Выбрать главу

April let her breath out in a whistle. "Just like that?"

Mike shrugged. "Well, it's not just like that. I've been thinking about it for a while now. I think cops should marry each other, know what I mean?"

April chewed on her bottom lip, then glanced out the car window at her house.

"So, what do you say?"

She studied the water dripping down the windshield before answering. "What about love?"

"Huh? Didn't I say I love you? You know I love you. You'd have to be crazy not to know that." He started patting his pocket down now for the car keys, didn't think this was going well and wanted to get away. "I want to marry you, be with you forever, don't I?"

"They're right here." She handed him the car keys.

"So?" He fumbled with the ignition.

After a long moment, she shook her head. "I couldn't marry anyone I haven't slept with, you know, quite a bit. Maybe as long as a year, to see if we're compatible."

"No kidding?" Mike perked up.

"I don't know why. But it seems important to me."

"It's important." Mike cleared his throat. "Shouldn't marry if you're not"—he coughed again— "compatible." He checked his watch. It was 7:00 A.M. He didn't know what time her shift started.

April brushed raindrops off the front of her raincoat, waiting for his next move.

Mike sucked on his mustache, considering. "You hungry? Want to go to my place for breakfast?"

"Sure," she said. "Got any food?"

"Ah, not really. Is that a problem?" Mike looked at her again, checking to make absolutely sure he wasn't missing something somewhere.

"No problem," she said, then smiled, stopping his heart again. Jesu Christe, she meant it.

After all this time no problem? Mike plunged the key into the ignition, got the car started, and pulled out with a roar. At 7:33 the rain stopped. At 7:45 Mike and April were in his apartment in their first deep kiss, struggling to embrace around their various weapons when the phone rang.

Mike picked up, breathing hard. "Yeah. Sanchez."

"You in the middle of something, Mike?"

"What's up?" He nuzzled April's neck, wasn't leaving now no matter what.

Hardly wincing at all, April pushed up her sleeves and wrapped her smooth slender arms around his neck. He kissed the inside of her upper arm. Her skin smelled of soap and roses. She pressed her hips against him. He kissed her mouth and tongue. She tasted of mint toothpaste. He could feel her breasts, her heart beating, her thigh nudging between his legs. He felt light-headed, almost dizzy with excitement. All he wanted was to sink down on the floor with her and never get up.

He couldn't hear what was being said to him. "I have a bad cold," he said. "I have a fever. It's my day off."

"You heard me, this is important. Are you coming ill?"

April had removed her weapon and now was disarming him. She caught a tender place under his arm and tickled, making him laugh into the phone. And he hadn't thought she was funny! Then she was tugging at his shirt, at the buckle on his belt. He was breathing hard.

"Mike—! Are you coming in or what?"

"No, man, not today," he croaked. He tried to hang up the receiver and dropped it with a crash. By the time he got the two pieces of phone together and the dial tone shut down, April had most of her clothes off. He stopped short, gawking like a kid.

"Jesus, April—"

"What was that about?" she asked.

"Oh, nothing. Um—" He took his pants off, tripping and almost falling on a cuff. Not cool, not cool at all.

"Very nice," April murmured at what she saw. She said "Kiss me a lot" in Spanish. He was pretty much out of his mind with desire, but he did notice that her accent was pretty good. He figured that she didn't really mean kiss me a lot. She meant what kiss me a lot really means. So he did.

If you enjoyed reading Judging Time,  be sure to look for Leslie Glass's powerful new April Woo suspense novel, STEALING TIME

Read on for a special brief excerpt. . . .

Available now from Signet

At 5 A.M., on what would tum out to be anything but a routine Tuesday, April Woo saw the glow of morning spread around the comer and down the hall into the bedroom where she was trying to sleep. The light came from the living-room picture window of the twenty-second-floor Queens apartment where her boyfriend had lived for six months and where no curtains concealed the drop-dead view of the Manhattan skyline. Punched out and highlighted by the dawn, the jumble of building shapes hung as if etched in the sky, a monument to the ingenuity of man, that great magician who used the raw power of steel and concrete in bridges and glass towers to dwarf nature and hide himself. Another day, and the city beckoned even before the cop was fully conscious.

April Woo was a detective sergeant in the New York City Police Department and second whip in the detective squad of Midtown North, the West Side precinct between Fifty-ninth and Forty-second streets from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River. She was a boss who supervised other detectives and was in charge of the squad when her superior, Lieutenant Iriarte, was not around. She was also a person used to sleeping in her own. bed. Having grown up in a Chinatown walkup, and living at the moment in a two-story house in Astoria, Queens, April was now in the highest place she'd ever spent the night. She yawned, stretched, and let the soft drone of the news perpetually playing on 1010 WINS filter into her consciousness. A sharp detective listened for disaster twenty-four hours a day.

Hearing a radio report of a crime in her precinct could get her out of bed even if she wasn't aware of hearing it. Now, April urgently needed the story of some catastrophe for her mother, that April could claim kept her working around the clock. She needed the story if she wanted to go home in peace.

Only three weeks ago, on April 25th, April Woo had celebrated her thirtieth birthday, but you'd never know it by the way her parents treated her. It was particularly humiliating to her that instead of bringing her the respect she deserved, her rank in the department and the ripeness of her age only served to pick up the pace of her mother's tirades on the subject of her low-life job and lousy marriage prospects.

In the Chinese culture, dragons can be both good and evil, can appear at any moment and have the power to make or break every human endeavor. April called Sai Yuan Woo "Skinny Dragon Mother" because her mother, too, had the ability to change shape before her eyes, and had a tongue that spit real fire. April was no less afraid of her now that she carried two guns on her person than she had been as a small and defenseless child.

Lately, Skinny Dragon Mother had upped the ante on her disapproval of her only child, calling April the very worst kind of old maid, a worm old maid with an undesirable suitor. The undesirable suitor in question, Mike Sanchez, was a Mexican-American sergeant in the Detective Bureau like April. But unlike her, he was now assigned to the Homicide Task Force. Carefully, April turned her head to look at him, lying on his stomach beside her, sound asleep. One arm was curved over his head, the other cradled the pillow that hid his face. The sheet covered his calves and feet. The rest of him was naked.

The clutch hit her above the heart and below the throat, somewhere around the clavicle. His legs and butt, the muscles in his back and shoulders, the fine tracing of curly black hair on the backs of his arms more on his legs, seemed exactly right. His waist, though no longer exactly slender and boyish, was proportionately correct for his age and stature. He had smooth skin—in places it was as soft as a baby's—and the hard muscles of a trained fighter. His body was an interesting blend of hard and soft, dotted with a collection of scars from various battles, only a few of which she knew the origins.