The Heat of Angels Read online

  She changed out of her vest and button-down shirt after she got home. She left her patrol pants on and threw on a Los Angeles Police Department T-shirt, the kind they used when they worked out at their gym or wore to casual functions. She noticed a small stain below the words BERGSTROM-LAPD K-9 Team embroidered on her left chest. Her academy training caused her arm muscles to jerk upward with the intent of ripping off the shirt and finding a perfectly clean one. The Pavlovian urge was strong, but she resisted. Hell, all she had to do was run out to the store. Then no one would bark at her and make her do forty pushups for looking like a shit hole.

  She fed Abel and grabbed the keys to her SUV. She would have rather cracked open an ice-cold soda and flopped on the couch, but for the last couple of weeks, her cupboards had been winning a contest against Mother Hubbard.

  She parked in the Whole Foods Market lot, the inescapable smoke from the local fires assailing her as she opened the car door. As she entered the store, she rubbed the ashy feeling from her eyes. Mid swipe, she glimpsed a woman dressed in a light-brown, sleeveless ribbed sweater and brown print skirt. From her angle, the woman seemed to be in her early or mid-thirties, with hair a hint lighter than her sweater, resting on her shoulders as regally as a velvet robe on royalty. Chris blinked and she was gone.

  Just as well, she thought. Her last girlfriend had cheated on her for so long that when it finally exploded in her face, Chris had been the one who’d felt like the outsider. She’d been the interloper in her own life—the hopeful partygoer without her name on the guest list, the idiot without the password. It was better to just stay out of the romantic ring of fire.

  Chris grabbed a hand basket and headed in the opposite direction of the lovely brown sweater, less because she wanted to follow her and more because she had a shopping mission.

  “Face it, Bergstrom,” she told herself. “You were born divorced. You’re better off without the insanity of someone else’s life.”

  In the produce section, she loaded up on greens for the week. She’d cook a whole chicken, wrap the pieces in spinach or lettuce, and then parcel it out over the next few days. It kept well in the small cooler that sat in the passenger’s seat and provided quick nourishment between calls.

  Now, she needed a tasty snack for her lunches, something that would end the boring reign of bananas she’d been eating the past two weeks and the Pink Lady apples in the weeks prior to that. Rounding the corner, between the cara cara oranges and muscat grapes, she found her nirvana. In a large bin the plumpest, most delectable Oregon blackberries were displayed like juicy, obsidian gems waiting for someone to quarry and consume them.

  “Oh, you chubby little delights.” Chris swallowed back a sudden hankering.

  “Shall I leave you all alone?”

  Chris jumped, jerking her hand toward her holster that wasn’t there.

  In an instant, the brown-sweatered woman stepped back. “I’m sorry I startled you.”

  “Crap,” Chris blurted out as she put her hands up in some sort of embarrassed armistice. “I’m so sorry.”

  The woman seemed to study her in the same composed manner a pageantry judge would consider a New Year’s Day float. Chris was still a little sweaty from the bulletproof vest she’d worn all day, and now she suddenly grew even clammier. The woman was extremely beautiful and perfectly built. Her shoulders were strong but feminine, as were her hips, legs, and arms. While normally Chris would have politely and deferentially ignored her flawlessly shaped breasts, they would’ve demanded consideration from even a blind person.

  The woman read the words on Chris’s LAPD T-shirt, taking more time than an art connoisseur would regard a Picasso, and finally said, “I hope I haven’t broken any laws, Officer…?”

  “Bergstrom. Chris.”

  “I take it you adore blackberries?”

  Chris laughed. “It’s June. And it’s a short season.”

  This time the woman laughed and Chris relaxed.

  “Well, the way you were looking at them, I wasn’t sure I should reach between you and the fruit.”

  “That intense, huh?”

  “Like you hadn’t eaten in days.”

  Chris tore a plastic bag from the roll nearby. “Please, help yourself.”

  “I’m Sarah, by the way.”

  They stood side by side as they filled their bags. “Nice to meet you.” Unexpectedly, Chris’s entire body experienced a confusing mix of calmness and excitement.

  “Do you usually come here to accost the produce?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. Well, if I must admit, the fruit here is worth stalking, at the very least.”

  “And what’s the charge for that, Officer Bergstrom?”

  “Well, it’s a violation of penal code 646.9, I believe.”

  “Doesn’t sound too serious.”

  Chris picked up the fattest berry she could find. “The charge is stalking, and it is to this little guy.”

  “Are you indicting yourself?”

  “Only if this berry decides to press charges.”

  Sarah plucked the piece of fruit from Chris and popped it in her mouth. Between chews, she said, “I’ve destroyed the evidence.”

  “You’ve killed the witness.”

  The way Sarah’s eyes widened as she raised her hand to her mouth was so adorable Chris swore the manager of the grocery store had just turned up the heat.

  “Well, do you suppose you’ll have to detain me now, Officer?”

  Was this really happening? Was Sarah flirting with her? Did she want something more than just a produce-section chat? Stranger things have happened, she thought. Whether or not Sarah meant anything by her question, Chris could play along. She pulled her pen and small notebook from her front pocket.

  “A phone number will suffice for now. That is, until I investigate this case and determine if the charges will stick.”

  Sarah smiled as if she were about to reveal a secret. She placed both hands over Chris’s, paused, and then slipped the pen and notebook from her fingers.

  “This,” she said as she wrote, “is my cell number. I don’t suggest you ask for my license, as you’ll find, when you run me, that I have a fondness for speed.” She handed the pad and pen back. “I hope that fact doesn’t impede your investigation.”

  A chuckle bubbled up from Chris’s throat and she shook her head. Women like Sarah didn’t just walk up to her and flirt. Well, not gorgeous women with a wicked wit and amazing eyes, at least.

  Pocketing the pen and notepad, she stepped backward. “I’ll be in touch.”

  As she turned to walk away, Sarah said, “Oh, and I also steal those paint stirrers from the hardware store.”

  Chris laughed and waved at Sarah. She might have needed some other groceries, but the mental list she’d entered the store with was now a blank sheet of paper. At the register, she tried to catch one more glimpse of Sarah, but the cashier scanned her items and took her money too quickly. Chris stopped at the exit to the store. She wanted to call Paige and say, “You’re never going to believe what just happened.” And it was true, because she almost couldn’t have imagined it herself. It was as if she’d just had a lone sighting of a UFO. She wanted someone else to know. She wanted to gush all over Paige about Sarah and retell the details of an event that seemed impossible.

  She looked around the parking lot. Where the hell was her car? Her brain couldn’t process anything but the thrill of Sarah still reverberating inside her. She actually felt giddy, which wasn’t an emotion she often had anything to do with.

  How could something as benign as a trip to the store change into an encounter that made her forget where she’d parked not twenty minutes earlier? She fished her keys out of her pocket and clicked the door-unlock button. The chirp answered her question, and she sure as heck hoped no one in the parking lot would think she’d suddenly gone feebleminded.

  *

  As the cashier rang up her total, Sarah bagged the ingredients for the family salad. The red apples, white and red
grapes, navel oranges, blackberries, and bananas would make her mother’s eyeballs spin. The “horribly ordinary” produce was a declaration, though. Fruit was fruit, and to turn a nose up at anything that wasn’t exotic and therefore acceptable was bullshit.

  Her mother expected the best and then allowed the society of the rich to decide what those things were. Obviously plain old red apples and conventional bananas were unacceptable because they were just too average.

  The cashier announced her grocery total, and Sarah sifted through her cash.

  And what was so bad about average? She longed to live a regular life where people were just…normal.

  Like the woman she’d met at the blackberry bin. She was a normal person, a working cop, who probably didn’t care if her oranges came from Florida instead of Venezuela.

  However, Sarah thought as the cashier handed her some change, the cop was refreshingly far from average. Her short-cropped, thick head of brown hair, lightly dusted with gray, the no-nonsense olive-green eyes, and her strong, chiseled jawline added up to a striking combination of beauty and strength. And she was able to match jocularities with her. It was silly to say they clicked, but they had. A box of popcorn and a dose of butter didn’t complement each other more naturally than she and Chris did.

  Her day was definitely turning around. She’d driven to the store dreading the upcoming dinner, but now she marveled at the fortunate turn of events. Of the thousands of people that walked in and out of Whole Foods, Sarah had been lucky enough to pick the perfect day and time to chance upon a woman who could awaken every cell in her body and infuse lightness and joy in places that had been starved of those pleasures for too damn long.

  A marvelous feeling of weightlessness overcame her, and she would never have dreamed its impetus would come in the form of a uniformed police officer.

  Whole Foods had just become Sarah’s favorite store.

  She took the grocery bag containing the ingredients of her “fuck you” salad and headed toward the store’s automatic doors, happy to be minutes away from pissing her mom off, but much happier to have met one Officer Bergstrom.

  *

  All day Saturday, the winds blew through the hills and the firemen chased the flames as they would a killdeer, the spry little bird that fakes her injuries to drive predators away from her nest but stays just out of reach.

  Chris had lost count of how many acres had been reported burned and how many houses had been lost. The strangeness of the ochre-tinged day and the charred smells of wood and brush created an eerie ambiance throughout a city that was usually a little too bright and quite full of the spicy smells of ethnic foods and the metallic, oily tang of smog.

  At noon, Chris pulled her squad car into the station and let Abel out. It was just under one hundred degrees, and the thick, burnt-smelling air assaulted her like a cheap blow-dryer.

  “Take a break,” she said, and he dutifully trotted to a patch of grass and peed. She put him back in the car, engine and air conditioner running, and went inside.

  “Hey, Bergy, how’s your partner?”

  “Bored, actually,” she said to one of her buddies, a tall young man named Cates.

  “No bites?”

  “Not for a while.”

  “Maybe it’s pilot error.”

  Chris turned to see Sergeant Shaffer standing in the doorway. He’d never recovered from being kicked off the K-9 team for some questionable bites. When Chris got his spot, he looked for opportunities to undermine her to the rest of the force.

  “I’d have to disagree, Sergeant. She found two pounds of meth the other night.”

  As Shaffer walked away he said, “Not sure a woman can handle the job.”

  Chris shook her head. “What a dick.”

  “Hey, nice bust anyway.”

  She sat down at a bank of computers and punched in her password. Four other officers were sitting around her typing up their reports. Cates, Miles, Forester, and Warshaw had been on the force almost as long as Chris had. They were all really good officers and treated her like one of the guys. Normally, Chris supposed that would be a bad thing, but on the force, lack of gentlemanliness meant equality. She was just as much the brunt of jokes as any other officer, and she’d received her fair share of razzes and pranks. Having more seniority meant that her repertoire of pranks far outnumbered theirs. And they were all very aware that she could deal out the best of the monkeyshine.

  The computer’s query screen came on, and she logged onto the case-filing page. Hopefully, she’d have a bit of time to write some reports before her next call. She opened her small notebook and flipped a few pages to the most recent notes. She had two domestic-disturbance calls, with names, descriptions, and quotes. On the next page, she had one breaking-and-entering and three car searches to write up. Turning to the next page, she paused. In a different script was Sarah’s name and phone number. Below that, it read the berry killer.

  A child with a new red balloon couldn’t have smiled wider than Chris did. Out of nowhere, an incredibly interesting woman had walked up and changed her day. And as unexpectedly as their encounter had begun, its conclusion had been just as unpredictable. In one moment they were talking about fruit, and in the next, Sarah made it known that she was interested enough to give Chris her number. If Sarah could do that, Chris reasoned, then she could certainly pick up the phone and dial.

  After a few rings, she heard the same voice and felt a rush of anticipation.

  “Sarah? This is Chris. Officer Bergstrom.”

  “Ahhh,” Sarah said, her voice as smooth as a velvet pillow. “Hello, Officer.”

  “I was calling to follow up on an incident I witnessed yesterday.”

  “Yes,” she said, and paused before saying, “but, I must inform you that the statute of limitations has run out on rubus fruticosus transgressions.”

  “Rubus…?”

  “It means blackberry. I looked it up.”

  How cute was that?! “Well, you may be correct about berry slaughter, but this state has no limits on first-degree…fruiticide.”

  Sarah’s overly dramatic sigh made Chris want to giggle. She knew the goofy smile she couldn’t wipe off her face would raise taunts from her police brethren.

  “I suppose I’ll need to come in for questioning?”

  Chris suppressed a giggle. “Yes, we require that.”

  “We?”

  “Berrrrrrgy!” The heckles started.

  She glared at Cates. “We, as in the city of Los Angeles.”

  “I’ll only talk to you.”

  “Ahhhhhhhhhh, sookie sookie, now!”

  She flipped Warshaw a middle finger. “That can easily be arranged.”

  “When does the city want me?”

  “At seventeen hundred hours.”

  After a long pause Sarah said, “Do I add or subtract two hours…?”

  “Five o’clock.”

  Cates and Warshaw were now singing quite badly. “Yooooou, your sex is on fire.”

  Chris threw her pen at them. “Any delay, reasonable or not, will be heavily weighed against you.”

  “Tell me where, then.”

  “How about Lilly’s Coffee Cart?”

  “In front of the Laurel Canyon Country Store?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do I need to wrap up my personal affairs before coming?”

  “Not yet.”

  “That’s a relief. See you then.”

  When she heard the phone click off, Chris stared at the computer screen. This was so unlike her, the blatant flirting and forward behavior. Things like this were supposed to go in a logical, sequential order. People were supposed to start by chatting and getting to know each other over a period of time and, eventually, request a date. By then, both parties would know each other rather well and things would naturally progress.

  A few empty cups got thrown her way.

  “You guys are assholes.”

  They laughed and turned back to their computers.

  Sh
e was about to meet up with a mystery woman whom she’d spent only five minutes with in the produce section of a grocery store. All she knew was her name. What kind of person would she turn out to be? Could she be a uniform groupie? That fetish was pretty popular, and she’d seen her share of loony Lulus, but they were usually pretty obvious. What little she knew of Sarah, she liked. Her humor and wit were just as attractive as her sexy face and body. But she might be too good to be true.

  The only way she’d find out for sure was to meet her. She was throwing caution into a wood chipper to get sliced up and disseminated into an explosion of scattered and unrecoverable guts. And it felt great.

  *

  “Get outta here,” Paige Cornish said. “This isn’t like you at all.”

  Chris had just left a call on Melrose Avenue and was heading up Fairfax. “I know, right?”

  “You just met her yesterday and you’ve got a date tonight?”

  “This evening, actually. Five o’clock.”

  “You’re usually so by the book. This is reaching out of your comfort zone.”

  “I know, and you’re not making it any easier.”

  “Five o’clock, huh? That doesn’t give you much time to get Abel home and shower.”

  “Like I said.” Chris fidgeted with the stitching on her steering wheel. “Not helping. Anyway, yeah, I figured it also wouldn’t give me much time to get nervous.”

  “You’ll be fine, my friend. It’s been a while, but that’s just because you’re picky.”

  “I might be picky, but I sure didn’t think I was reckless.”

  “Just because you met her at Whole Foods?”

  “No, because we were flirting within, like, five seconds.”

  “What’s wrong with that? Sometimes crazy things happen.”

  “To you, Paige. You’re the one who spends your days on exciting movie sets and sees the insane celebrity stuff that happens. You’re the one who dabbles in the lives of the rich. You met a famous actress, for God sakes, and fell in love. You marched right in there and swept Avalon Randolph off her feet. I mean, who has the balls to go after the most popular actress in Hollywood? Or, for that matter, to go after anything with that much confidence? Not me. I don’t do those things.”