Free Mission Road by Rick Riordan Page A

baby grinned at her on the bedside table. The heart monitor bleeped, ticking off seconds Maia didn’t have to waste.
    •                           •                           •
    ETCH HERNANDEZ SAT IN HIS CAR considering what Miss Lee had said.
    The lawyer reminded him strongly of Ana, which made him uneasy. He didn’t like the doubts she’d raised about Kelsey. He wished she hadn’t asked about Lucia. No matter how many years went by, that subject was always painful.
    Most of all, he was ashamed she’d caught him at a weak moment. Looking at Ana in that hospital bed had been harder than he’d anticipated.
    He had a reputation for being professional—calm and collected. Yet for all the years he’d been climbing the ranks, he still felt like a pretender. At heart, he was still a simple patrol cop. He wanted nothing more than to be back in his unit again, with Lucia DeLeon, drinking bad coffee at three in the morning and watching the moon rise over the South Side barrios.
    He closed his eyes and remembered the day he’d come closest to dying. August 10, 1975.
    He and Lucia had been patrolling together for almost a year at that point. Etch had been doing his best to hate her.
    Lucia had started in ’67. She’d spent five years relegated to typical women’s jobs—doing body searches on female prisoners, caring for children after domestic disputes. Finally in ’72 she’d made enough noise and rattled enough cages to get a regular patrol assignment. The male officers despised her. Many refused to work with her. She spent three years getting bounced from partner to partner, given the worst shifts in the most boring parts of town, but she wouldn’t quit. Finally, in ’75, she got her wish—a patrol on the near South Side, the Mission area where she’d grown up. Etch was the lucky guy who got her as partner.
    He tried his best to ignore her, to say nothing that wasn’t absolutely necessary. She never let him get away with it.
    “Herberto Hernandez,” she mused one night as they were riding the dog watch. “H.H.
Hache, hache.
Too much of a mouthful. I’m gonna call you Etch.”
    “The hell you will.”
    Lucia smiled. She loved goading him to talk.
    “Etch,” she repeated. “Like
hache,
see? It’s a good name.”
    His protests didn’t matter. Even his male colleagues picked up the nickname. It fit, they said. He’d been Etch ever since.
    Seven months into their partnership, they got a call for backup from the Pig Stand restaurant on South Alamo—two officers on a disturbance call, a fight between a woman and her jilted boyfriend. The officers on the scene were having trouble subduing the male assailant.
    The Pig Stand was an old diner even in ’75. A slim box of glass and neon and brick, it sat on a triangle of asphalt where South Flores scissored into South Alamo. Its most remarkable feature was the giant concrete pig outside.
    The two patrolmen who needed help were Ingram and Halff, old-timers in the department. Hernandez knew damn well they would never have picked a Latino and a Latina to be their backup, but they sure as hell needed help.
    Judging from the broken furniture and shattered windows, the fight had started inside and moved out into the parking lot.
    Ingram was lying on his back in the diner doorway. Etch didn’t know whether he was dead or just unconscious. Halff was on the pavement, being straddled and beaten by the assailant, a long-haired Anglo biker who must’ve weighed three-fifty. A woman knelt next to him, crying, trying to pull him off the cop. She had a bloody mouth and a black eye and her paisley dress was torn.
    The biker was yelling at half-conscious Officer Halff: “I’ll do whatever the fuck I want to her! You understand? Whatever the fuck I want!”
    Lucia started forward, but Etch said, “Let me handle this.”
    “Etch—”
    “
No.
Stay back. Call for an ambulance.”
    He didn’t wait for her to argue. There