"How's it going out there tonight?" she asked. "Catch any bad guys?"

He knew she always wanted to hear the stories, take her away from the boring blather in front of her.

"Not much," he said, not willing to take the effort to make anything up off the cuff. "Pretty quiet. Rain you know. Policeman's best friend. How's it in there?"

"Dull," she said and he saw her step forward and pick up a bar rag while she cradled the phone with her shoulder.

"So who's the guy you've been flirting with for the last half hour?" he said, not able to control himself.

"What? You're kidding, right?"

He could see her look up at the window on the north side of the bar where he had parked his cruiser in the past.

"Oh. Tell me he's just another old friend from high school like that last one," he said.

She kept looking north and then walked out from behind the bar over to an empty table, wiped at the clean surface.

"Yeah, old is right," she said into the phone. "He's forty-eight. He's married to my old boss out at Ranchers."

She was trying to keep an easy, teasing tone in her voice. He wasn't close enough to see the tiny prick of fear that stained the light in her eye.

He was silent and watched her give up on the table and then disappear behind a wall and then come back into view in another window. She was wearing that loose white button-down blouse, open wide down the front. She had on a cotton jersey underneath that stretched tight around her breasts and accented her cleavage.

"You gotta wear that shirt open like that all the time?" he said, watching her move close to the window and look out in his direction. The reflective paint on the side of the squad car glowed like neon under the lights and he saw her eyes stop.

"You always seem to like it," she said and cupped her hand around the mouthpiece of the phone and moved closer to the glass. Her face was shadowed by the angle of the light.