"What do you mean, you refuse another assignment with the Feds?" Captain Frank Marks yelped.

Detective Marleen Avoni took a step back. Not a cowardly move, for she knew her superior's snarling dog look held more bluster than bite, but she was fidgety from standing in front of his desk for the last ten minutes while he'd finished his phone conversation. Eavesdropping, she'd heard enough to know he'd been talking to someone in the Department of Justice about another liaison case with the DEA. She'd thrown up her hands and rejected the assignment before Captain Marks had a chance to go into detail, an evasive maneuver that probably wouldn't deter him one bit.

Marks had a full head of gray hair, shoulders the size of a linebacker's and a stomach that rolled over his waistline, hiding two-thirds of his lap. He almost never cracked a smile, today being no different, and he grunted like a bear as he picked up his pen and began writing as if Marleen had all day to wait for him to dismiss her. Without looking up, he said, "This case may be important to our national security."

Why me? Marleen wondered. Not only was she supposed to begin her vacation today, but she'd promised to attend a friend's wedding before leaving town. The ceremony would be over by now and if he didn't end this interview soon, she would miss the reception, too. She considered pleading the need to pick up her mother at the airport to hurry the captain along. Hopefully she could still make the reception and congratulate the happy couple before heading to the airport. By late afternoon, she and her mother should be on their way to a vacation resort on the Gulf coast. Marleen hadn't had a vacation in nearly three years. She needed this one. She'd earned it, she deserved it, and she'd be doggoned if she'd let Captain Marks change her mind again.

"I'm not saying I won't take future assignments with the DEA. I'm just refusing this one." She hoped that came out with a proper amount of subordination instead of the impatience she felt. Marleen checked her wrist and realized that she'd left her watch at home in her rush to get down to the police station.

Marks made a monosyllabic reply and went back to scribbling on the papers in front of him, making her feel like a child brought to the principal's office for misconduct.

"I need the time off," Marleen added with a bit of desperation. She'd been looking forward to lying on the beach with nothing more to worry about than whether the days would be too cloudy to see the sunset.

Captain Marks just grunted again and kept writing. She imagined him preparing one of his clich� lectures about her responsibility to the department, her dedication to law enforcement, her previous unfailing record. It would be just like him to use such underhanded tactics.

"Sit down, Avoni. I'll be through here in a moment."

Marleen eyed the door with regret and sighed. She slid into the seat in front of his cluttered desk and decided to remind him of the trying undercover operation she'd just completed. "The only reason the DEA wanted me on the last case was because of my connections with an informant. I'm sure anyone in the department can act as local liaison on this one."

"You think that lazy street bum gave you something that the DEA hadn't been sitting on for months?" With his eyes never leaving the work in front of him, the captain actually snorted, causing a rush of blood to pound inside Marleen's ears.

"Are you saying that I didn't contribute?" If that's the way he felt, he and the DEA could take their assignment and stick it up--

"Christ, Avoni!" He threw down his pen, making her jump at the unexpected attention. His fuzzy gray brows drew together and his eyes narrowed. "I never took you to be that slow. Even when your snitch no longer played a key role, the Feds kept you on. You're a good cop, and they knew they were damned lucky to have you."

She grinned. It was the closest the captain had ever come to complimenting her. "Not nearly as lucky as I was to have a competent agent like Devereau around when that sniper took a bead on me from the warehouse loft."

He waved his wide palm in an objecting gesture. In spite of his blustering attitude, Marleen knew the captain was downy soft underneath when it came to one of his officers getting hurt. The importance of what he'd said suddenly made her wonder if she really were a bit slow. Her smile faded, replaced with a scowl of retrospection.

"I wonder how the DEA found out about the dealers using that particular warehouse. My contact might have known about it sooner or later, but our search and seizure followed right on the heels of a huge drug delivery. Who told them?"

"I figured you found that out from Devereau," Captain Marks said dryly.

"We were too busy at the time to make small talk," she replied without curbing her sarcasm.

The captain's chair creaked when he leaned his overweight body back and plunked his sixties-style loafers amid the chaos of paperwork on his desk. Marleen liked the fact he treated her with no more or no less respect than one of his male detectives.

"Thought you'd know anyway since you're so close to the source's daughter."

A cold chill swept Marleen's spine. "Brenningan?"

"Don't you read the paper?"

"Yeah," she said. She stood and moved about the room to make sure her supervisor couldn't see the effect that man's name had on her. She hadn't missed an article Conner Brenningan had written in the last three years. "I read the paper."

As she paced back and forth across the room, irritation edged out her more fragile emotions. She reflected on the article that she'd read that morning. Once again Brenningan had more inside facts than could have been gleaned in the usual manner. She wondered whom he'd bribed this time.

"I should have known the Agency wouldn't be that free with information about the case," she said. "Brenningan described the operation as if he'd been there himself."

The captain made another monosyllabic noise. When she stopped and glared at him, he shrugged. "Conner Brenningan seems to have a knack for being in the right place at the right time. But that's probably because his reports are usually fair and unbiased."

That depends on the subject matter. Brenningan still had some pretty biased ideas about the male versus female roles in this world.

"I can't get serious about a woman who insists on working in such a dangerous profession," Conner had once told her. How much danger had there been for him while collecting information about drug operations in the cocaine capital of the world?

She rubbed her arms to dissolve the unexpected mass of goosebumps that popped up. Colombia was a dangerous territory for an American correspondent to wander around, even when he wasn't asking people for details about a drug cartel's operations.

"Seems I remember you two had a thing for each other a few years ago." Captain Marks picked up a letter opener. Paying close attention to his left hand, he used the instrument like a nail file, picking beneath his well-manicured nails.

They'd had a thing all right, Marleen remembered bitterly, but it'd been one-sided, all on her part. A friendship with Conner's teenage daughter had been the only good thing to come of their brief time together. Joani had continued to keep in touch with Marleen even after her father left the country. The teenager had become like the daughter she'd probably never have. At thirty, Marleen had no prospects of a lifetime partner and no interest in finding one.

The captain went back to his original argument as though he didn't expect her to respond to his remark. "Dammit, Marleen, I stuck my neck out and promised the department heads you'd be glad to cooperate on this. It's an opportunity any one of my male detectives would jump at."

Marleen rolled her eyes and resumed her place in the straight-backed chair. There were more comfortable chairs in the building, but Marks chose varnished hardwood torture-seats for his guests. If the discomfort were a ruse to get people out of his office quickly, it likely also influenced those forced to remain to give in to his demands. She crossed her legs and shifted on the hard surface.

"Really, Captain, that ammunition has about lost its charge. I've been compared to those male ego-bloaters you call detectives more times than I can count, and I've always come out on top. I'll bet there isn't one of them who could have held up any better during the DEA's last investigation. All those weeks of uncertainty, often switching between isolation and boredom or unidentified dangers..." Too late, she realized how much her words sounded like a contradiction to her earlier assertion that anyone could handle this new assignment. She wondered if the captain were deliberately trying to trick her.

"Humph," he huffed, but didn't argue the point.

Silence hung in the air for several moments. Marleen knew, in spite of the fact he hadn't used her own words against her, he wouldn't let her off the hook so easily. The old hardhead was no doubt just getting his second wind so he could hammer away at her until she agreed to do what he wanted. Braced for his verbal onslaught, she became determined not to give in to his tactics.

Marleen glanced at the big clock over the doorway. She slapped her hands on the desk and stood. "Look, Captain, if Devereau still needs me in two weeks, I'll be happy to work with the DEA on whatever. I'm flattered they requested my assistance again, but I've already made reservations."

Not quite sure she was getting through to him, she searched for a stronger argument. Unable to come up with anything better, she began cataloguing a few more flimsy reasons that came to mind. "If I cancel now, I'll lose my deposit. My mother is flying in from New York to join me. We want to be at Sanibel Island before dark--"

Marleen jumped when Captain Marks's size thirteen shoes dropped from desktop to floor with a resounding thud. Anticipating another long-winded lecture, she was pleasantly surprised when his steady scowl turned ever so slightly into what the dour-faced man probably considered a smile. He rubbed the beard stubble on his second chin and muttered, "Sanibel Island, huh?"

"Look, Captain," Marleen began to restate her case and edge toward the door at the same time, "I haven't had a vacation in over two years--"

"Go ahead and take your vacation, Detective Avoni. You deserve it." He jumped to his feet and slapped his fat thighs enthusiastically as if her time off had been his idea all along.