“I think you’re on the new schedule. Provided you can manage to show up on time.”

“Eleven years on the force and I think I’ve been late maybe three times. Are we really going to smash heads over this, Landon? Do I need a union rep or something? Gonna formally write me up? Or should I just hang my head in shame? What’ll get you off my back?”

Jackson had no idea what propelled the sudden release of ichor, but something inside him snapped loose and he lost patience with his boss, his dog, and the world in general. Right there. That very second.

It was clear to him how out of character the jolt of temper was … and how out of line it might actually be … as the entire room fell silent. Well, shit. If Landon can be an asshole, so could he. Right? And he was far more justified in his show of temper than Landon was with his constant griping and his seemingly dogged way of finding flaws in his staff where they didn’t exist. This was a good team of cops. In a small-town police department that couldn’t afford specialized forces full-time, each man and woman cross-trained to fill whatever shoes were needed at any given moment. Jackson was not only one of two K-9 cop teams, he was also a bomb disposal tech and a SWAT team member. Hell, he’d be on the hostage negotiation and retrieval team, too, if he could, but SWAT, bomb squad, and HNART sometimes had counterpurposes, and even he couldn’t be split into thirds.

Jackson ran a hand through the haphazard curls of his hair, the length one of many signs of neglect that made up his life of late. And now Landon was giving him one of those dark appraisals that inevitably was followed by …

“Jackson, do I need to send you to Psych?”

And there it was. As if sitting across from some tenderhearted touchy-feely shrink clutching a pen in one hand and a tape recorder in the other would be like waving some kind of magic f**king wand and make things all better all at once. Well, until that magic wand could bring Chico back from the dead … thanks, but no thanks.

“Nope. No need. I did my time. I got my happy stamp of approval. Didn’t you get the memo? They even gave me a new dog and everything. I just want to train the little bastard and get him on track for duty.” Jackson gave his boss the fakest, brightest smile he could muster. He did everything but hug the prick. “It’s just been a crappy morning and I’m itching to get back to work, boss.”

Landon frowned and eyeballed him as if he were a brick of C4 jammed full of blasting caps. Jackson gritted his teeth, counted the seconds while he waited for Landon to figure out he was wasting his time. Finally Landon nodded, his perfect buzz cut accentuating his squared-off head and making him look a lot like the typical jarhead he had once been.

Jackson sat back with an exhalation of relief as Landon retreated to his office. It wasn’t that the man didn’t deserve his job. In truth, he was a strong captain at what Jackson imagined was a stressful helm to manage. He did respect Landon, it was just that they were both men of very strong opinions, and often those opinions clashed. And Jackson didn’t much appreciate the fact that Landon didn’t seem to trust him enough to let him have a little autonomy. Jackson didn’t take it personally, because Landon was a control freak and treated everyone the same way. It was kind of a craptastic quality in a leader of strong individuals, and Jackson had to wonder who the hell had thought it was a good idea to put Landon in a leadership position. Then again, he doubted Landon had ever been introduced to a rule book that he didn’t enjoy following to the letter. In a bureaucratic environment like the upper echelons of the SPD, that was no doubt an excellent quality to have. An attractive one, too, to those who were looking for a police lieutenant they could be assured wouldn’t go maverick on them.

Jackson decided to take his sister’s lead and switch his attention away from his boss’s more irritating qualities. Touching his laptop’s mouse, he woke up the screen. He went straight for the schedule, and sure enough, he was off the streets for the next three weeks. It was an immersion schedule, where there would be nothing but him, Sargent, and an entire class of K-9 pups from the Catskill region with nothing to do but learn how to listen to their partners and start learning what it meant to be a cop.

It wasn’t that Sargent didn’t have the goods. Anyone who knew what to look for could see everything he needed right there in his personality. He was strong, fearless, and determined almost to a fault. But his willfulness needed to be worked with. Not broken per se, because that strength would serve him well once properly molded.

The truth was, Jackson hadn’t been molding him. Every time he looked at the goofy little booger, he felt … cheated. Angry.

Crap.

Jackson glanced across the bullpen and down the hall, the blue-rimmed glass in the door of Dr. Marissa Anderson’s office jumping out from all the others. But that was a whole other can of worms, he thought as her door opened suddenly and she stepped into the hall, taking a moment to adjust to the bustle of the corridor. As if she were trying to blend into her surroundings and become a part of them.

The very idea made him exhale a short, hard, and soundless chuckle. It was utterly laughable, the idea of the tall, flawless woman, wrapped up tight in a snug gray business skirt and a plain white oxford-style blouse, being able to blend unnoticed in the sea of blue unis and unkempt older detectives with their doughnut bellies. As she turned and walked toward the bullpen, every step she took in her high heels sending an impact of bouncy shimmers through her br**sts and the long curling ends of her red-penny bronze hair, he recalled exactly why he couldn’t wait to get her to sign him back on to duty and put an end to their required sessions together. She was entirely too hot to be some egghead doctor he was supposed to shed all machismo in front of as he plumbed the depths of his grief over the loss of his partner. He’d almost taken the option of seeing an off-site doctor, but damn it, he wasn’t about to run away from her just because every time he looked at her his mouth went dry and his penis grew hard. Rather like what was happening right that minute as she hurried through the bullpen and headed for Landon’s office.

But just before she entered his lieutenant’s office, she glanced in his direction, her pretty blue-green eyes be neath a wrinkled brow of concern settling on him just long enough to kick him out of his shallow objectification of her and provoke a frisson of concern down the back of his neck.

Jackson sat up straighter in his chair and watched through the glass as she exchanged succinct words with Landon, which then made Landon look in his direction in exactly the same manner. Landon barked at Marissa and swept up the phone. The call lasted about thirty seconds, if that. Then Landon looked back up and saw him still looking on with interest. His boss immediately rose to his feet, lifted two fingers, and beckoned to Jackson.

He couldn’t help it. Jackson looked behind himself, just to make sure that call forward wasn’t meant for someone else.

No such luck.

The thoughts that raced through his mind as he stood up and made his way to Landon’s office were tremendous and varied. In the end, it boiled down to some kind of paranoid conspiracy they must have cooked up between them to pull him back off of active duty. And if that was the case, it was absolutely insane! He’d done everything he was supposed to do, and neither of them could say otherwise. She couldn’t suddenly change her mind about approving him for duty, could she? He wondered, as he opened the door, if he had his union rep’s number handy, his free hand touching his pocket where he kept his wallet and an assortment of crucial cards whose names and numbers he’d never found the time to enter into his cellphone. He shut the door, the tension in the room telling him he wanted to be free to let his temper rise in relative privacy. Not that the glass provided much of that. Luckily, most of the bullpen was empty; everyone else had already begun their shift on patrol or working cases.

Jackson felt his gut burn when Marissa moved to close the blinds over the glass in quick, practiced movements. He could smell her warm, delicious perfume as she moved past him, but it only put him more on edge as the response it created in his blood warred with the anxiety ratcheting up his adrenaline.

“Have a seat, Sergeant Waverly,” Landon offered, tension making a muscle in his jaw twitch, betraying the way he must be clenching his teeth.

“I’d rather stand. What is it?” Jackson asked, trying to temper the defensiveness he was feeling so it wouldn’t echo in his voice. He wanted to play this as cool as possible. Manage his emotions. Prove to them just how in control he was.

“Sergeant, you really should sit,” Marissa repeated, those warm eyes as clear as the Caribbean Sea they emulated, but far more turbulent than gentle waves against a beach in Aruba ought to be. It was as irritating as nails on a chalkboard, and he was ready to snap.

“Jackson,” Landon overrode Jackson’s hostile refusal with a brusque, no-nonsense tone, “they just pulled your sister’s body out of the Hudson River.”

His eyes jerked to his boss. The words seemed to bounce off him like icy hail, stinging cold and hard in tiny bits over all the exposed parts of his skin. Then, as if someone had plucked his spine out of his back, leaving him with no way of supporting himself, his knees gave way. Landon wasn’t close enough, but a surprisingly strong feminine body was under his arm and plastered to his side like a warm, exotic-smelling crutch. But she had no hope of holding up a man who towered over her by nearly a foot and had nothing but muscle strapped to his 215-pound body. And all that machismo he’d held on to so diligently in front of her for three months of sessions mockingly abandoned him in the face of the one thing … the absolute single most thing … that could take him out like that bullet to Chico’s brain that had stopped his partner dead in his tracks.

Landon was around his desk by then, keeping him from hitting the ground, helping Marissa move him into the twice offered chair.

Jackson drew in a breath. Then logic seemed to race over him and he laughed.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said. He felt suddenly stronger as he pushed away hands that abruptly felt obnoxious. “That’s bullshit! I was just on the phone with her not twenty minutes ago! On my way to work!” He fumbled for his watch. Checking his time. God, more time had gone by than that. “Thirty minutes, then. Still, not enough time to fish out anything, never mind identify it, if it were my sister. What the f**k is wrong with you people? Don’t you f**king check your facts before saying something like that to someone?” He was shouting at them, his hands shaking with a sickly combination of fear and fury.

“She went off the bridge at the tributary outlet right after …” Landon paused to look at a hastily scribbled note.

“Kiss My Feet,” Jackson said in a croak.

… I just passed Kiss My Feet …

“Someone took the turn like a demon. That turn into the bridge is notorious … ,” Landon said, his words fading as he ran out of things to say about it. Every cop in Saugerties knew about that turn. Having been raised there, Jackson knew what was under the bridge as well.

They’d fished her out of the Hudson. That meant she’d gone over into the water. The rocks. She would have been screaming the whole way down.

Jackson’s phone went off in his gun belt. Numbly, he silenced it.

“Where is she?” he asked hoarsely.

“Kingston Hospital. The officer on scene called me and said she was …” Marissa seemed to lose hold of her professionalism, seemed unable to say the word. “The hospital is just a formality, as you know.”

Jackson’s phone went off again.

And that, more than anything, made what he was hearing real. Friends in the force and in the hospital were trying to reach him, he realized. They were breaking confidentiality and protocol to be the first to warn him.

Jackson lurched to his feet and stumbled for the door, but Marissa threw herself in the way, her warm, soft body once again providing strength and comfort. So unexpected. So grating and consoling all at once.

He looked down into her face, his entire body rippling with cinders of fury that were rapidly turning into a conflagration of flames. He danced, in turns, with numbness and a rage unlike anything he’d ever felt. Not even when he’d watched that meth-head prick shoot his dog down as if he were nothing. Tearing him up and throwing him away like frail paper. Not even then had he felt such an all-consuming, virulent wrath.

“Breathe,” she whispered to him, her hands coming up to cup his face, forcing his eyes to look into hers. “Take a breath in, then slowly let it out.”

Did she have any idea how infuriating and ridiculous such moronic psychobabble techniques were in a moment like this?

“Breathe, Jackson,” she said more firmly, giving him a shake and forcing him to be present in a moment he didn’t want to be present in.