3. Oh Captain, My Captain

I need to put to rest all the rumors about me and the captain sleeping together all along. I slept next to him once, but that was only by accident. I didn't even know he was a captain, with a wife and kids and political aspirations, not necessarily in that order. Nor did I know he would either become the one true love of my life or the likeliest guy to want me dead, depending on where you get your cable news once I start spilling my guts.

I was crashing in a holding cell we use as a break room here at Hollywood Division. That's when all the shooting started. I was pretty sure the Navy SEALS had taken over the compound, going full-on Bin Laden on anything that moved. I bolted upright, meeting a pair of steely blue eyes over in the next bed. "Excuse me," I hissed through the dark, as though he'd barged in on me in the ladies' room. "There's a girl in here."

He chuckled, tossing a pair of handcuffs on the nightstand before pausing to light a Marlboro. "I promise I'll stay on my side." I caught a flash of his silhouette in the flame of a silver Zippo as he reclined on an adjacent bunk -- followed by another burst of automatic fire from just downstairs. Bam. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam.  I pulled the covers over my face. "Please put that out," I whispered. "What is happening out there?"

"That's just Morning Watch warming up on the range," he said. "I take it you're new here?" I fumbled around for a bedside light, knocking over my open bottle of nail polish. "You mind leaving that out?" he mumbled. "What's say we grab another minute of shut eye before we double back, nobody has to know."

Dabbing at the spilled polish with a Kleenex, I put my hand on something in the general shape of a pistol. I'd never even touched a gun before, let alone slept with one by my head. "Is this thing loaded?" I whispered. He laughed again, louder this time. Cops don't tend to do much laughing with perfect strangers, upsets the power balance. You get any reaction at all out of a cop and believe me you've earned it. I guess he wasn't all cop that night any more than I was a total knockout one more drooling loser had to go and get all stupid over. We were just a pair of voices, finding each other in the dark. I held my ears against another round of bullets. "Relax over there, I just told you it was the good guys. I'm Chuck, by the way."

"Cherry," I replied. "Chuck and Cherry, we should start a folk band." I guess by the third time he laughed, we were both pretty much done for, whether or not we knew it yet. He said I'd never have to be afraid of anything again, even as a civilian employee. "You're either one of us or you're not," he told me, as if there were only two choices in life.

I should have made a run for it right there. This was only supposed to be a day job, not some kind of life sentence -- or worse yet, a death sentence. How am I going to be a movie star if I end up in witness protection? As for him, what he knew, when he knew it -- if he actually knew anything -- I still haven't figured that out. That night, though, I'd already started falling for the only guy in my whole life who'd ever asked me to leave the lights out. "I should really go," I whispered, leaving him in the shadows. "I'm supposed to meet with the captain." Bam. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam.