Excerpt from Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza , plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"She has to pee," the woman shouted.

"The bathroom is locked," said Michelle. "Ma'am–this–this is a crime scene."

With the dangling child still wailing, the woman scanned her surroundings. For the first time she noticed that it was, indeed, a crime scene. She saw the bullet strikes on the building. She glanced over her shoulder towards Niket, who somehow stumbled over the tape while trying to turn away from her gaze. But in actuality, the woman was looking past him, sizing up the access into and out of the station.

Through a patient study of the scene, she absorbed her surroundings. Then finally, carefully, she looked at Satkunananthan. She noted the wet stain in front of his prone form and on his pants. She sized up the blood spatters on the gas pump.

Neither the child's crying, nor her other children shouting from inside the van seemed to faze the woman. She was seeing… what, wondered Michelle?

"Ma'am?" Michelle said, to no response. Then more forcefully, "Ma'am…?"

The woman's attention snapped back to the present.

"She has to pee," is all the pregnant woman said with a now-eerie calm.

Michelle had no idea how to respond. "Uhm… yes… I'm pretty sure the bathroom's locked. And–uhm– " Hitching a thumb to Sasmal's body, "–I think he has the key."

The woman processed that. The child's crying suddenly stopped. The silence was surprising. Then, still held aloft in her mother's hands, the child started to pee.

Michelle watched as the jet stream splattered all over the blacktop in front of her. Just when she thought the child had finished, a more powerful secondary surge
shot out from between her spindly legs. To avoid getting peed on, she had to backpedal.

"This is a crime scene!" Michelle said angrily.

The pregnant woman said nothing. The child peed like a racehorse. She was the Secretariat of urination. Finally, the stream trickled to a drip.

Michelle said, "I could arrest you for contaminating a crime scene."

"In that case, you'd have to arrest yourself first," replied the woman. She abruptly turned her back on Patrol Officer Wu to put the child back into the car.

"Excuse me?" Michelle said.

"This isn't a crime scene," said the woman, "it's a joke."

"Excuse me?" Michelle repeated, this time with a cracked squeal that she immediately regretted.

Seemingly without oxygen in her lungs, the remarkably pregnant woman said, "You should have parked your squad car blocking one of the entrances. That would have prevented your tire treads from contaminating any potential evidence all around you. Once you realized the victim was dead, you shouldn't have stepped anywhere within a fifteen-foot diameter of the body until your detectives arrived. You're not wearing shoe covers, so your soles might have deposited minute traces of particles from anywhere you had stepped tonight and/or lint from inside your patrol car around this entire area, which means any potential particles and/or lint and/or residue left by the killer and/or the killer's automobile is now contaminated. I don't see a notebook or a pen in your hand, which would indicate you haven't been taking notes. As first on the scene, you should have been. But I guess I could forgive that, since you have your cell phone out taking pictures of the blood spatters on the pump before they trickled any further or dried up, because you know that could help inform the calculation of the bullet's trajectories and/or time of death–oh, wait–your cell phone is in your pocket, so you haven't been doing that, either! Now it'll be harder to identify the exact direction the shots were fired from and more accurately calculate the time of death."

Michelle blinked as she took this in. "Who the hell are you, lady?" Pregnant or not, Michelle wanted to kick this woman's ass. The two things that prevented her from doing so was professional decorum and the fact the stubby incubator was totally right.

Excerpted from Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza. Copyright © 2021 by Fabian Nicieza. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.