Page 7 of Dropping Like Flies

I gave another shrug. “Okay. Not John, then. Send Calisto. Sell it to him as a wonderful opportunity to broaden his horizons and make new contacts. He’s gullible enough to buy it.”

Cade treated me to the most scathing look he’d ever given me in all the decades of us being friends. “You think Calisto would survive a secondment to CID?”

I considered it for a few seconds. “It might toughen him up a bit.”

Cade didn’t even warrant that with a response. “It’s you or it’s nobody.”

I rolled my neck from one side to the other, trying to rid myself of the tension that had crept into my shoulders. “Then I guess it’s nobody.”

Cade shook his head. “You know how it works between me and the boys in blue. I scratch their backs and they scratch mine. We have an agreement that’s worked perfectly for years. You’ve even reaped the benefits of it a time or two. I don’t want to put that in jeopardy by saying no to them.” He turned pleading eyes my way. “Come on, Griffin. I don’t ask much of you. I give you all the best shifts. I don’t complain when you don’t turn up to work. I listen to John bitch about you and don’t say a word against you.” His eyes narrowed. “I don’t even complain when you turn up stinking of booze.”

“Wow! Low blow,” I said.

“But true,” Cade countered.

“What do they even want with me? It’s not exactly standard procedure for the police to call on the services of a necromancer.”

“DCS Baros wouldn’t say. He wants a meeting with you. I presume he’ll tell you what he has planned, then.”

I hung my head while I tried to think. I was the master of wriggling out of things I didn’t want to do, but I couldn’t help but feel that in this situation, the net was closing in on me. I wasn’t about to give up that easily, though. “You know why I’m so against it, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.” Cade let out a sigh. “How many police officers are there in London?”

I let out a snort. “What is this, Mastermind? If it is, I hardly think I’d choose London’s Met as my specialist subject. I’d go for something far more interesting, like whiskeys of the world.”

“Yeah, you’d be an expert at that.”

I let the dig go. I was beginning to think Cade had been under a lot of pressure in the past few weeks, presumably linked to the John situation—which I’d known nothing about. Sure, I’d worked more, but that happened occasionally. And then it came to me, John’s absence the perfect excuse. “You need me here. The department can’t function with just one necromancer. Not unless you’re planning to make Calisto work twenty-four hours a day.”

“I’ve pulled a few strings and requisitioned someone from Scotland. They’ll be here tomorrow.” Cade held his finger up in a warning. “And before you suggest it, no, they can’t be seconded to CID instead of you. They don’t know London and I don’t know them. I’m not willing to stake the reputation of the PPB on someone I haven’t even met yet.” Cade pulled his phone out of his pocket and typed something in. “As of 2022, there were 33,984 police officers in London.”

“Fascinating statistic,” I drawled.

“You know what I’m getting at.”

Yeah, I knew. He was trying to point out that the likelihood of me bumping into a certain police officer I’d once been involved with and had thought I’d marry, was virtually zero. “That’s the entire force. Not CID.”

Cade dutifully typed something else into his phone. “5666 qualified detectives.”

Silence wrapped around me, Cade biding his time. “I’ll go to the meeting,” I eventually said after too long of a stalemate. “But I’m not promising anything more than that.”

“Fine,” Cade said, sitting back in his seat. “Let’s take it one step at a time. Call me after the meeting once you know what they want and we’ll discuss it. At least if you go to the meeting, I can claim I’ve done my part. I’ll have delivered a necromancer to their doorstep, and it won’t be my fault if they didn’t convince you to fall in with their plans.”

Evening found me where it usually did these days, frequenting Purple Paradise. Despite being in the middle of serving someone, Flynn threw a flirtatious wink my way. We hadn’t fucked on the night I’d taken him home with me. Instead, we’d talked until the early hours. Not about anything particularly earth shattering. Just books and films and restaurants, and about how long he’d worked here and what he did when he wasn’t at work. Somewhere along the line, one of us—or maybe it was both—had decided we’d be better off as friends. And I was completely fine with that. I didn’t need any more complications in my life than I already had.

He served me my usual, an opportunity to talk not arising until the crowds had thinned. Flynn leaned on the bar to scrutinize me, his study far more searching than I would have liked. “Okay. What’s got you looking even more gloomy than usual?”

“You can tell?”

He grinned. “I can tell. You work a bar for long enough, you become an expert on people’s moods. Helps you to know the best way to treat all the drunks. Some need kid gloves and treating like they’re a naughty child. While others respond better to military commands.”

I raised an eyebrow. “So… it’s your bar work that gives you all the expertise, is it? Not the degree in psychology you’re doing?”

Flynn’s grin grew wider. “Bit of both, probably.” A devilish light glinted in his eyes. “I handled you okay, didn’t I?”

“Are you calling me a drunk?” My words might have been more convincing if I hadn’t brought the tumbler to my lips a millisecond later and taken a long swallow.

“If the cap fits.” Flynn leaned forward slightly. “Listen…” When I started lifting the tumbler again, he pulled it away from my lips and polished the rest off himself.

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