God of My Dreams (Greek Heroes #1) ✅ Completed

Chapter Four: Cops and Wine-in-a-box

Cops and Wine-in-a-box:

Gwen-Stacey sat at her desk and wondered how she was going to get through the rest of this crappy day. Already three of her four cases had pulled no-shows that morning, and the last one cried so hard, she’d barely been able to understand the young teenage mother. It was a hard job being a social worker. It was even harder being a social worker, teacher, counselor, and surrogate parent to teens living harder lives.

New York was a great city – she’d never say any different. It was the home of great theatre, world-class cuisine, fashion week, and the best hot dogs on the whole planet (she figured if anybody else made hotdogs better than Nathan’s at Coney Island, then surely the whole world would’ve been notified). As great as New York was, it could also be cold, unforgiving, and dangerous. If you didn’t learn how to swim fast you were eaten by sharks. And the teenagers she saw on a daily basis either at her office, in the street, or in a courtroom knew all about it.  

“Gwen?” Her special voice-activated intercom buzzed. Her desk was in the farthest corner of the office floor. She was able to use her voice activated phone, intercom, and computer without worrying about disturbing her co-workers, or being overly distracted by their own noise. It was a little lonely, but it was worth it. Just the idea of not being able to support herself made her physically ill.

“Yes, Marisol?” Only her best friend knew how much she detested the use of her whole name at work. Everyone just assumed Marisol was too lazy to say her name right, but that wasn’t the case at all. She really was a great friend. 

“Your one o’clock won’t be able to make it today,” she said.

Gwen-Stacey picked up on both the notes of tension and worry in her friend’s voice. “Why? Did his foster mother call? Did you speak to her?”

“No, not exactly…” There was a brief pause as her friend decided how to proceed, “the cops did.”

“What? Why didn’t you transfer the call over to me right away?” It was unlike Marisol not to transfer a call in that sort of situation. Sometimes other case workers handled overflow calls in case you were unavailable, but in these types of situations the counselor in charge of the ward always got the call.

Marisol’s voice came through the intercom again, and this time she sounded almost desperate. “I tried Gwen, I really tried. But I think the officer on the phone just wanted to make sure Anthony hadn’t given him some kind of bogus number. When I told him that Anthony Garcia was one of ours he hung up on me.”

Dammit! It was never a good thing when New York’s finest started playing games with the overworked (and underpaid, don’t forget underpaid!) civil servants of New York. They’d probably picked up Anthony on something ridiculous because he fit a sketchy profile – but that was true for most of the young, minority teenagers in the worst parts of the city. Gwen-Stacey would bet her left arm that the cops didn’t  have any real evidence that Anthony had been involved in anything, certainly not enough to hold him. If he didn’t have parents to come in to defend his rights, then they’d just keep him there until they felt like releasing him…usually when another, likelier suspect came along. The last thing they wanted was some nosy, official pain-in-the-ass coming in and causing problems.

Normally she preferred avoiding any problems where she could help it, as they didn’t make doing her job any easier. But Anthony was one of hers – and no one messed with what was hers.

“Gwen, you still there?” she could hear the concern in Marisol’s voice.

She imagined her best friend was probably standing at her desk looking across the office floor at her. In her mind, Marisol would always look the same as she did when she was eighteen on their first day of freshman orientation. Gwen-Stacey still had a little of her vision at that time, and she’d been grateful for it. Trying to get around the sprawling city campus of NYU was hard enough without being able to see anything.