Rock Chick

Chapter One The Great Liam Chase

Until now, I’ve never been in trouble with the law.

It’s cosmically impossible, I’m a cop’s daughter.

Cop’s Daughter Karma protects me and seeing as I’m not a drug addict, drug dealer, thief, prostitute, gangster or murderer (all traits that would negate Cop’s Daughter Karma), I’m protected.

This isn’t to say I haven’t done stupid things that are not exactly law-abiding, in fact, I’d done a lot of stupid things that are not exactly law-abiding.

Let’s see…

I’ve had a number of parking tickets but they don’t really count.

I’ve been stopped for speeding on occasion, though I never got a ticket.

I’ve been known to jaywalk when I’m in a hurry (which is a lot).

Further possibly-non-law-abiding exploits include the fact that I conned my way backstage at an Aerosmith concert. I went so far as to touch Joe Perry’s chest with the very tips of my index and middle fingers and, after making contact, I felt an electric spasm of sheer delight fly through my body (especially certain parts of my body) that has gone unequaled, before or since. Unfortunately, I only got the touch in before the bodyguard hauled me out.

I’m not certain it’s against the law to lie your way backstage and touch Joe Perry’s chest but considering the experience had to be far better than many illegal activities, it should be.

But, twenty minutes ago, my employee, Rosie, told me something I didn’t want to hear.

Rosie could be difficult but this was ridiculous.

And he’d involved another employee (and one of my most favorite people in the world), Duke.

Then, five minutes ago, Rosie and I locked up and stood at the front of my bookstore, Fortnum’s, wondering what to do about that something.

Then two guys came up to us, we had a chat that did not go well (and if I’m honest, the reason it didn’t go well is because of me) and then they shot at us.

Shot.

At.

Us.

With guns.

Guns filled with bullets.

We made a hasty getaway which, luckily, didn’t leave a trail of blood.

Now, we’re in my car, hyperventilating, sitting in a dark corner of a dark alley in the bowels of Baker Historical District that hadn’t yet re-gentrified and I’m staring at my cell phone wondering what, in the fucking hell, to do.

Let’s rewind.

I’m India Savage, known by all as Indy. I’m Tom Savage’s daughter and practically every cop knows me, even the rookies. That’s because, when I was young, I spent a lot of time at the station waiting for Dad or hanging out with Dad’s friends.

Oh, and Dad and I still go together to the Fraternal Order of Police (or F.O.P.) hog roasts

There is also the fact that I look the way I look. I’m not bragging or anything, it’s just that being a cop means you have to have an overabundance of testosterone and, well, I’m a girl.

Most of Dad’s colleagues noticed me from the age of about sixteen. Unfortunately, if any one of them touched me (even after I came of age), the others would have shot him.

Such is the life of a cop’s daughter. You take the ups with the downs.

In my not-so-clean-and-tidy past, I was caught one night by Dad’s friends, Jimmy Marker and Danny Rose. Ally and I were underage drinking and were taken to the station.

My Dad had not been angry at this youthful stunt. Dad had one kid and a dead wife. He’d been hoping for a boy to come along but my Mom died when I was five. Seeing as they had their hands full with me, they’d never got around to a second child and Dad had never got over Mom enough to find another wife.

Dad always said Katherine Savage was the kind of woman you didn’t get over.

He also said I looked a lot like her and the pictures prove it (except, of course, my blue eyes, which come from my Dad).

And everyone says I act exactly like her.

Anyway, Dad thought my drinking binge was kind of cute, and, if I had been a boy, my getting picked up by his cronies would be a rite of passage. His best friend and long-time partner, Malcolm Nightingale, agreed.

Malcolm’s wife, my Mom’s best friend and the woman who swore to my mother on her death bed that she would help Dad raise me right, Kitty Sue Nightingale, did not find my short-lived incarceration amusing.

Kitty Sue didn’t find any of my youthful foibles amusing, not in any way, shape, or form. Kitty Sue worried over my immortal soul.

Kitty Sue had her hands full. Not only did she make a death bed promise to my Mom, she also had three kids of her own to look after. And two of those kids were Lee and Ally and that right there is enough said.

Kitty Sue talked to preachers, teachers and high school counselors, little league softball, baseball and football coaches, neighborhood busybodies, anyone she could to set up her network of Nightingale/Savage Child Watch. Even with all this effort, it didn’t work so well.

Allyson Nightingale is my best friend and has been since birth. Ally is Kitty Sue and Malcolm’s youngest child and she’s far crazier than me, mainly because she isn’t scared of anything.

Lee’s another story altogether, Lee’s a Bad Boy with capital Bs.

After getting caught on the side of the road puking our inebriated guts out by Jimmy and Danny, Ally and I smartened up. After that, when Ally and I were underage, out partying and were done over-imbibing, we called Lee and he came to get us.

No matter what, no matter where, Lee would show up in his vintage Mustang, hold open the passenger side door and grin as we stumbled out of someone’s house and into his car. Lee knew the exact sounds a person would make before they were going to hurl and thus knew when to stop and haul a body out so they could do it on the side of the road and not in his car. Lee also had lots of experience with holding a girl’s hair back when she threw up.

In our partying days, we tried calling Ally’s other brother, Hank, a couple of times but he would always give us a lecture. Hank’s the oldest of the three Nightingale children and therefore felt the need to behave responsibly. He may have lectured but he didn’t snitch, snitching was a shade too far.

Not surprisingly, Hank became a cop.

No one knows what Lee is.

Henry “Hank” Nightingale was captain of the football team, prom king and voted Best Athlete, Most Popular, one half of Best Couple and Best Smile. He’s six foot one, has thighs that could crack walnuts, has just the right assets to fill both the seat and crotch of his jeans, a killer smile, thick, dark brown hair with just enough wave and whisky-colored eyes. In High School, Hank was good-natured, chivalrous and had a steady girl. Not much has changed (except there was no longer a girl).

Liam “Lee” Nightingale could hot-wire any car going, had both a Mustang and a motorcycle, started smoking when he was thirteen, was rumored to be able to get a girl pregnant by just looking at her and was also voted Best Smile. He’s six foot two and gives the impression that faded jeans had been divinely created just for him. Lee also has thick, dark brown hair with just enough wave and chocolate-colored eyes with a heavy rim of long lashes. Lee was good-natured as well, but in an entirely different way. Without any effort at all, (mostly by crooking his finger, casting a glance or, if a girl was playing hard to get, he’d pull out The Smile), Lee nailed everything that was female, had long hair, big boobs, a fine ass and was breathing.

Every female, that is, but me, no matter how hard I tried and let’s just say I tried real hard.

I, too, have big boobs, a helluvan ass, long, russet hair (with just enough wave) and was, as far as I could tell, not the walking dead.

I’d been throwing myself at Lee since I could remember.

I should have picked Hank. If I’d have picked Hank, I would now be married with children, probably very happy and definitely getting it regularly.

But I like them bad.

I’m a rock ‘n’ roll chick, that’s just the way it is.

Ally and I decided when we were eight that I was going to marry Lee so I could be her “real” sister. She was going to be my maid of honor, we were going to live across the street from each other in houses with white picket fences and Lee and I were going to name our first daughter after her.

We even made a blood pact on it by sticking our thumbs with safety pins and mashing them together. We spent the next twelve years attempting to make that fantasy a reality in every way our somewhat devious and definitely outrageous minds could dream up.

It was my bad luck (considering Lee’s moral code was a bit sketchy) that I fell into Liam Nightingale’s Ethical Rule Book at Rule Number Two (with Rule Number One being “Thou shalt not nail your brother’s girlfriend”), I was “Thou shalt not nail your little sister’s best friend”.

I also grew up like a member of the family which made me practically his little sister by default and, in my last effort to throw myself at him (when I was twenty and he was twenty-three), he’d told me exactly that. It was pretty fucking embarrassing, but then again, so were all of my other attempts and that never stopped me.

Still, for some reason, that last one really hurt. Lee wasn’t cruel or anything he was just… final.

The Great Liam Chase ended right then and there, at least for me. Ally still has (very) high hopes. Not to mention Kitty Sue, who I think has always wanted me to fall for one of her sons and it’s been pretty clear that her druthers would put me with Lee. Probably because she thinks we deserve each other.

I resigned myself to seeing Lee at Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, every birthday celebration, most family parties and barbeques, over at Hank’s when we’re watching a game and the like (unfortunately, this means I see Lee a lot). Usually, there are always enough other people around to run interference.

If, on the odd occasion that he’s at his parents’ house for dinner (these days it’s less odd and more like Kitty Sue is getting a bit desperate and becoming far more obvious at playing matchmaker) and I’m also invited, I make my excuses (mostly lies) and leave as fast as my boots will take me. This usually pisses off Ally and Kitty Sue but they hadn’t thrown themselves at the guy for over a decade and been rebuffed repeatedly and then had to live the rest of their lives seeing that guy at dinner and on holidays. It’s mortifying, let me tell you.

Not to mention, Lee went from Bad Boy to Badass in half a decade. By the end of that decade he was Badass Extraordinaire. You didn’t mess with Lee. I may have been a bit of a wild child, but I knew enough about playing with fire and getting burned and Lee Nightingale had gone from a bonfire to a towering fucking inferno in ten years.

Don’t get me wrong, Liam Nightingale still has killer good looks only slightly marred by a small, crescent moon scar under his left eye. He also still has a killer bod that looks great in jeans, great in sweats, great in suits, great in anything. He also still has a killer smile on the odd occasions he flashes it. And finally, he also still likes women with lots of T&A and lots of hair (and I was still a woman just like that).

But he’s also dangerous.

I don’t know how to explain this, he just is, trust me.

These days, I still go to rock concerts. I still listen to music way too loud. I still wear my red hair long and wild in a tangle of waves that fall in a deep V down my back. I still have some serious T&A. Let’s just say, my body is my gift and my curse. A body like mine isn’t difficult to maintain, just feed it loads of crap to keep the curves but keep in shape because you’ve got to lug it around everywhere.

These days, though, my parties have real, home cooked hors d’oeuvres and bowls of cashews and nobody passes out in my bed or pukes in the backyard anymore.

These days I’m also the owner of a used bookstore located on Broadway (not the Broadway in NYC, the other Broadway, in Denver, Colorado, US of A).

My grandmother left me the store when she died. It would seem a rather staid profession, owning a bookstore. You’d think I wore tortoise-shell glasses and had my hair back in a bun. This isn’t true about my bookstore or me, by any stretch of the imagination.

You see, my grandmother was a hellion, she’d raised a hellion in my Mom, Katherine, and she and Dad carefully oversaw raising the third-generation hellion that was me.

My bookstore is on the southeast corner of Broadway and Bayaud. Not the greatest neighborhood, not the worst. In the times of my grandmother, the ‘hood had been in decline, now it’s on an upswing.

My inheritance came with half a duplex one block down on Bayaud in the Baker Historical District. I live in the east side of the duplex, a gay couple live in a west side, another gay couple live east of me and another behind me. This is why Baker is safe, it’s populated mainly by gay couples, DINKS, hippies and Mexicans. When I, a single white female who looks like (and is) a rock ‘n’ roll groupie of the highest order, moved in, they all called each other and said “there goes the neighborhood”.

My bookstore is named Fortnum’s. There was no reason for this except Gram had gone to Fortnum and Mason’s in London the year before she opened it and she thought it sounded high brow.

There’s nothing high brow about Fortnum’s.

In the day (that was Gram’s day), it was a hippie hang out and still, in a way, is. Harley boys often came there too, don’t ask me why. Now, it’s also filled with preppies, yuppies and DINKS trying to be trendy and boarders and goths because it is trendy.

It has a bunch of mismatched shelves, stuffed full of all sorts of used books and tables piled high with vinyl records. It’s a rabbits warren of organized disorganization, every once in awhile punctuated by a fluffy, overstuffed chair. Most people come in, find a book, read in a chair and leave without buying the book, maybe coming back the next day to pick it up again and read some more.

With the shop, I also inherited Gram’s two employees which, shall we say, diplomatically, are just as eccentric as she was.

Jane’s my romance (our biggest seller) expert, she’s six foot and weighs in at about one-twenty, painfully thin, painfully shy. She keeps her nose in a novel nearly every minute of the day when she isn’t buying them off people hawking their books for our shelves or selling them to people with mumbled recommendations. She’s told me she’d written over forty novels herself but never had the gumption to try to get them published. She didn’t even have the courage to allow me to read them and I ask all the time.

There’s also Duke. Duke’s a Harley man, all leather and denim and a big ole gray beard and loads of long, steel-gray hair with a bandana tied around his forehead. He talks rough, lives rough and is tough as nails but can be soft as a marshmallow if he likes you (luckily, he likes me). He used to be an English Lit professor at Stanford before he dropped out and moved to the mountains. He’s married to Dolores who works part-time at The Little Bear up in Evergreen where Duke and Dolores own a tiny cabin.

Gram loved Fortnum’s, looked at it kinda like her own personal community center. She was not an especially good business woman but she was happy to make do and play hostess to her eclectic group of pals. Gramps brought in an okay salary and, when he died, left her with a decent pension, so she didn’t have much to worry about.

Fortnum’s smells musty and old and, just like Gram, I love every inch of it.

When I wasn’t at the police station, with the Nightingales or out with Ally, I was at Fortnum’s with Gram and Duke, and then came Jane. It was always one of my homes away from home and those come with being a motherless child, believe you me.

But the way I’d inherited it, it sure as hell wasn’t going to keep me in my cowboy boots, Levi’s and huge, silver belt buckles attached to tooled-leather belts (my signature outerwear, my signature underwear was strictly sexy-girlie lace and silk, Gram said that looking like a cowboy-inspired groupie on the outside was one thing but every girl had to have a secret and Gram said sexy underwear was the best secret a girl could have).

Now the front of the store is where I do my business. There are a bunch of comfortable couches and arm chairs and a few tables. I invested in an espresso machine and I coaxed my favorite barista, Ambrose “Rosie” Coltrane, from the chain coffee store down the road.

Rosie’s a coffee god. Rosie could make a skinny vanilla latte that could give you an orgasm if you just sniffed it. Rosie’s a bit of a pain in the ass, a kind of semi-coffee recluse (he comes in, he makes coffee, he goes home), but his talent is undeniable.

My addition of coffee was a hit. When the espresso started flowing, the books also started going and now I have new furniture in my living room and a fast-growing collection of kickass belts and cowboy boots.

I see all this flashing before my eyes

I learned quickly that lots of stuff flashes before your eyes when you get shot at.

As I stared at my cell, trying not to have a heart attack, I tried to figure out who to call.

I could, and probably should, call Dad, Malcolm or Hank.

Considering those choices and this situation, in the cop stakes, Hank would be my best bet. He’d go ballistic when he heard I’d been shot at and would probably arrest Rosie on the spot, but he was least likely to kill Rosie for putting me in danger.

Hank had control. That was why Hank was such a good athlete, why he was a good student and why he’s a good cop.

Dad was my father and Malcolm considered himself like a father so they’d just lose it and make a scene which would freak Rosie out.

Rosie was a coffee artiste.

As an artiste, Rosie had a delicate disposition. He freaks out easily. You could only give him two coffee orders at a time or he’d have a mini-mental-breakdown. That chain coffee shop hadn’t been right for him, Fortnum’s was his nirvana. He could create his drinks and even when it got busy and the pressure got heavy, someone else, Jane, Duke or me, took the burden and just let Rosie perform.

But right now, Rosie said no cops.

And I understand why.

So even though I really, really wanted to call Hank, I didn’t.

I could call Lee, Lee isn’t a cop. I had his numbers in my cell, Ally put them there.

Lee would be a good bet. Lee had gone into the Army after high school. Lee had gone on to be Special Operations Force. Lee had done some serious shit while in the armed services that took the good ole boy look right out of his dark brown eyes and put something else, something colder, more serious and far scarier in those eyes. Lee had come out and gotten himself a private investigator’s license and opened an office in LoDo (or Lower Downtown Denver). Lee was supposed to be a PI but no one really knows what Lee does, I’m not even certain anyone has even been to Lee’s offices.

I could call Lee and tell him someone shot at me. That would take care of things pretty quickly. I mean, I hadn’t really had much of a relationship with Lee for ten years but it would be a kind of family responsibility, considering he thought of me as his little sister (huh).

Lee might track them down (whoever they were) and shoot them, though. Torture them first and shoot them. Lee had skills I could not comprehend (at least that’s what I heard Malcolm and Dad muttering about, more than once).

It wasn’t like when I was sixteen and Brian Archer was telling everyone he’d gotten to third base with me (when he’d barely slid into second) and Lee had found Brian and broken his nose.

This would be serious.

Maybe Lee wasn’t a good idea.

This left me with Ally.

Allyson Nightingale is always up for an adventure.

Allyson Nightingale can keep her mouth shut.

And Ally is not a cop.