At Their Own Game Read Online Free Page B

had decided on our first night that Stankovic was too long and cops don’t call each other by their first names, so he gave me my first nickname. “This is important.”  
    “I hear you.”  
    “You wanna know why?”  
    “I think it’s obvious why.”  
    “Really? Okay, mister rookie who knows all the shit in the world. Tell me why.”  
    I glanced over at him in the passenger seat. His training notepad was still wedged up between the support pillar and windshield. This didn’t sound like a canned training quiz, either, but I could tell he was serious.  
    “Because it’s wrong,” I said simply.  
    “No shit, Captain Obvious. Why is it wrong?”  
    “It’s cheating. Infidelity.”  
    “Are you married?”  
    I shook my head. “You know I’m not.”  
    “Got a girlfriend?”  
    “Nothing steady. I’m focusing on my job right now.”  
    “So if you ain’t got a wife or a girlfriend, how is it that you’re cheating?”  
    “If she’s married or has a boyfriend, I’m part of it.”  
    “Oh…I see. And that’s why you shouldn’t do it?”  
    “Yeah.”  
    “Any other reason?”  
    I thought about it for a minute. Then inspiration struck. “It violates the brotherhood.”  
    “Do tell.”  
    “Well, we’re out here on the front line, right? And we have to count on each other, sometimes for life and death. So we can’t betray each other. It breaks down the trust, the brotherhood.”  
    We rode in silence for a few seconds. I shot a sideways glance over at him to see how I was doing.  
    He was nodding slowly. “That’s probably all true,” he said. “And that shit would sound great on an oral board for new hire or getting promoted, so I’d keep it on file if I were you.”  
    I blinked. “But…”  
    “But this shit is as simple as the night is long,” Perry said. “Listen up. You don’t bang another cop’s wife or girlfriend for two simple reasons. Number one, who else you know that carries a gun twenty-four hours a day? And number two, cops are some no-forgetting motherfuckers. You add those two things together, and that is a serious problem.”  
    I drove down Regal, amazed that this was tonight’s lesson.  
    But Perry was right. And it only took me two years to realize it.  
       
    I met her at the gym. Casual nods turned into chatting at the drinking fountain, turned into spotting each other on some lifts. The fact that she was married came up early. The fact that I had a girlfriend never did. By the time I found out who her husband was, we’d already cut several workouts short to slip off to my apartment for the tangled sheet tango.  
    We were lying next to each other, just catching our breath, still sweaty, with the last of the slow, aching pleasure still fading when she said, “I’ve always had a thing for cops.”  
    “Lucky me.”  
    She rolled onto her side and toyed with the hair on my chest. “It just makes me feel safe.”  
    “No safer place to be.”  
    “Yeah? Safe from everything?”  
    “Yep.”  
    “Except other cops.”  
    I rolled onto my side to face her. “What’s that mean?”  
    So she told me. She was Mrs. Helen Falkner, wife to one Detective Kyle Falkner.  
    Around the police department, Kyle Falkner was something less than a legend but more than just a guy. Most cops didn’t like him, but they respected him. The brass didn’t like him, either, but they grudgingly tolerated him, probably for the same reason cops respected him:  he brought in cases. He was good. If you wanted a case solved, you gave it to him.  
    He was something of an arrogant prick, the best I could tell. Of course, what did I know, what with my almost three years on the job, all in patrol? I was at that dangerous stage in a cop’s career. Just past rookie time, confident, competent, and way better at things in my own mind than I was in reality. In the few years of my career that followed, I saw almost every new guy travel the same