Chapter 2

“Okay. Good. Go ahead and talk to her.” Not that there was anything he could do about it in any case, but Mark often bonded with his callers in high-adrenaline situations, and it made it easier to click them off into the night if he knew they were in good hands.

“Is she right there with you?” he asked. “Do you feel safe disconnecting?”

“I think so, yeah. Ohmigod, thank you. He did have a gun—you just saved my life. You’re like my hero!”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Mark told nobody. His caller was gone, in Flo’s care now. Sergeant Tanaka, call center protocol would have him think of her, but once you’ve watched a police officer shake her shimmy in a sundress down a Soul Train line at your own wedding, as Mark had discovered four years ago, it became quite impossible to consider her on anything but a first-name basis.

He swiftly slid the mouse across his desk and signed out of the phone before another call could drop in, yanking his headset from the jack for good measure. He liked his job, and he was good at it, but three twelves in a row provided quite a sufficient number of distress calls; he earned his time off, and by three o’clock on Monday morning—three-oh-four, to be quite precise—the tires on his wheelchair were practically screeching as he rolled for his locker, then the elevator.

But a guy had to be rolling pretty fast to slip past Coretta Montague when she was on the hunt for a shift trade. The “Bradford!” she hurled across the center hit Mark just before the elevator doors slid open, and he had no choice but to let them slide closed on an empty car while he waited for her to finish her call. Coretta was his buddy, for one thing. More to the point, Mark doubted he could get into his car and out of the parking lot faster than Coretta could get off the phone, run down the stairs, and fling herself bodily in front of him. For a three-hundred-pound grandmother she was pretty light on her feet when time off was at stake.

With a little over six years under his belt, Mark enjoyed some seniority at a job with such a high burn-out rate—a full two-thirds of the city’s 911 call takers had been on the phones for under two years. Coretta had started in 1990, a few weeks before Mark turned three. She knew the ins and outs of 911 as if she’d written the employee handbook. Which she had, in 1998 and again in 2007. In what she referred to as her “real life,” she showed champion Corgis and ran a booming online organic dog treat business, with which her obligations to the City occasionally interfered. She was relentless when her schedule needed rearranging, but equally reliable for paybacks. Mark had cobbled together more than one extra vacation with Coretta’s help, and he knew it would be worth his while to hear her out. While he waited for her to wrap up her noise complaint, he carefully avoided calculating the snuggle time with Starr that was ticking away.

Shortly Coretta signed out of her phone and lumbered across the room. “How you been, baby?” She bent to peck Mark on both cheeks. “Those babies must be keepin’ you boys busy. I never see you around here anymore.”

“That’s ‘cause you never come to work,” Mark teased her. “You’ve always got something better to do.”

She laughed. “Funny you should mention that.” She launched into the preamble of an elaborate three-way trade scheme that would allow “Indiana,” some new girl on day shift Mark had never met or heard of who apparently spoke Spanish, to accompany Coretta to an upcoming dog show in Mexico City.

“You know I can’t function at seven o’clock in the morning,” Mark reminded Coretta when she wrapped up her pitch.

She scrunched her lips to the side of her face and said, “Please. Don’t give me that. You’re a daddy now, you function when you’re told. You trying to tell me you’re sending those babies off to school with no breakfast?”

“I got a husband takes care of all that.”

“Well, perfect. He can take care of all that, you can help me take care of this.”

“Yeah, but…seven o’clock?” Mark whined.

“It’s just an eight-hour shift, and it’s straight overtime for you. C’mon, baby. I’ll owe you big, and you know I’m good for it.”

The shift in question was on a Wednesday. Smack in the middle of Mark’s days off, and he really did try to switch his body clock back to something like normal during the week. With a three o’clock logout, he’d still be able to scoop the boys up after school, and it never hurt to have a favor from Coretta up his sleeve.