My arms crossed over my chest, and I leveled a glare at him. “What, precisely, is the problem then?”
He paused for several minutes before changing the subject. “I am tired. I need to rest. To sleep.” Without further explanation, he lay down on his side, back facing me, and pulled the blankets over his head.
“Whatever.”
Sick of the runaround and dramatics, I opened a game app on my phone and played with it for an hour or so before getting bored. I set the phone down with a sigh and settled for watching the blankets rise and fall with N’kal’s even breathing. A quick glance at the clock showed me how late it was, but since I was solo on this job, I couldn’t take the time to rest.
No big deal. I’d been on stakeouts that lasted longer than this. Coffee was my friend … I just couldn’t have any sugar with it now.
Since I’m lactose intolerant and synthetic sugar makes me gag, I opted for black. Settling back down in the chair with my brew, I picked my phone back up and opened a reading app. There was a new novel by a favorite mystery author of mine, and I hadn’t had the opportunity to get much farther than the first chapter. I kicked off my shoes and tucked my legs under me, getting comfortable as I picked up where I left off weeks ago.
The book was just getting good when a knock at the door set off my internal alarms. Aside from my contact at the AARO, noone should have known we were here—and it was the middle of the night! Whoever it was, it definitely wasn’t the maid service.
I pulled out my service weapon and crept to the door, releasing the safety as I peered through the peephole. As soon as I saw my partner, the tension bled out of my shoulders. I reached for the bolt to unlock the door and let him in, but a flash of silver through the peephole gave me just enough warning to move to the side before Jim started to fire through the door.
What the hell? Jim wasn’t careless enough to start blasting into a room without knowing who was inside. Even though the AARO had instructed me to keep mum on my location, hehadto have known I was in there.
Jim and I weren’t exactly the closest of partners in the department. He had a more old-school approach to crime solving, whereas my relative youth gave me a different outlook on things. We got along well enough, or so I thought, but even given our differences, we’d never argued to the point of opening fire on each other. That meant one thing: Jim wasn’t a fan of Xalanites, and his distaste seemed to be enough to warrant riskingmylife in the process.
N’kal woke with a shout, leaping out of the bed with his hands balled into fists. Great. If he came any farther around the corner, he’d be right in the line of fire.
“Stay back!” I shouted.
The idiot did the exact opposite.
“You are in danger,” he said, charging for the door. I dove for him, using my lower center of gravity to my advantage and knocking him off his feet. Bullets whipped through the air above us until Jim ran out of ammo. While he reloaded, I checked N’kal over. “Are you hit?”
“I am fine,” he said, cupping my cheek in an oddly affectionate gesture. “Areyouhurt?”
Keeping my body covering his, I rolled over to aim at the door. “Let me deal with this. Your weapons are all at the CPD right now.”
I hated that it came to this, but I leveled my gun at the door, waiting for Jim to bust in. I had mere seconds before he finished reloading and broke the door down. My mind raced with options, few though they were, and I finally decided that we were never going to be able to get safely past him into the hallway; that meant we had to go out the window.
I didn’t like our odds. We were on the sixth floor. N’kal might survive the drop, but I’d be lucky to get out of this with just a broken arm or leg. Whipping my arm around, I fired three shots at the curtains. Glass shattered as my bullets pierced the pane, and I grabbed N’kal’s hand, dragging him along with me to our exit point.
“C’mon. He’s got us pinned; we have to jump.”
All things considered, N’kal handled the situation pretty well. Despite his initial disobedience, he followed my lead without complaint, keeping his body crouched low like I did as we hurried to the window. We both looked down to see what we’d be landing in. Through some miraculous stroke of luck, there was a full Dumpster right underneath us, with lots of bags to cushion our fall.
“We’re gonna aim for that receptacle down there, okay? You go first, then when you’ve climbed out of it, I’ll jump.”
N’kal raised a skeptical brow. If we weren’t at risk of being gunned down, I would have had time to marvel at the similarities in our species’ facial expressions.
“You are too fragile. You will die at this height.”
He had a point, but we also didn’t have any options. “I’ll be fine,” I lied. “Just hurry up and jump.”
The frame splintered as Jim kicked in the door, but before he could pop off any more shots, N’kal scooped me into his arms and leapt out the broken window.
Don’t ask me how, because to this day I still haven’t figured it out, but N’kal managed to twist midair so we landed with me on top of him in the Dumpster. He groaned when we hit, and I worried that he’d gotten hurt. Before I could ask him if he was okay, though, he lifted me up and carried me out of the bin, setting me on my feet in the parking lot.
“Now what?” he asked.
I pulled him down behind the Dumpster as gunshots rang out from above us. Jim had reached the window.
“We get to my car and drive the fuck away from here, that’s what.”
“Are your tires supposed to be flattened on the bottom like that? They were more rounded before.”
