I drive down the street, looking intently around at Fort Brynard, the town where I'll be stationed for the foreseeable future. I feel a slight breeze against my skin, and glance down. Shit. One of the buttons on my trooper uniform just popped open over my breasts again. They don't exactly make these shirts for a woman with curves.
I stop at the next red light and button it. Maybe I'll have to sew a hook and eye underneath the fabric to keep it shut. The last thing I need is for it to pop open on the job. As a young, petite woman, I already have enough trouble being taken seriously as a police officer.
The light turns green, and I continue on toward the station. Up ahead, I see a small figure standing on the sidewalk. A little girl, alone. I shiver as I see a nearly burned-out building behind her. Scorch marks lick the sides of the apartment buildings on either side of it. I pull over to the curb and lean out toward the passenger side of my car.
"Hi, I'm Marie. Are your parents around?" The girl looks back at me with huge brown eyes but doesn't respond. "It's okay. I'm a police officer. See?" I point down at my uniform.
She takes a nervous step toward the car. "My daddy's inside…"
Sure enough, the charred metal door of the building opens with a bang. "What the hell are you doing?" a man in a dirty white t-shirt and carrying a cardboard box snaps at me.
"I saw your daughter alone and wanted to make sure she was alright," I explain.
"It's none of your business," he sneers.
"It is my business," I retort, my eyes narrowing. "I'm a cop."
He leans down to get a better look at me, and clocks my uniform. "Hmph. Well, I'm just picking up some of our stuff that didn't get burned to shit," he says gruffly. "That alright with you?" he adds sarcastically.
"Just fine," I say with a forced smile. "You have a good day, and please be sure to keep a better eye on your daughter in the future." I can tell he wants to say something back to me, but he bites his lips. Leaning down, he grabs his daughter's arm a little too hard, then yanks her down the street. My fingers tighten on the steering wheel. He's behaving like an asshole, but not quite like a criminal, so there's nothing I can do about it. I pull away from the curb.
The Fort Brynard police station is only a couple blocks further, and I feel nerves swell in my stomach as I pull into the parking lot. It's my first assignment out of the Academy, and I don't want to fuck it up. These are going to be my colleagues for many years, so first impressions matter. I take my keys out of the ignition and take a deep breath. I need to put on a hard face. Just like at the Academy, I'm sure I'll be one of the only women, and none of the men are going to believe I'm tough enough to be a trooper until I prove it.
I get out of my car and head for the front of the building. Above me, the January sun shines down weakly from the sky, hidden behind a slow-moving grey cloud. I see a flicker of movement behind the glass doors at the entrance and reach out to push one open. I nearly collide with the door, then step back as a middle-aged woman pushes it open from the inside.
"Ya gotta pull," she tells me, looking down at my uniform.
"Thanks," I tell her with a smile. She doesn't smile back, but moves aside to let me enter.
"I'm Jeanette," she says, extending her hand.
"McHenry. Marie McHenry," I introduce myself.
"So you're the new trooper. Huh. I'm the Office Manager, so I can show you to your locker area," she says, nodding behind her. I follow her into a small hallway, and almost trip over a box of files. "They've been using the women's locker room for extra storage, since they didn't have any female troopers until now. That locker there is yours. You don't have any personal items with you?" I shake my head no. "Well, I think Lieutenant Ebert wanted to see you when you got here."
She leads me back out of the locker room, then around the front desk and through the detective's bullpen. A few of them are occupied by older men, who look up at me as we pass. I keep my gaze straight ahead.
"Have a seat," Jeanette says, indicating a bench outside of a closed office door, then walks back toward the front. I sit, folding my hands in my lap. I glance quickly around the room. One of the men is still looking at me, but moves his gaze back down to his paperwork as I catch him.
I got used to the looks while I was at the Academy, and they don't bother me anymore. The instructors and male cadets were vocal about not thinking I was up to the physical challenges. At five foot four, I certainly don't look like I can take down a man six inches taller than me, but I can. I've been training in jiu-jitsu and boxing since I was thirteen, when my curves started coming in and I realized how men saw me, and how I might need to know how to protect myself. I got my GED at sixteen, but had to wait tables for years until I was twenty-one and allowed to enter the police academy.
I'm interrupted from my thoughts by a blur of movement. A tall, broad-shouldered man strides confidently through the rows of desks before sitting with a beleaguered sigh behind his own. He's in plain clothes, so I know he's a detective. He looks up, and now I'm the one who's caught staring. My face flushes, and I look down at my hands, though I can still picture his brown, intense eyes and his shortly cropped blonde hair. Even with my eyes on my hands, I can still feel him looking at me.
I take a deep breath and raise my eyes again. He might be trying to intimidate me, and I can't let him. To my discomfort, he doesn't look away.
"McHenry?" the door to my right opens, and the Lieutenant Ebert, a tired-looking man with a thick grey mustache, looks down at me.
"Sir," I reply, standing up.
"Come in," he says, pushing the door open. "You too, Stewart." I glance back to see the blonde man standing up and following me. Great.
I sit in a chair across from the desk, light filtering in from the window behind it. The Lieutenant moves behind his desk, picking up a thick file and putting it on top of a large pile on the floor. The door shuts, and Stewart sits in the chair next to me. The Lieutenant pulls another file, a thin one, onto his desk and flips it open. There's a moment of silence, then he leans back in his chair.
"Feel free to say 'no'," he finally says. "The Academy didn't prepare you for this."
"Say no to what? You sound like you're warning me," I reply, feeling confused.
"That's exactly what I'm doing," he says gravely. "I'm sorry. I know this is your first day on your first assignment, but we're desperate. In the last two years, this county has seen an explosion in homicides. It's gotten a little quieter, but now there's been a steady uptick in the number of deaths from heroin overdoses. We know exactly where it's coming from, but there's nothing we can do about it."
"Sir?" I ask, feeling completely at sea.
"The Death Dealers MC," Stewart pipes up, leaning forward and resting his broad forearms on his knees. "MC means motorcycle club," he informs me. "This particular club has recently risen to become the strongest in the entire state of Arizona. They've consolidated power – that's where the homicides came from – and now they've got a lucrative heroin ring going and they're running arms down to the Mexican cartels. Their headquarters are in the next town over, a place called Paradise Falls."
"The problem is, we can't get any hard evidence on them. They're always a step ahead of us. We think there might be a leak in the department, and we're getting no help from the Feds," the Lieutenant picks up. "And here's where you come in…" he says, then tucks his upper lip into his mouth and appears to chew on the end of his mustache for a moment. "You have a certain…look," he says. "That's part of why we requested you."
I tense. "I was given this assignment because of my appearance?" I ask, anger tinging my voice.
"Yes," Stewart says flatly. I look at him, about to rise out of my chair, but the honesty in his eyes stops me. "But it's not what you think. We want you to go undercover."
"I haven't been trained for that," I gape.
"We know," the Lieutenant says. "And we wouldn't ask you if the situation weren't dire."
"Ask me?"
"That's right. This is not an order. I wouldn't feel right, ordering someone to go into a situation as dangerous as this one."
"We would give you a new identity," Stewart adds, "and you'd have to engage with the Death Dealers, get them to trust you, and then feed us information about what they're doing. We need to catch them in the act, in the middle of a deal, or with a substantial amount of drugs or arms. We waited a long time for the right candidate for this assignment. It had to be someone with a real passion for law enforcement, not someone just looking for a steady job. Your instructors at the Academy passed you with flying colors."
My heart swells with pride, even as my head continues to spin. "And I'm a new face. Someone they won't recognize as a cop."
"Exactly," Stewart says.
"So, I would just sort of hang around these guys, hoping they'll notice me?" I ask.
"Well, um, like we said before, about your, ah…" Lieutenant Ebert says awkwardly, then trails off.
"About your appearance, that's why it's so important," Stewart says. "The Death Dealers are always looking for young, beautiful women."
"Oh," I reply, not knowing what else to say. I spent so long at the Academy trying to get people to ignore what I look like, only to come here and find it front and center.
"Stewart here would be your handler. The only outside person you would make contact with," the Lieutenant adds.
I take a deep breath. "Sorry, this is just a lot of information."
"Let's take a walk," Stewart says abruptly, standing up. "There's a path right out back. It'll help you clear your head."
"Good idea," the Lieutenant says with a nod, not leaving me much of a choice.
"Come on," Stewart says. "We'll just be able to catch the sunset at the top of the ridge."