Page 43 of I Want You
He shifted to the side and let me pass. I could feel his eyes on me until I was fully out of sight. I dropped the court memo off with Chief Williams and went back to my desk, slumping into my chair.
I typically liked adrenaline rushes. I would actively seekthem out. But standing in a room with a colleague was not supposed to elicit the same psychological reaction as jumping off a cliff attached to a thirty-foot wing.
I pulled out my phone and swiped through the pictures I had taken. I didn’t want to tell Luke that I had something for him if they were illegible or useless. Luckily, they weren’t either of those. Each line was written in various neat to messy scrawls, but everyone took the evidence log seriously enough to try to make their writing legible.
Me: Good news and bad news.
Luke responded right away. He was working second shift later, so I would only have a few minutes with him when we were swapping places.
Luke: Bad news first, always.
Me: Matt caught me.
My phone rang immediately, but I sent it to voicemail, texting him back instead.
Me: I can’t talk right now.
Luke: What happened?
Me: Well, that’s the good news. I got a copy of the evidence log. I took a picture of every page for the past five or six months.
Luke: Jesus, Scarlett. That’s great. What did Monroe say when he saw you?
Me: He asked what I was doing so I made up a lie.
Luke: Fuck. Don’t do that. You can’t lie to save your life.
Me: Facts.
Me: I told him that Rusty Burgess is accusing us of losing his watch so I was checking to see if we ever logged a watch into evidence.
Luke: Rusty’s in jail.
Me: Yeah
Me: It just came out. He was the first person I thought of.
Luke: That’s concerning on many levels.
I could hear Luke’s smooth voice picking on me as I read his messages.
Me: I’ll send you over the pictures now.
Luke: Thank you, Letty. Seriously. You’re the best. This is really going to help us piece together what’s going on.
Me: You’re welcome
No. No. No.
I sent that emoji to Aurora the other day. It was in my recently used section right next to the standard smiley face. Should I laugh it off, play it off like I was just being funny? Did I send the regular smiley face now, like whoops, wrong emoji…
He sent me back a meme of an exaggerated wink and smirk, and I breathed out a sigh of relief. He was brushing it off for the mistake that it was, thank God. I sent each of the pages to him. He would get them off to Wes to review as well. I had Wes’s number and could send them to him too, but Luke was the one who asked me to help, and I wanted him to have first eyes on it. He could make the decision on what to pass along.
The department phone rang with an incoming call, and I got back to work, finishing my shift. Matt didn’t say anything else to me, but I caught the looks he sent me. Watching me with suspicion.
14
Scarlett
