Free Tag Man by Archer Mayor Page A

what it’s costing him.
    “Let me worry about that, okay?” he said instead. “We’ll just start and see where it leads.”

 
    CHAPTER SIX
    “Was Joe here?”
    Willy Kunkle looked up at Sammie’s voice. She was standing in the VBI doorway with Emma in her arms. He glanced over at Lester Spinney, who was working at his desk, before answering neutrally, “Nope. Why?”
    Lester swiveled in his seat. “Hey, Sam. How’s the little monster?”
    “Hi, Les. Still not sleeping through the night.”
    “You gotta give ’em time. It’s not like cats and kitty litter.”
    “Cute,” Willy groused. “What about Joe?”
    “I saw him going into the detective bureau downstairs, so I figured he’d been here.”
    “Lester,” Willy said gruffly, “why don’t you check that out—invite him up for a cup or something?”
    Lester’s mouth fell half open before he grasped the subtext and rose quickly to his feet. “Sure. Be back in a few.”
    He slipped by Sam, giving Emma’s thin blond hair a quick stroke as he passed. “Hi there, sweetie.”
    Willy waited for his footsteps to fade before he, too, got up and approached Sam. He kissed his child murmuring, “How’re you doing, little daughter?”
    Sammie smiled while shaking her head. “You couldn’t do that with Lester in the room?”
    Willy was sniffing Emma’s hair as if it was a cure for melancholy, which it undoubtedly was. “Don’t give me crap,” he barely whispered. “I got an image.”
    “Which applies to your street-bum friends,” she countered.
    Willy straightened and tousled her hair, which she couldn’t protect with her arms full. “Half of them are your snitches, too,” he reminded her. “What’re you doin’ here? Getting restless?”
    “A little,” she admitted candidly. “I’m not bucking to speed things up, but I am getting curious about how things’ll work out when I come back to work.”
    He looked at her carefully. “What’s that mean?”
    She shrugged and Emma stirred. “I don’t know. I used to pull twenty-four-hour shifts when the shit hit the fan. Now I’ve got something bigger to think about.”
    She had thought he would react as he’d trained everyone to expect. Instead, he made a dismissive face and said, “We’ll figure that out. You’re not alone, you know?”
    A slow smile creased her face as he retreated to his desk in the office’s windowless corner. “I do know, Willy. Thanks.”
    They heard footsteps coming down the hallway, announcing Lester’s return, complete with company. When he entered, however, it wasn’t Joe but Ron who stopped in the doorway, as Lester continued in and immediately asked Sam if he could hold the baby. She handed Emma over willingly. Lester had two of his own, older teenagers by now, and made no apologies for considering himself a dad first and foremost. Several years ago, he had even risked jail time when his son had gotten into a legal bind. Typically, Joe had helped him get out of it.
    Lester crossed to his office chair and gently sat down, cradling Emma in his lap. His focus on her excluded everyone else, allowing Sam to give Ron a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
    “Hey, stranger. You don’t write, you don’t call…”
    “Thank God,” Willy cracked.
    Ron laughed. “It’s not like you guys don’t walk by my office every day, coming and going.”
    “Good point,” Sam conceded.
    “It’s called moving on, Ron,” Willy commented. “We spent enough years in that hole.”
    Ron didn’t take offense, taking in the VBI’s spartan furnishings. “Right. You guys really moved up.”
    It was true that the VBI, for all its elitist cachet, had never had the funding to match the image. A typically political animal, created by a past governor, reluctantly supported by successive legislatures, and staffed by often quirky and self-motivated defectors from a dozen other agencies, the Bureau had become the law enforcement community’s bastard brother—inside the fold, but awkwardly