Sloan was one of the few officers who appreciated Sara's efforts, or even noticed them, but on that day, she was as oblivious to her surroundings as everyone else. Holidays were always a busy time for the police, but this one seemed even noisier and more hectic than usual. Telephones rang incessantly, and loud voices, punctuated with bursts of nervous laughter, echoed down the hallway from an anteroom where forty women were gathering for Sloan's first self-defense class. The conference rooms were all being used by officers interviewing witnesses and talking to suspects involved in a robbery by a group of teenagers that had ended up in a high-speed chase and then a huge pileup on the interstate. Parents of the teenagers and lawyers representing the families tied up the telephones and paced in the hall.

The pandemonium annoyed Roy Ingersoll, who wasn't feeling well, and he retaliated by prowling up and down the aisles of desks, gobbling antacid tablets and looking for something to criticize. Marian Liggett, his sixty-five-year-old secretary, who was hard-of-hearing and who regarded the newly installed telephone-intercom system as evil and untrustworthy, added her voice to the din by standing in his office doorway and shouting to him whenever he had a phone call.

Officers tried to concentrate on their paperwork and ignore the distractions, but everyone was finding that a little difficult to do—everyone except Pete Bensinger, who was so excited about his bachelor party that night and his forthcoming marriage that he was oblivious to Ingersoll's sour mood and everything else. Whistling under his breath, he sauntered down the aisles, stopping to chat with anyone who'd talk to him. "Hey, Jess," he said, stopping at the desk beside Sloan's. "How's it going?"

"Go away," Jess said as he typed out a report on a minor drug bust he'd made earlier in the week. "I don't want your good mood to rub off on me."

Pete's euphoric good cheer was undiminished by Jess's rebuff. Stopping at Sloan's desk, he leaned over and tried to sound like Humphrey Bogart. "Tell me, kid, what's a good-looking broad like you doing in a place like this?"

"Hoping to meet a smooth talker like yourself," Sloan joked without looking up from the notes she was making on the class she was about to teach.

"You're too late," he crowed, throwing up his hands in delight. "I'm getting married next week. Haven't you heard?"

"I think I did hear a rumor like that," Sloan said, flashing him a quick smile as she continued to write. The truth was that she, and nearly everyone else on the force, had been directly involved in his entire rocky courtship. He'd met Mary Beth five months ago and fallen in love with her "at first sight" by his own calculation. Unfortunately, neither Mary Beth nor her well-to-do parents had been particularly enthusiastic about marriage to a police officer whose occupational and financial prospects were far less than dazzling, but Pete had persevered. Armed with a great deal of advice from his fellow officers, most of which was very bad advice, he'd pursued Mary Beth and triumphed against all the odds and obstacles. Now, with his wedding only a week away, his boundless enthusiasm was boyish and utterly endearing to Sloan.

"Don't forget to come to my bachelor party on the beach tonight," he reminded her. Jess, Leo Reagan, and Ted Burnby had originally planned to have a party with a female stripper and the usual sort of drunken revelry, but Pete wouldn't hear of it. His marriage to Mary Beth meant too much to him, he declared, to do anything right before it that he might regret… or that she might make him regret, Jess Jessup had added. To make certain he got his way, Pete had insisted that his bachelor party be a "couples" party, and he was bringing Mary Beth to it.

"I thought the party was tomorrow night," Sloan lied, sounding as if she might have a problem being there tonight.

"Sloan, you have to come! It's going to be a great party. We're going to light a fire on the beach and barbecue—"

"Sounds like a violation of the Clean Air Act to me," she teased.

"All the beer you can drink," Pete cajoled.

"Drunkenness and disorderly conduct—we'll all get busted, and the news media will turn it into a national scandal."

"No one will be on duty to make the bust," he countered happily.

"I will," Sloan said. "I'm splitting a shift with Derek Kipinski tonight, so he'll be at the beginning of your parry and I'll be there later." Pete looked a little crestfallen, and she added more seriously, "Someone has to work the beach; we've got a serious drug problem there, particularly on the weekends."

"I know all that, but we aren't going to stop it by busting some small-time pusher under the pier. The stuff is coming in by boat. If we want to get rid of it, that's where we should be stopping it."

"That's a job for the DEA and they're supposedly working on it. Our job is to keep it off the beach and off the streets."

She glanced at the entrance and saw Sara walking in; then she jotted another note on her list of reminders for the self-defense class. "I've got to teach my class in ten minutes."

Pete gave her shoulder a brotherly squeeze and wandered off to his desk to make a phone call. As soon as he was out of hearing, Leo Reagan got up and crossed the aisle to Sloan's desk. "I'll give you ten-to-one odds he's calling Mary Beth," he said. "He's already called her three times today."

"He's completely besotted," Jess agreed.

Sara arrived, perched her hip on the edge of Sloan's desk, smiled a greeting at the two men; then she leaned around Leo and looked at Pete, who was leaning way back in his chair, grinning at the ceiling. "I think he's adorable," she said. "And based on the look on his face, he's definitely talking to Mary Beth."

Satisfied that Pete was preoccupied, Leo pulled an envelope out of his shirt pocket and held it out toward Jess. "We're taking up a collection to buy Pete and Mary Beth a wedding gift. Everyone is putting in twenty-five bucks."

"What are we buying them, a house?" Jess said. He dug into his pocket, and Sloan reached for her purse.

"Silverware," Leo provided.

"You're kidding!" Jess said as he put twenty-five dollars into the envelope and passed it to Sloan. "How many kids are they planning to feed, anyway?"

"I dunno. All I know is that Rose called some store where they keep a list of stuff the bride picked out. Would you believe your twenty-five dollars will only buy part of one fork?"

"It must be one hell of a big fork."

Sloan exchanged a laughing look with Sara as she slid twenty-five dollars into the envelope. At that moment, Captain Ingersoll strolled out of his glass-enclosed office, studied the scene, and noticed the cheerful gathering around Sloan's desk, and his expression turned to a glower.