Rock Chick 01 by Kristen Ashley Page A

either. Duke really needed to get into the
twenty-first century and I mentally added items onto my
Christmas-present-buying list.
    Then the door opened to the Marianne Meyer
walked in.
    Marianne Meyer lived next door to the
Nightingale’s in Washington Park all the while we were growing up.
She was between Lee and Ally and me in age and she was a good
friend. She had been fettered by a scoliosis brace in junior high
and orthodontics in high school. She married a jerk, got a divorce
and moved back in with her parents a year ago. Marianne was taking
her divorce hard and living with her parents at age thirty-one
harder. She was five foot five and used to be cute as a button, but
the divorce was taking its toll and she was drowning her sorrows in
Oreos. She was a nurse at Pres-St. Luke’s, took the evening shifts
so she’d have her days free and had made house-hunting a full-time
hobby.
    She rushed up to me at the espresso counter,
her cheeks flushed.
    “I heard you finally hooked up with Lee
Nightingale,” she said.
    Shit, shit, shit .
    Marianne was intimately acquainted with my
lifelong crush and had been recruited for some of my Lee Maneuvers
in the past. She probably thought I was in seventh heaven and
needed a friend to take me wedding-dress-shopping.
    “We’re taking it slow,” I said.
    “Have you… you know… done it yet?” Her
eyes were beginning to glaze over at the very thought of doing
it with the legendary Liam Nightingale.
    “Nope.”
    “What are you waiting for?” she nearly
shouted and if she’d reached across the counter and grabbed me by
my shirt and shook me, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
    I took Marianne’s mind off Lee with a mocha,
heavy on the chocolate syrup and whipped cream.
    After Marianne left, making me promise to
phone her the minute I did it with Lee and give her all the
details (not gonna happen), I called Hank.
    I did this because I thought maybe Rosie
might do something stupid, like hock the diamonds and go to San
Salvador. According to him, he was owed fifty dollars for some of
the “primo” grass I never knew that he grew in his basement and the
guy gave him a gazillion dollars worth of diamonds.
    That was seriously fishy and Rosie was
seriously stupid for taking the damn things.
    Though, what did one do when presented with a
fortune of diamonds? Say no?
    I didn’t actually blame Rosie for wanting to
cash in his windfall and skip town.
    Personally, I wouldn’t have picked San
Salvador though.
    If Rosie successfully skipped, and Lee was
right in what he said last night, this meant that Rosie would be in
San Salvador and there was a good possibility that either Lee or I
or both of us would be target practice (I really shouldn’t have
mouthed off to those guys and I was in whole-hearted agreement with
Lee, I’m sure he’d been shot at tons of times and if he didn’t like
it, I’d never like it).
    This would also mean I owed Lee big time for
putting his life in danger. Not to mention my life would be
in danger and I’d have a hard time talking myself out of having sex
with Lee (at least once) before I died.
    Further, I’d never replace Rosie at the
espresso machine. He had a God-given talent, no joke. He was the
Picasso of Coffee.
    The first thing Hank said, “I hear you’ve
finally hooked up with Lee.”
    Shit.
    Kitty Sue, the fastest dialing fingers in the
West.
    Something had to be done.
    “Not exactly,” I responded.
    “Yeah, takin’ it slow.”
    “Something like that.” Really slow.
Snail-with-a-hernia slow. “Listen, can I talk to you about
something?”
    “Anything.”
    “Can you step out of your cop shoes for five
minutes?”
    Silence.
    Hank wasn’t very fond of me asking that
question, which I did, over the years, a lot.
    “Shit. You and Ally haven’t stolen candy from
Walgreen’s again, have you?”
    “We didn’t steal it! We were just buying a
bunch and didn’t know what we could carry so we started putting it
in our pockets early to see