“Wouldn’t be the worst I’ve had.” At forty-five years old, Rust’s fit and by no means bad looking. Likes younger women, from what I know. “May have been easier.”

“No, it wouldn’t. 24’s smart. You need the dumb nephew. Kid’s too new. Get him comfortable, get him drunk . . . He’ll slip and, when he does, we’ve got him.”

“I just don’t know what the best way in is with this guy. I don’t think it’s the bar scene.”

Heaving himself off my couch, Warner strolls over to the kitchen to drop his empty on the counter. “We have a few more weeks before the warrant’s up. Sleep on it. We’ll regroup in the morning.”

“ ’kay. Night,” I call out as the condo door shuts. As tired as I am, I know that the stress of looming failure—of being sent back to D.C. to bust pimps and drug addicts—is going to keep me up. I’m half-tempted to drink wine until I pass out, but I’ll only feel worse tomorrow. Not that I have anywhere that I need to be.

So I start flipping through the case files, beginning to end, like I’ve done over a hundred times. Luke Boone’s schedule is pretty basic: he’s either at the garage, at a club with his uncle, working out, or “entertaining” one female or another. There have been no reports of him disappearing into warehouses or storefronts at erratic hours of the night. The team’s never lost track of him in the few hours per day that they’re on him. Unlike his Uncle Rust, who continuously slides through their surveillance detail like a bar of wet soap.

Frankly, there’s no solid evidence that Luke Boone has any involvement with this ring. Only speculation. Enough to get a sixty-day warrant from the judge. I need to spend time with him to get a better read. Surveillance tapes and reports give me only background. They help me to speculate about what he might respond best to.

So far, all of our speculations have been wrong.

Closing the file, I pack everything back up into the hidden safe and pull out my personal phone, checking it for any messages. My parents are aware that I’ll be away for an indefinite amount of time on a case. That’s all they know, though, and that’s all I can tell them. As far as my mother is concerned, I’m only ever sitting at a desk, working behind-the-scenes detail. If she knew what I was actually doing—the kind of danger I put myself in on a daily basis—she’d beg me to quit with tears in her eyes and Sicilian prayers rolling off her tongue.

If they could see me now . . . This loft is a far cry from the small, semi-detached house they’ve owned for the past thirty-one years, complete with the original stiff-backed floral couches and the large vegetable garden they tend to in the backyard. It’s nothing special, and yet it’s their dream come true after immigrating to America from a small town outside Palermo, Sicily, with nothing but one suitcase of clothes and my grandmother’s white linen tablecloth. It took almost ten years and at least four honest jobs between the two of them at all times—my mother in bakeries, my father as a janitor—to scrounge up enough money for the down payment.

My brother Dino, older than me by eleven years, remembers those years being tough. Socks with darned toes and jeans with patches in the knees, used toys for Christmas, summer vacations at local parks. Cold winters, to save on electric bills.

By the time I came along—an accident when my parents were in their mid-thirties—they were living in luxury by comparison.

Still, it’s nothing like what I’m living right now.

No calls from the family tonight, which doesn’t bother me. I talk to them enough. A few texts from my girlfriend Aubrey, telling me about the upcoming girls’ weekend that I won’t be going to because I’m 2,300 miles away. It bothers me a little bit but I’m used to it. I miss a lot of birthdays and holidays and getaways because of my job.

What I still haven’t gotten used to is not seeing a message from David, my latest ex-boyfriend. Nine months of messages all day—every day—until I came home with a black eye and busted lip from a takedown and he decided that he can’t handle being with a cop.

I really liked this one, too. I thought he might be different. Stronger.

I thought I’d prove my police college instructor and that author with her PhD label wrong. That keeping a relationship in this field isn’t as hard as they made it out to be. I still have that stupid paperback that they handed us in class, about loving a cop. It’s at home, collecting dust. At first I thought it was a joke, until I started flipping through the pages and digesting everything I should expect in the years to come. How the long shifts and overtime coupled with the daily hazards earn this field high divorce rates. How the things I see every day make it hard for me to carry on a normal dinner conversation. How I’ll have a difficult time meeting men to begin with because of all the trust issues I’ll develop, dealing with liars all day long. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I pushed it off as a stereotype that wouldn’t fit me. I hoped that being aware of the challenges would prepare me enough to avoid them.

The dozen or so failed relationships since then have proven that little pocket book not so stupid after all.

My mentor—a staff sergeant in her early forties, who’s been divorced twice now—only validated it by warning me to expect a whole lot of heartbreak before I find the right relationship. If I ever do. Dating a female cop may be a fantasy involving handcuffs and wild sex, but marrying one isn’t a reality most guys can stomach. The day she told me that, three days after David ended things, I went home and cried into a bottle of red wine.