Read Grave on Grand Avenue for Free Online

communications. She thinks she has a knack for investigative reporting, which maybe she does, but she’s taking it way too seriously. Now she’s a reporter for the Citrus Squeeze ,Pan Pacific West’s student paper, with access to wire services. She’s been keeping tabs on any crime within a five-mile vicinity of PPW, which unfortunately for me includes the same area that the Central Division covers.
    “Hey, Rush, who is this Nay Pram? She says that she knows you,” Jay Steinlight says to me right now in the squad room. He’s always fielding questions from the press, and apparently Nay has made an impression. Oh great. Nay must have called him directly.
    “Uh, yeah, she’s a friend.” Like my BFF, practically the sister that I never had. But Steinlight doesn’t need to know how close we really are.
    “She’s persistent,” says Steinlight. I can read between the lines. She’s a crazy nightmare, and I should use my influence—discreetly, of course—to get her to lay off. But Nay’s a challenge. Push too softly and she won’t feel a thing. Push too hard and it will make her even more curious.
    During my break I go outside and stand beside some dying palm trees next to our building. It’s times like these I kind of wish I smoked. To hold something in between my fingers, some excuse to let my mind wander miles away from here.
    Instead, I hold my phone to my ear and keep my back toward the door. “Hey, Nay, what’s up?”
    “What’s with that guy Steinlight? Wouldn’t give me a thing.”
    “What do you mean?” I am an awful liar, because Nay quickly says, “You know exactly what I mean. Xu. The fight that his father had with that gardener. It was right at Walt Disney Hall. Weren’t you saying that you had patrol duty there?”
    “Nay, I can’t talk about it.”
    “So you were there! Did you see what happened?”
    “I didn’t see what happened,” I say definitively. That isn’t a lie. “And all of this is off the record.”
    “Of course, of course.” I want to believe Nay, but I can’t. Even her writing that “some unnamed cop said that she didn’t see anything” could possibly get me in trouble.
    “But you know what happened,” Nay continued. “Did Xu push that gardener down the stairs? I heard that he’s not doing well.”
    “Where did you hear that?”
    “I have my sources.”
    “Nay, this is not a joke. You can’t be writing any of this right now.”
    “Did you meet him, by the way?”
    “Who?”
    “Xu. Oh my God, he is so damn cute. I could eat him up.”
    “I did see him.” Shoot, did I say that? Shut up, Ellie, I tell myself. “Oh, Nay, ah, I got to go, okay?”
    I end the call and take a deep breath. Crisis averted, right?
    Before I go back in, I set a Google Alert on Eduardo Fuentes, although I know it’s probably a pretty common name inboth North and South America, not to mention Spain. I add Los Angeles and Disney Hall to limit the category.
    I turn around to see a tall redhead walk into the station, and get a closer look as I enter our lobby. The PR lady, Kendra Prescott, obviously here on some kind of mission.
    I try to keep my eyes down, like when you’re in class and don’t want to be called on. I’m almost safely out of the lobby when I hear Captain Randle call out from his office, “Officer Rush, could you join us, please?”
    Johnny’s already seated in the office. Captain Randle, his graying hair close-cropped, looks as intimidating and as dashing as ever, like that classic actor my father loves, Sidney Poitier. He’s dark-skinned like Poitier, and commands the same level of respect. In other words, we P2s are scared as hell of him. Johnny seems about as happy to be there as a dental patient waiting for his root canal.
    “I understand from Officer Mayhew that you are acquainted with Ms. Kendra Prescott from the concert hall,” Captain Randle says.
    “We’ve met,” I say.
    Kendra frowns slightly as if she can’t remember our previous encounter.