Chapter 7

CHAPTER SEVEN

During the entire drive back to his house, Cisco thought about his mother's not-so-sage-advice.

Just be yourself, honey, and the girl will come around. You're a good person, and she'll see that, eventually .

Cisco appreciated her certainty, but he doubted it would hold true. He'd already been as nice as he could be—on his best behavior, really—with Hilly, and she'd still regarded him as if he'd crawled out from under a rock.

His father's words of encouragement were even more vague.

If it's meant to be, it's meant to be.

It's meant to be? Cisco repeated in his head. What was it , and… Meant to be what? Wasn't that the flipping question of the day.

Cisco knew he wasn't looking for a fast tumble in the sheets with Hilly, but what did he want? Did he want to get to know her? Did he want to…date her? He knew he wasn't angling for marriage; or at least he'd never thought about it before. His needs, lately, seemed simple. He was looking for a nice woman who wouldn't treat him like his body was a slab of juicy meat. That was all well and fine, but Hilly, he believed, was too far into the vegan category where his physical self was concerned. He seriously doubted she'd agree to take a voluntary bite of anything he was offering.

It looked like his parents were spot on, though, even if he'd felt their platitudes were unhelpful. Time would certainly tell. Hilly would have to put up with his presence twice a week for the entire summer, and during that time, he'd be chipping away at her reticent, rock-solid and disinterested fa?ade at every opportunity. He'd be so freaking helpful, she wouldn't be able to resist him.

The plotting was easy.

He'd be extra eyes on her campers. He'd enthusiastically join in on any and all activities—even drama club—and he'd cheerfully take care of any disgusting chores around the property. If that wasn't putting himself out there to make a good impression, he didn't know what was.

Settled that there was at least some sort of plan in his head, Cisco pulled into his driveway and glanced appreciatively at his small, neat bungalow. Its style was arts and crafts reminiscent, and the olive green and cream fa?ade soothed him every time he saw it. The six-room home was sparse, minimalist, but that's the way Cisco liked it. His modest style was apparent at first glance. The porch held two cane rockers, and a welcome mat. That was it. No side tables to accumulate crap. No hanging plants to sprinkle dead leaves onto the painted wooden flooring. Just simple and sweet.

Jogging up the porch steps, Cisco couldn't wait to get out of his uniform and into what he'd now call "weekend clothes", since this was his new time off. It felt good to be like the majority of the population as he looked around and saw neighbors mowing lawns, kids playing basketball in their driveways, and parents walking babies in strollers. This is what he'd been missing. He'd been working and sleeping at all the wrong times for so freaking long that he'd been kept from normalcy.

Cisco was about to enter his house when his phone rang.

Welker.

He picked up his phone with a grin and gave his standard greeting. "Hey, asshole."

"Prick," Welker came back, automatically. "When were you going to tell me you've been switched to weekdays? Am I always the last to find out these life changing events?" he scolded. "Buddy, this is huge."

"I know," Cisco replied, letting himself into his cool, shadowed foyer, picking up the mail that had been sent through his front door slot. "Sorry you weren't my first call," he chuckled, "but I only found out yesterday. I had to sleep on it to make sure it was real. Then this morning I went on a ride and scoped out part of my new, special assignment."

"Which is?"

Cisco made up his mind instantly to fill Welker in on his schedule, as well as his mental dilemma. "I'm going to be teaching a self-defense course Tuesdays and Thursdays at a camp out on Lake Pushaw."

"Cushy," Welker snorted. "Leave it to you to pull light duty."

Right. Cushy.

Cisco sighed. "But there's this camp director…" How did he describe Hilly?

"A real bear, huh?" Welk came back, clearly not waiting for clarification. "A ball buster? Worse?"

That was all debatable. In a way Hilly was busting his balls, or at least coloring them blue with the way she vacillated between pretending to tolerate him before flipping the script to send him shy, uncertain smiles that had him plotting how he could extract more.

"She's actually pretty sweet, and a smoking hot redhead," Cisco replied with a little bitterness in his tone that he couldn't disguise. "But get this. She treated me like I was an unwelcome relative. Kind of in a lukewarm way; putting up with me, but only because she has to."

Welker laughed. "Shit, man. You mean you've finally found a woman who rings your bell, but is resistant to your charms? That's gotta hurt."

Coming from Welker, that was raw. The man had nothing to worry about in the ladies' department, and never lacked for eye-candy on his arm or in his bed. Even though Welk had a scar running the length of his face from his eyebrow to his chin, the imperfection simply gave him even more of an allure; his pick-ups gleaning a chance to offer—or at least pretend—compassion over his injury. Add to that mysterious knife-mark, Welk's natural blond good looks, and he attracted women like locusts to corn.

"I didn't try charm," Cisco admitted. "At first when I rode up, I figured my Harley and the uniform would not only tell her I was the cop she'd hired, but they'd make her sit up and take notice. When that didn't work, I spent the rest of my time sticking my foot in my mouth, then doing damage control over every fucked-up word that came out."

"Sucks for you, buddy, but you know what you need?" Welker countered.

"I'm almost afraid to ask." Cisco threw his keys in a bowl designated for such, bent down and unzipped his boots, toed them off and immediately put them into the hall closet.

Welk didn't hesitate. "Positive reinforcement. A stroke to your male…ego," he quipped. "Which is good for me, because with all the guys getting hitched, I'm jonesing for someone to go out and hit the bars with me. So, now that our schedules have aligned and I don't have classed this evening, you, Cisco my man, are the perfect guy for my purposes. What are you doing tonight?"

Cisco wanted to groan. All he'd been planning on doing was hunkering down with a ballgame and a beer while feeling sorry for himself over Hilly's tepid response to him; she being the first woman in a long time who'd even remotely stirred his imagination.

Going out tonight? Shit. The last thing Cisco wanted to do was watch a gaggle of lustful woman parade by their table like he and Welker were the daily specials.

"You sure you wouldn't rather come over here?" Cisco posited. "I can throw some steaks on the grill and we can watch the Sox."

"Lame," Welker came back. "It's Saturday night. Come on, old-buddy-old-pal. Join me. We can go farther afield than normal so we don't see off-limit faces."

Yeah. It was an unspoken rule that neither of them do any of their trolling in local territory. Orono especially. They were, as known officers and SWAT members, bound to get female interest in the local bars from women with whom they were familiar, or from seriously young college girls going to UMaine. Neither scenario was even remotely appealing. Together or apart, he and Welk normally ended up in Bangor, a larger town, where they still risked seeing women one or the other of them knew, since Welker worked for the BPD, and had a history of not choosing bed-partners wisely.

"Like, where did you have in mind?" Cisco asked, sorting through his mail. He walked to his home office, instantly depositing all the bills in a neat pile on his uncluttered desk. The junk mail hit the bin.

"Let's try that new place, Brew-Baby, south of Bangor. I've heard it's hopping on the weekends."

Should Cisco give in or stick with his original plans for a pout-fest?

Welk continued to prod. "Don't give me any excuses. If anything, we need to celebrate your new schedule."

"Okay," Cisco finally capitulated. "But I'm driving myself."

The last thing he wanted to do was get stuck calling an Uber when Welker hooked up and took off with his ride.

"Excellent. Nine o'clock?"

Cisco grunted. "Do they serve food there?"

"They do."

"Then let's make it seven so we can eat."

"Always hungry," Welker teased. "But okay, it's a plan."

Welker hung up and Cisco pocketed his phone, but…speaking of food, once Cisco disconnected, he walked into his kitchen and pulled open the fridge. Even though his mother had fed him only two hours previous, his stomach was still asking for more. He eyed the leftover pizza.

Yeah. He grabbed two slices out of the box. He'd just have to do twenty extra minutes of cardio this afternoon to burn off those extra calories.

Hunger and neatness. Two constants in his life.

Cisco had long understood that both his need for order and his bottomless appetite stemmed from a time he couldn't remember; a time before his parents had adopted him. At the age of ten, under the care of a childhood therapist whom his parents had made him see, Cisco had quickly come to the realization that fastidiousness and food were two things that had probably been lacking in his life before he'd been placed with Selma and Genero Andera.

Therapy had given Cisco the mental tools to accept his compulsions, and once he'd come to grips with that, he'd never let either of his persistent urges define him. He simply made sure to assuage his needs in private and with close friends, not letting them interfere with the public portion of his life.

Standing at the kitchen sink in order to keep the fall-out-crumbs contained, Cisco chewed methodically and gazed out the window at his small, but neat back yard. He wasn't seeing the table and chairs, the stainless grill, or the firepit, though. No. Instead he was envisioning Hilly's camp.

In a rare bit of good news for him, it was well-ordered and clean, which Cisco truly appreciated. Of course, once a hundred campers descended, he couldn't expect the same degree of tidiness, but knowing the surroundings had started out the way they had, told him that Hilly also enjoyed an organized environment.

Another plus in her column.

Once his pizza had been devoured, Cisco washed his hands, then silently padded up the runner-carpeted stairs to his room to put on shorts and a t-shirt. On a whim, because it was so nice outside, he'd decided to eschew his indoor workout and go for a run, instead.

Cisco went downstairs to stretch on his living room floor, then feeling buoyed up, he jumped to his feet and jogged to his front porch where he popped in his earbuds and cued up Rage Against the Machine .

Yes. He already felt better, and once the endorphins kicked in, maybe he could forget about Hilly altogether.

It seemed like the healthiest thing to do.

An hour later, having run seven miles at a decent clip, Cisco began doing cool-downs on his front lawn while lamenting the fact that all the sweat and effort he'd expended hadn't driven one very tenacious woman from his mind. He was wondering if some early alcohol intake wouldn't be the answer when an alert tone came in over his Bluetooth buds.

A SWAT callout. Excellent. It was just what he needed to shake off his Hilly-fixation.

He quickly went inside and picked up his phone to read the texted details.

Armed robbery in progress. Bangor Five Savings Bank .

Cisco ran upstairs while his thumbs responded.

ETA eighteen minutes .

That gave him five minutes to shower and dress.

He wasted no time.

Kitted out in his BDU's, vest, and helmet, Cisco hunkered down behind the teams' armored bearcat with his five-person unit, alongside Welker and his squad. The rest of the team was spread out around the block, but Mason had given B and H squads front row position within twenty feet of the main door.

The chief, along with Opal and Nolan, the team's tech experts, were currently in the fortified command bus right next to them, orchestrating what they all hoped would be a brief showdown, but now looked like it would last well into the evening.

"So much for our plans," Welker grumbled.

Cisco sighed. "You mean so much for my dinner."

Welk snickered. "Of course, you're thinking about your stomach instead of my?—"

"Uh, uh," Cisco cut Welk off with a hiss. "Mixed company."

"That's okay, LT," one of Welk's unit members, Moira Bliss, a sheriff with the Penobscot County Department, spoke up with a snort. "We all know what Welker thinks about all the time, and what he gets up to on his off time."

Cisco found it amusing that it was always Moira who gave Welker shit. He wondered if there was anything between the pair, but quickly dismissed it. Welker, like Cisco, didn't fraternize within the ranks. Not that it was forbidden, but once a relationship went south, it was often times damned uncomfortable to work when two people on a close-knit team were attempting to ignore each other, post coitus.

Mason's voice clipped out over their mics. "The perp is asking for a television interview. He wants someone from the press with a camera to meet him outside the building where he'll be holding the bank manager as his hostage, at gunpoint. He has a message for somebody."

"Any ID on who he is yet, and who he's trying to rattle?" Mike's question followed.

"So far, nothing. The man's been keeping to the back of the bank, out of our line of vision, even from our snipers' scopes. Once he steps outside, we'll have facial rec. But from the sounds of him, he's probably a local. He's calling the bank manager by name."

Shit. Cisco hated when the perp was someone teammates from Bangor might know. It made taking the bad guy down that much more personal.

Mason continued. "Who wants to play reporter?"

"I'll do it." Cisco offered immediately.

He was tired of waiting, and chances were, with him being from Orono, the hostage-taker would be unfamiliar with his face. "You have any civvies that will fit me?"

"On the bus," Mason grunted. "Come suit up."

And by suit up, Mason would try to get him to wear a vest under his plain-clothes, but it being summer, any bank robber with a brain in their head would see the bulk, so Cisco was going to decline. All he needed was a camera…and an excuse to get near the guy.

Ten minutes later, dressed in a white, short-sleeve button down shirt and chinos, Cisco hefted the professional news camera Mason had procured from the local TV station, onto his shoulder.

He was ready to roll.

"Your press badge is just about ready to print," Opal told him with an amused look on her face as she stood by their copier, retrieved the item hot off the press, then ran it through the laminator.

Cisco didn't have to wait long to see why she was snickering under her breath. When she handed him the tag, he read it. Peter Parkour .

"Funny." He rolled his eyes while her partner in crime, Nolan, chuckled. Mason simply snorted, then picked up his phone and dialed the line he had into the bank. A few seconds later, the boss was all business.

"We have a reporter from WABI who's just arrived. He's agreed to video you, live," Mase lied. "But you have to promise that he and the bank manager will both be safe."

Yeah. Like the guy wouldn't simply just agree to get his own way. But Mase clearly felt compelled to say something because the manager's life hung in the balance, and yes, Cisco had eschewed any safety equipment.

"Right," Mason continued, clearly having been given an affirmative answer. For what it was worth. "He'll wait until you're out of the building, then he'll come toward you, slowly, where he'll give you your interview."

Mason must have heard what he wanted, because he hung up with a grunt, then addressed Cisco. "During the first few minutes of engagement, Units C and K will breach the back door to rescue the remaining hostages inside."

"I'll give them five," Cisco agreed.

"That'll work." Mason gave Cisco the nod, and Cisco responded with grin and a thumbs up.

Piece of cake.

They had a plan, and Cisco knew what to do.