Ties That Blind. Zachary Klein

      I stood on the wooden porch, finished my smoke, and tossed it onto the sidewalk. Uniforms never failed to strum my anxiety and an invite from a heavy Blue had me checking pockets, making certain I wasn’t accidentally holding.

      I took a deep breath, walked through the screen door and found myself in a huge white room, completely empty save a large desk and chair butting up to an arch on the far side. Someone had taken decorating lessons from Mussolini.

      I was halfway across the oak floor when a slim, medium height, dark-complected figure with close cropped brown hair appeared from the back and leaned against the arch’s frame. I stopped as he took a bite of an apple, chewed, swallowed, and pitched the core into a pail.

      “You’re Jacobs?” he asked in a soft, polite voice. He was in his late thirties—an age I hadn’t seen in quite a while. No uniform, although his pleated green chinos and yellow Izod were close to an official something.

      “Jacob,” I reminded. “You’re Chief Biancho?” I walked close enough to see his sharp features. Despite the languid pose, his intense dark eyes scraped my face and scratched my nerves.

      “Thanks for stopping by.”

      “Thanks for the directions. You get hit during the night?” With me, banjo nerves usually came loaded with an open mouth.

      Razor thin lines crossed Biancho’s smooth forehead. “What?”

      I waved my arm around the empty room. “Some terrorist steal all your stuff?”

      He smiled briefly. “I told you we’re a small operation.”

      “Small is different than empty.”

      “Just a ‘mom and pop’ office with more pops than moms,” Biancho said, a touch less pleasantly. “We don’t use this room. People generally come through the side door.”

      “At least you don’t have to rent a hall for the Police Ball.”

      Biancho smiled tightly, pushed himself off the frame, and turned his back. His alligatored knit back.

      I followed it through the rest of the great hall into a long corridor that led to the additions. The Chief waited until I caught up before heading toward a plain, but large and comfortable, office.

      “You usually man the fort alone?” I asked before sitting on a small leather loveseat across from a floral upholstered wing chair. On the other side of the room there was a neatly kept mahogany desk with a framed photograph of a beautiful redhead. Dum dums to silver bullets, we were talking wife.

      Biancho shook his head as he sat down in the pretty chair. “Deborah called in sick. I was planning to send her on errands when you arrived, anyway.”

      I tried to ignore my sudden shot of panic. “It’s good to be Chief.”

      “Pretty good. Got me pegged as a regular small town shit-kicker, don’t you?”

      I couldn’t stop wagging my tongue. “Not yet.”

      Biancho’s mouth moved but I couldn’t tell if it was a smile or swear. “This morning you asked where I got your number.”“After you told me who you were I figured the phone company.”

      “I went through your car yesterday when it was parked near Shore Road and ran across your ticket. Bad habit to leave your wallet in the trunk. Trunks get popped all the time.” Biancho eyes bore into mine.

      I hoped he didn’t see how fucking stupid I felt. I’d spent half the goddamn night in a car worrying about nothing. While Biancho’s b&e didn’t explain the trampled grass in the woods, it probably did explain the “feeling.” Still, something about that campsite continued to disturb me.

      I raised my brows. “This time it was the good guys who did the popping.” Now that I knew he’d been in my car, I felt a mixture of anger and alarm; I couldn’t remember whether I had finished all my weed before I’d followed Lauren out to the rocks.

      “There’s no reason to worry, Mr. Jacob. We’re on the same side. When I called your police department to check on you, an interesting thing happened.”

      “Everybody cheered?”

      “No cheers, but your name caught their attention. It took a couple of hand-offs but I finally spoke to a mutual acquaintance. Washington Clifford. They called him your “babysitter.”

      Whatever wind left in my sail escaped. Washington Clifford was a vicious son of a bitch who more than once Buddy Rich’d my body.

      “I’m sure he gave you a balanced report,” I said sarcastically. Clifford lived a sanctioned life between the official cracks of Boston’s Police Department. My dislike was matched only by fear. Clifford’s dislike was undiluted, despite situations where we had helped each other out.

      “You leap to conclusions awfully fast, Mr. Jacob.”

      “Why don’t you just call me Matt? Mister makes me feel even older than I am.”