gone to couples counseling before I came back in to work, because now I had a dinner date with my wife, and we’d actually kissed. Those facts helped me not to flirt with yet another woman today.
I walked resolutely toward the locker room with Adam and his paper bag trailing behind me. I swore I could feel Minis staring at me. I did not look back to see if she was staring at my ass, because that was on her; if I looked back and smiled at her, then it was on me. I made the locker room without looking back. Point for me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The locker room was empty except for us. Adam watched me solemnly, not looking away, so I used my body to hide my combination as I spun the lock. It wasn’t that I thought he would steal from me, but I’d worked too long as a police officer to trust much of anyone.
It meant my back was to Adam as I took off my jacket and hung it on a hook in the locker. The holes in the jacket were from Kate’s nails, not the demon. I undid my belt so I wouldn’t have to pull the dress shirt over the stomach wounds. It meant that everything on it slid around a little, but I figured I was safe enough in the locker room. Then Adam started to crowd me.
“I need your jacket, too,” Adam said.
“If you’re looking for claw marks so you can identify the type of demon, you only need the shirt.”
“You’ve got bandages on your right arm, Havoc, that means I need the jacket to help us line up the cuts in the shirt.”
“The arm isn’t from the demon,” I said.
“Did you have an altercation with something else today?”
I hesitated, because the truth was, yes. I just hated to out Kate. She wanted to be human like everyone else; if I told the truth to Adam, he had no filters. He wouldn’t talk about an ongoing case, but he might talk about Kate to the wrong person. If it had been almost anyone else in the ME’s office, I’d have told them the truth, and of course they would have just called me to bring my clothes down to them. No one but Adam would have chased me down like this.
“It’s hard to explain,” I said, and knew it was the wrong thing to have said as soon as I saw his jaw clench.
“I am good at my job, Detective Havelock,” he said; his eyes darkened like gray clouds filling up with rain.
“I know you are, Adam, I mean Assistant to the Medical Examiner Thornton.” Something on the bandages had caught on the shirtsleeve so I couldn’t get it over them.
“I am not stupid, Detective.”
“I never said you were.” I tried to force the sleeve over, but it actually hurt to press on it. Scratches always hurt worse than deep wounds at first, more nerve endings exposed to the air.
“Then why is it hard to explain to me? Are you afraid I won’t understand the attack, the demon, or the magic involved?”
“No, that’s not what I meant at all,” I said, and tried to think of a way to save the conversation without hurting Kate. She’d been hurt enough for one day.
“I know more magic than you do.”
“I don’t doubt that,” I said, and finally gave up getting the sleeve over the bandages, which meant I turned to the other man with the shirt hanging off my arms like I couldn’t dress myself.
“Then why are you insinuating that I won’t understand a simple demon attack?” he asked, his gray eyes the color of storm clouds. Apparently, he was one of those people whose eyes just got darker the more pissed they were; if they reached black, I wondered what would happen.
“First, there was nothing simple about the attack,” I said, but he wasn’t looking at me, or he wasn’t looking at my face. He was staring at my stomach.
He reached out to touch my stomach. I jerked back out of reach and that hurt, but I didn’t want him touching my bare stomach. Maybe I’d been too fast to say he wasn’t bisexual, because he tried to touch my stomach again.