Ho. Ho. Ho!
As Sima peeled off screams, her friend slapped a hand over her mouth, dragged her away.
“Trey! Trey!”
“Shut it down, Sima. Just shut it down a minute. Jesus, what a mess.”
“He’s dead. There’s blood. He’s dead.”
“I got that. Holy shit.”
“Whattawedo? Oh God! Whattawedo?”
Running away would be awesome but . . . Even buildings as lousy as this probably have some security. Or somebody might have seen them come in. Or heard them work out the plan over tequila shots. Or something.
“You’ve got to calm down some—and don’t touch anything. Not anything. I’ve got to tag up somebody.”
“You’re going to have somebody come get rid of the body?” Sima dragged her fingers down her throat as if she were being strangled. “Oh my God!”
“Grip reality, Sima. I’m tagging a cop.”
• • •
Two in the morning, two in the freaking morning in the frozen bowels of December, and she had to roll out of a warm bed beside a hot husband and deal with what might be a dead body—or a drunken prank by a woman who drove her crazy on the best of days.
In moments like this, being a cop sucked.
But Lieutenant Eve Dallas was a cop, so she pulled up in front of the dingy box of a building in the West Village, grabbed her field kit—if there was an actual DB, it would save her coming back out for it—and stomped across the icy sidewalk.
She’d have used her master to swipe in, but the door clicked and buzzed as she reached for it.
She didn’t much like the look of the elevator in the skinny, smelly lobby, but opted for it. The sooner to get this over.
She jammed her cold hands—she hadn’t thought of gloves—in the pockets of her long leather coat and scowled with golden brown eyes at the numbers creeping from one to two to three, and finally to four on the dented panel.
When the doors opened, she strode out, a tall, lean, pretty pissed-off woman with a shaggy cap of hair nearly the same color as her eyes.
Before she could bang a fist on the door, it opened. There stood the woman who cut her hair—often whether Eve wanted the service or not. Who’d seen her naked—and that Eve never wanted.
“If you’re fucking with me, I’m hauling your ass in for filing a false report.”
“Hand to God.” Trina shot up a hand—fingers tipped in swirls of holiday red and green—then used the other to yank Eve inside. “His name’s Trey Ziegler, and he’s really dead in the bedroom.”
“Who’s that?” Eve demanded, jerking a head toward the woman with an explosion of red curls smashed under a black watch cap who was currently holding some sort of red-and-blue plastic golf club and blubbering.
“That’s Sima. His ex. She lived here.”
“You live here?” Eve asked Sima.
“Yes. No. I did, but he—then he . . . He’s . . . he’s . . . he’s . . .”
When Sima dissolved, Eve turned back to Trina. “Stay here, don’t touch anything. Don’t let her touch anything.”
She took the short five steps to the bedroom door, looked in.
Okay, that was a dead man.
She set down her field kit to pull out her ’link. She called it in, arranged for her partner to be notified.