Free The Night Cafe by Taylor Smith Page B

her work would be done. Easy money.

    She rewrapped the painting in the soft cloth Rebecca had provided and slipped it back into the leather portfolio. In her bedroom, she propped it behind her bureau, then kicked off her sandals and pulled her T-shirt over her head. She was just heading to the bathroom to turn on the shower when the bleep of her cell phone stopped her in her tracks. It was in her messenger bag in the living room. She ran back into the other room, plucked it up and glanced at the screen. Her stomach did a backflip. The number was familiar enough that she recognized it, but not such a habit that she’d assigned it a permanent place in her phone list. That would be too much like asking for trouble.

    She opened the phone. “Hi, there.”

    “Hey, stranger.” John Russo’s voice reminded her of bittersweet chocolate—deep, dark, rich but never cloying. It was like everything else about him, a balance of weirdly Zen calm and edgy tension that made him intriguing, unpredictable and just a little bit scary. He was unremarkable in appearance, not overly large or menacing, but the bad guys he encountered in his line of work would underestimate him at their peril. Russo was one of the best homicide detectives in the city. It would be easy enough, she imagined, for a suspect to be lulled by his easygoing demeanor, only to be stung by that laser intelligence and pit bull tenacity.

    Hannah counted herself among the good guys, but Russo kept her feeling a little off balance, too. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do about that. The two of them had been tap-dancing around each other for a couple of months now. If the irregular hours they both kept made it tough for them to find time to see one another, Russo had made it clear he wasn’t about to let a few scheduling problems get in his way. The guy was determined, she’d give him that. And a damn good kisser, Hannah had discovered. Her stomach cart-wheeled as she recalled their one and only real date. It was about ten days ago, dinner followed by a walk on the beach. Yes, a cliché right out of the classifieds, maybe, but it had worked. Unfortunately, it had come to a breathless but abrupt end when he’d been called out to a murder scene in West Hollywood. He wasn’t supposed to be on call that night, but as luck would have it, a gang war had erupted in Compton and all of Russo’s colleagues had been out picking up the pieces of carnage there when the dead sheet call came in.

    “You’re a tough lady to get hold of,” Russo said now.

    “I wouldn’t want to seem easy.” Hannah winced. Damn, was she flirting? She hated flirting. “Anyway, I called your office. You have a new partner.”

    “Yeah, she’s a newbie. She’ll be riding with me for the next couple of months. I’m her T.O.” Her training officer. “Name’s Lindsay. She just transferred in from the Twin Towers.”

    The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, in addition to policing vast swaths of Southern California, also ran the detention facilities that housed men and women arrested anywhere in the county. It was impossible to climb through LASD ranks without sooner or later doing a stint as a corrections officer in one of the jails. Hannah herself had worked in the Twin Towers correctional unit for a year after graduating from police academy, and she’d hated every minute of it. The relationship between jailed and jailer was made up of equal parts suspicion, contempt and gamesmanship, bored inmates having little else to occupy them besides looking for ways to end-run the guards. The day her transfer to a patrol beat had come through, Hannah had danced a jig right there in the control tower.

    “I’ll bet she’s glad to be out of there. I assume she’s been on the street already?” Hannah asked. You didn’t make detective in the Sheriff’s Department until you’d put in your time on patrol.

    “Yeah, she worked the Valley and Compton. She only just told me you’d called.