Free Mission Road by Rick Riordan Page B

was no way he was going to send a woman into a brawl like this.
    Etch drew his weapon and approached the biker. He yelled the right commands in just the right tone of voice. He was cool. He’d done this before. He didn’t know that the biker was pumped up on Angel Dust, something nobody in San Antonio had seen yet. It wouldn’t be common on the streets for another ten years.
    The biker reared and charged with such intensity Etch never had time to shoot. He saw a flash of black and he was on the pavement, the barrel of his own gun swimming in front of his face.
    “I’ll start with you!” the biker yelled, pressing the muzzle against Etch’s forehead. “Cops in my business! I’ll do you first!”
    Etch realized there wasn’t going to be any help. There wasn’t time. The biker would murder three cops and his girlfriend just because it felt good. Then he would probably shoot himself. Etch knew cops who had died this way. He just never thought he would be one of them.
    “Hey, asshole!” Lucia yelled, somewhere off to the left. “Maybe it’s because you got no dick.”
    The biker lurched toward her voice. The pressure of the gun muzzle eased up a little between Etch’s eyes.
“What?”
    “You heard me,” Lucia called.
    Etch could only see her feet behind the patrol car, but he understood what she was doing—crouching for cover, both hands on her weapon, elbows steadied against the hood of the car. Etch wanted to scream
no.
He couldn’t allow her to die, too. And yet he was totally powerless.
    “I’ll kill this motherfucker!” the biker warned.
    “Yeah,” Lucia said. “Because you got no dick. No wonder your girlfriend left you.”
    “You bitch!”
    “That’s right,” Lucia coaxed. “I’m the one you should be mad at. I’m laughing at you—a dickless coward who beats up his defenseless girlfriend. How’d you do against
me,
asshole? Come on, show me your gun.”
    “I’ll kill you, you goddamn—”
    He took the gun off Etch and pointed it at Lucia, which is what she’d been waiting for.
    She shot him through the heart.
    A month later, an official hearing cleared Lucia to return to patrol. The brass presented her a medal of bravery for saving three officers’ lives. She got an avalanche of press attention. She turned down offers of better assignments and went right back to patrol.
    Etch and Lucia started meeting at the Pig Stand for dinner every night before their shift. Surprisingly, the manager was glad to see them. He comped every meal.
    The changes between Lucia and Etch were subtle but seismic. She had saved his life.
    “Thank you,” he told her one night, the first time he’d been able to say it.
    Lucia looked up from her plate of onion rings. “No problem, Etch.”
    He didn’t object to the name.
    “How did you know the guy would turn the gun on you?” he asked. “How did you know what to say?”
    She smiled ruefully. “I’ve made it a point to understand men.”
    “Even men like that?”
    “Especially men like that.”
    He sensed more of a story there. He knew she was a single mom, raising a nine-year-old daughter named Ana. Speculation around the department was Lucia had to be lesbian. But Etch wasn’t so sure.
    He’d never noticed the amber color of her eyes before, the way her short black hair curled behind her ears. She wore no makeup, but she had nice lips, the color of plums. He found himself wondering what she would look like in civilian clothes—a dress, perhaps.
    Thirty years later, he could still remember the way she looked that night.
    He opened his eyes. He thought again about what Miss Lee had told him.
    He’d never trusted any cop the way he trusted Lucia. He sure as hell didn’t trust Kelsey to do things right.
    He dialed the private number of a detective who owed him a favor—a narcotics guy who would’ve lost his job in an IA investigation if Etch hadn’t withheld some damaging information.
    “This is Hernandez,” Etch told him. “I need you to do