Gotta Dance with the One Who Brung Ya

Excerpt

Gotta Dance with the One Who Brung Ya
Jon McDonald © 2016
All Rights Reserved

Detective John Shannon of the Miami PD was tying the ribbon at the end of the second braid on his four-year-old daughter, Felicia, as she swirled the cinnamon and brown sugar into her oatmeal at breakfast.

“Don’t play with your oatmeal—eat it,” John admonished.

“I don’t like it. It’s squishy.”

“Daddy Lorenzo made it especially good today. To warm you to your toes.”

Felicia laughed, “My toes don’t need warming. I got shoes.”

“Well, eat it anyway.” John turned to his partner. “I don’t know, maybe you can get her to eat it. I gotta go.”

“I da’ know. Like she would pay any more attention to me than to you.”

Lorenzo was the stay-at-home dad these days as his law firm had recently downsized, leaving Lorenzo scrambling through the want ads and making endless calls to his business associates looking for work.

John gave a playful tug to both of Felicia’s braids and gave her a kiss on the top of her head. “Bye, sweetie. Be good and mind Daddy Lorenzo.”

“K,” Felicia answered as she reached for her coloring book across the table.

“Not till after you eat all your breakfast,” Lorenzo scolded, grabbing the book from her hand.

“You’re gonna have a handful today, I can tell,” John whispered to Lorenzo as he gave him a quick kiss on his ear.

“Yeah, thanks. Be careful out there. Don’t let the bad guys score any points today,” Lorenzo called after the departing John, just as Felicia knocked over what was left of her milk.

* * * * *

Detective Shannon was working on a case of massive identity theft with his partner, Connie Mata. They were a good team. They had been paired together because they were both gay, but they had transcended the labels and tackled their cases with street smarts and a sense of humor that led to a higher than average arrest rate.

They had been working this case on and off for over a month now, but with little success. Connie was working on the check-cashing angle. She had been tracking where bogus checks were being cashed using stolen identities taken from the heisted database of a Minneapolis accounting firm. She had been able to identify a cluster of bad checks cashed near Bal Harbour, an exclusive Miami community that seemed an unlikely location for such activity. She had only two leads. A security camera had captured an image of a suspect departing a deli just after one of the bad checks had been cashed. The suspect was wearing a large hat that covered the person’s face, and it could not be determined if it was a man or a woman. The second piece of evidence was a photo from a home decorating shop of an old Oldsmobile that had pulled away just as the clerk realized they had been scammed and took a picture of the departing car. Unfortunately, there was no license plate visible, and though it was an old car, it was also a common model and thus difficult to trace. And John had also come to a dead end with his efforts to untangle the computer links used in stealing the database.

It looked like they would have to rely on one of their most basic police investigation techniques—questioning door to door—hoping they could get some hit of recognition from their two photos. They had mapped out sections of Bal Harbour and were taking one at a time. They had covered two so far without any luck. Today they were going to spend the morning canvassing a third area. It was near the beach in a nice older section. It was a pleasant morning, and they figured they could have pulled much tougher duty. So they stopped for some coffee and drove their unit on over to the first street they wanted to check out.