The Full Moon Breeding Club novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Dispatch

At two in the morning, Cook County Dispatch is the quietest loud room in the world.

Six screens, one radio on low, and the drip of the coffee maker in the break room behind the glass.

I had taken a dozen calls since seven p.m.

A deer through a windshield.

A drunk on a snowmobile.

A man whose wife had fallen on the basement stairs and who kept saying "she's okay, she's okay" in a voice that said she wasn't.

She was, in the end.

I told him what to do with my hands steady and my voice level, and the ambulance beat the worst of it.

Then it was my break.

I shut the break room door, turned the little lock, and sat at the plastic table with my phone in my hand.

I called the only number I had saved that week.

He picked up on the first ring.

"Anja."

His voice was thick with sleep and warmer than the room.

"Did I wake you?"

"I was waiting."

"At two a.m.?"

"You said you'd call on your break."

I hadn't said it.

He had said it at dawn, in my doorway, with his boots in his hand.

I smiled anyway.

"Where are you?"

"Somewhere quiet," he said. A rustle of cloth. "I can hear your radio."

"That's the scanner. It's on all night."

"I know." A pause. "I've heard your voice on it for three years."

I went still.

"You've what?"

"The county scanner. I keep it on in the kitchen. Medical calls, fire calls, a dispatcher named Aune who never sounds afraid."

I put my hand over my mouth.

"I used to listen on bad nights," he said. "On the moon nights, especially."

"I'd hear your voice tell some stranger to breathe, and I'd breathe."

"Eero."

"I didn't know it was you until Friday."

"Why didn't you say?"

"I had my hand on your pulse. I was busy."

I laughed, and then my laugh broke, and I put the phone against my forehead for a second.

When I lifted it back, I was in a different mood.

"Are you alone?" I said.

"Yes."

"Naked?"

A very long pause.

"Is that a dispatcher question?"

"It's an instruction. Take your shorts off."

I heard him move.

I heard the shift of a big body on a bench seat, the soft thud of cloth on a floor mat.

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