“Hello?” she called, knocking on the door. Over the blare of the television, she heard a pleasant kind of grunt that she took as an invitation to come in.
“Ehn,” Ken said when he saw her, his mouth curved up on one side as he tried to smile. He had lost about sixty pounds sitting in his wheelchair, and she wondered how he managed to wake up every morning knowing this was the life he had to look forward to.
“Remember me?” Angie asked.
He gave a deep, knowing laugh, as if to say, “How could I forget?”
Angie pulled a chair over and sat across from him. Ken fumbled with the remote in his lap, trying to mute the television. She hated nursing homes almost as much as she hated hospitals, and here she was visiting both in the same day. The chemical stench of disinfectant, the white sheets and flickering lights, reminded her of the first time she had seen her mother after the overdose. Deidre had been lying in bed, her body completely still, her mouth hanging open as if she had been surprised to find herself here. Irreversible coma. Angie was only a kid, but between General Hospital and Days of Our Lives, she knew exactly what that meant: baby, you are fucked.
“Deh,” Ken said. He had finally managed to mute the television.
Angie tried to sound cheerful. “How you been?”
One shoulder went up. He’d certainly been better.
“Stupid question, huh?”
Ken allowed a smile on the side of his face that he could control.
“You can’t talk well?”
“S’bad,” he admitted.
“I’m here about Michael Ormewood.”
He looked at the silent television for a couple of minutes. Finally, he blew out a puff of air.
Angie cut to the chase. “I know he’s an asshole, so you don’t have to bother telling me that.”
Ken nodded.
“Did you know he beats his wife?”
Shock flickered in his eyes.
“Guess not,” Angie said. “I saw her this morning. She looks like he took a bat to her.”
His jaw set and his good hand clenched in his lap. Still a cop, even though he probably couldn’t go to the toilet without someone there to wipe his ass.
Angie leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “I know you didn’t like him. Why? What was it about him that you didn’t like?”
He blew out a noisy stream of air in answer.
Angie shook her head. “I’m not following.”
He blew out some more air.
“Oh,” she said, finally getting it. “Hot air. He’s full of hot air.”
Ken nodded, excited, and she felt like she was playing a painful game of charades.
Still, she couldn’t stop now. “When Michael worked Vice,” she confided, “he was taking advantage of the girls.”
Ken shrugged.
“Is that a ‘what do you expect’ shrug or an ‘I’m not surprised’ shrug?”
He looked at his hand in his lap, the index and middle finger slowly pointing up to show it was the second choice. I’m not surprised.
“I told him to leave or I’d report him, so he left.”
“An ah ga…” His mouth closed. She could see he hated trying to talk. “Ah gah hih.”
“Yeah,” she said. Michael had been assigned as Ken’s partner. “You got him.”
They both sat there, Ken’s mouth working but no noises coming out. Angie tried to keep her face blank, tried not to let on how hard it was seeing him like this.
Finally, he said, “You,” clear enough for anyone to understand him.
“You what?”
He just stared, and Angie realized he was looking straight down her shirt. She straightened up, laughing. “Jesus, Wozniak. You old poon hound.”
“Nah.” He waved her off with his hand. “Nah dah.” He glanced around the room as if he needed a prop. Finally, he looked back at his hands. She watched as he forced his right index finger straight out, then made a circle with his left thumb and index finger. He slid the circle up and down the finger.
Angie crossed her arms. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Nah,” he insisted. No.
“Yeah,” she snapped, duplicating the fucking gesture with her own hands. “I got you, Ken. I know exactly what you’re saying and I gotta say I’m impressed you still got it, but no way in hell is it gonna happen.”
“You!” he yelled back, jabbing an angry finger at her. “Ma-ahl.” He made the sign again.
“Ohhhh.” She drew out the word, his meaning finally sinking in. You and Michael.
She asked, “You knew about that?”
Ken raised his eyebrows. Who doesn’t?
“Yeah,” she admitted. “I fucked him.”
“He…old…me.”
“I bet he did.” Jesus, they all knew.
“Eh,” Ken said. Hey.
She looked up. He held out his hand in an open shrug, asking her what else.
“One of my girls was killed.”
He pointed to the television. “Home.” He had obviously seen the story on the news.
“Yeah, she lived at Grady Homes,” Angie told him. “Her tongue was bitten off. She choked to death on her own blood.”
“Ma-ahl?”
For a minute, Angie thought he was asking if Michael had killed her. Then, she realized what he was asking.
“I don’t know if Aleesha was one of the girls who went with him to get out of a bust,” Angie admitted. “I stopped working the Homes about the same time he partnered up with you. My cover was blown.”
“Who?”
Angie laughed at herself. She’d never even considered the question, just assumed that there was only a certain number of times you could take a john out and not come back with him before people started realizing you were a cop.
“I guess Michael could have outted me,” she allowed. “He might have thought he was getting me in trouble, but they just moved me to a different strip. New girls. New johns.” She thought about one John in particular. “Michael came to my new drag a few months ago,” she told Ken. “I thought he was just being an asshole, but he told us to look out for this guy who’d just been paroled, said he was a bad motherfucker.”
Ken snorted. He had obviously had the pleasure of being on the receiving end of Michael’s trash-talking.
“Yeah, I didn’t think anything about it, either,” she admitted. “Then I ran into the guy he’d warned us about. His name is John Shelley.”
Ken shrugged. Never heard of him.
“Anyway,” Angie said, knowing she was talking in circles. “The day after Aleesha Monroe died, Michael’s next-door neighbor was found dead in her backyard.”
“Huhn?”
“Yeah,” Angie agreed. She told him the things he wouldn’t have heard on the news. Angie herself would not have known the details but for Will. “The neighbor’s tongue was cut out. Monroe’s was bitten off, but still…”
Ken sat there. Angie felt bad. The old fucker was confused enough without her pouring her heart out to him.
“I shouldn’t be bugging you with this.”
“Mo.” Ken made a circling motion with his hand. He wanted to hear more.
“Michael’s neighbor was just fifteen.” Angie stopped. Hadn’t Gina Ormewood said she was fifteen when Michael met her?
She asked, “When was the Gulf War? Ninety? Ninety-one?”
Ken held up one finger.
“How old do you think Michael is? He’s forty, right? They had some kind of party for him last year. I remember there were black balloons everywhere.”
Ken nodded.
Angie sucked at math. Will would have figured all of this in his head, but she needed something to write on. She found a scrap of paper in her purse and scribbled the numbers down with her eyeliner pencil, muttering, “Michael was born in sixty-six, minus two thousand six.” She checked the numbers, making sure she had it right. Slowly, she looked up at Ken. “Gina was fifteen when she met him. She said at first he was interested
in her cousin, who was a year younger.”
She held up the sheet for Ken to see. “He was twenty-five. What’s a twenty-five-year-old man doing with a fifteen-year-old girl?”
Ken made a suggestive sound, the meaning loud and clear.
“Tell me something,” she began. “You ever go fishing with Michael up in the mountains?”
The expression on his face was as clear as if he had spoken the words. Hell no.
Angie drove right past her house, her mind still trying to grasp what she had figured out while she talked to Ken. The fact that Michael Ormewood had pursued and married a teenage girl almost fifteen years ago wasn’t exactly evidence that he was involved in something now, but the coincidence was still there and Angie had been a cop too long to believe in coincidences.
She worked a scenario in her head as she made a U-turn at the end of her street, passing by her house again and heading down Piedmont. She took a left at the light, then another left onto Ponce de Leon, as she let the possibilities play out. Michael was still using the girls, pulling rank for freebies. Baby G had figured this out. Maybe Aleesha Monroe had been one of the girls Michael used and G hadn’t liked the cut in his income. He had killed Monroe, then killed Michael’s next-door neighbor as a lesson.
But why would Baby G kill Cynthia Barrett? Even if Michael did have a thing for teenage girls, that didn’t mean he was screwing his neighbor. And it wasn’t like that kind of lechery was unusual in a man of forty. All you had to do was look at a fashion magazine or go to the local cinema to find images of scantily clad girls hanging on to men who were old enough to be their fathers. Hell, you couldn’t walk through the local shopping mall without seeing a bunch of twelve-year-olds wearing T-shirts up to their nipples and jeans down to their hooches. And their mothers were usually wearing the same thing.
Angie passed City Hall East, then took a right into Poncey-Highlands. She slowed the car, checking to make sure Will’s motorcycle was out front before she parked on the street.
She got out of the car, not giving herself time to change her mind. She used her fist to knock on his door, then pushed the bell a couple of times for good measure.
He took his sweet time opening the door. She saw he had rolled down his sleeves but not buttoned the cuffs. He was still wearing his vest and that stupid little dog was scooped into his left hand like a bag of candy.
She demanded, “Why do you always take so long to answer the fucking door?”
“What’s wrong?”
She dropped her purse by the door and walked past him into the house. An audiobook was playing in the background and a pocket watch was laid out on the worktable where he had taken it apart to repair it. She looked at the tiny springs and gears he had stuck into a piece of cork, the various instruments he used to repair the winding mechanism. Angie had always been shocked by the fact that Will could figure out how a watch worked in about ten seconds but it took him half an hour to understand a page in a book.
Will put the dog on the floor. She trotted off into the kitchen. Angie heard her drinking some water.
“What’s wrong?” Will repeated, muting the stereo.
“You need to talk to Aleesha’s pimp.”
“Baby G?” Will asked. “He’s dead.”
“What?”
“He died this afternoon,” Will told her. “His cousins got sick of being pushed around.”
“Slow down,” she said, though she was the one with the racing heart. “Tell me what happened.”
He narrowed his eyes, but still told her. “The day that Michael and I talked to Baby G, there were two kids sitting on the hood of his BMW. G said they were his cousins.”
Angie sat on the couch. “Okay.”
“He chased them off with a bat. I guess they didn’t like it. They ambushed him, shot him three times.”
“Sit down,” Angie told him. She hated when he hovered over her. “Are you sure that’s what happened? The cousins shot him?”
“As sure as you can be when you’re dealing with these thugs.” Will sat beside her. “I talked to the arresting officer this afternoon. The kids will probably be tried as adults. One’s already flipped on the other. He’s got a record, a drug bust, an assault. This would be his third strike. He’s trying to talk his way out of a life sentence.”
“Are you sure they’re not involved in the case?”
“Neither one of them even knew Aleesha.”
Angie nodded, letting him know that she had heard him. She was too shocked to talk. Whatever Baby G knew about Michael Ormewood would be taken to his grave.
Will said, “You look bad.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean it,” he said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I had a really hard day,” she told him, suddenly feeling everything catch up with her. “I had to go to the hospital.”
He sat up, took her hand. “Are you okay?”
“Not for me.” She lied because it was easier than dealing with his anger if he found out she’d gone to Piedmont this morning to put the fear of Jesus into Ormewood’s wife. “I took one of the girls in. It wasn’t anything bad. Women stuff.”
Will nodded, and she knew he wouldn’t press her.
Christ, what a mess. She had things to tell him but didn’t know where to begin. What could she say? That the night of Ken’s party, Michael was rough with her? That Michael was the kind of guy you couldn’t change your mind with? That with him, once things got started, there was no such thing as stopping?
She could still remember how much it hurt the next day, the bruises on her thighs, the feeling that something deep inside her had been torn. Shit, she’d been drunk out of her mind, but the marks on her skin were clear enough to tell the story.
“You okay?” Will tucked her hair behind her ear. The gentle gesture was something new. He never touched her like that, or maybe she never let him.
She said, “It was hard being there,” not telling him exactly where “there” was. “I kept thinking about my mom.”
Will stroked her hair and she wanted to close her eyes, put her head on his shoulder. Angie had taken him to see her mother a couple of times. Going to her mother’s grave would have been easier for Angie than seeing Deidre lying in that hospital bed, not knowing if somewhere behind those closed eyes she was screaming for help. Why did Angie love the one person she should hate the most?
“Come here,” Will said, pulling her close, putting his arms around her. He leaned back on the couch, taking her with him. “Just stay like this for a while.”
Angie wanted to cry, but she couldn’t let herself break down in front of Will. She pressed her face to his shoulder, smelling the detergent he used and the soy sauce that had dripped onto his tie. If she could stay like this, if she could just let him hold her, then maybe things would get better. Maybe they could make each other whole.
She turned her face toward him and kissed his neck. His skin reacted, and she kissed his Adam’s apple as he swallowed.
He said, “We don’t have to…”
She cupped her hand around his neck and put her lips to his. Will was reluctant, but she teased the passion out of him, using her teeth and tongue until he started kissing her in earnest. His arms tensed as he gently lifted her up and laid her back on the couch. He kept his weight on his left elbow, his hand brushing her face as he kissed her neck.
The cuff of his shirt had slipped back, and Angie saw the angry pink scar on the inside of his wrist. She had taken him to the hospital that night, stayed by his bed as she waited for him to wake up and realize that it hadn’t worked, that he was still alive.
Tentatively, she touched his wrist, tracing her finger along the same path the razor blade had taken as it had flayed open his skin.
Will jerked away, staring at her in shock.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized.
He tried to sit up, but she grabbed his vest in her fists, pulling him back. “I said I’m sorry.”
“Angie—” He tried
to pull away again, but she wouldn’t let him. They struggled but Will would never use his full strength against her. She managed to pull him down, pressing her lips firmly to his. She arced up into him and he stopped resisting. Angie kissed him deeper, rougher than usual, and to her surprise he returned it with the same intensity.
She felt her breath quicken, her mind blur. The weight of him on top of her was enough to bring tears to her eyes, and she slid her hand down into the waist of his pants, needing for this to go quickly before she lost herself.
“Christ,” she mumbled, pulling open his vest, tugging his shirt out of his pants, then his undershirt, so that there was room enough for her hand.
He had pushed up her shirt, his mouth finding her bare breast. When she wrapped her hand around him, he lost his rhythm. She took over, using her free hand to slide down her panties. Angie guided him inside her before he could stop her.
His breath caught as she thrust up to him, tightening herself around him, trying to make him come.
“No,” he whispered, struggling to slow down. His eyes were squeezed shut and he shook from the effort of restraining himself. She licked her tongue in his ear, bit the lobe, did everything in her power to force his release. He groaned loudly as he gave in, shuddering in climax.
“Oh, God,” he breathed. “Angie…”
She let him kiss her some more, stopping him when his mouth started to move down on her. “No,” she told him, pulling him back up to her face. “I need to go.”
He was sweating, his breathing hard as he kissed her breasts. “Let me taste you.”
The raw growl of his voice sent a tingle through her body. She bit her bottom lip, trying not to think about how good his mouth would feel down lower as his lips grazed her stomach.
“No,” she managed, gently pulling him back up. “I need to go.”
“Stay with me.”
Somehow, the begging quality to his voice made it easier for her to leave. “I’ve got work tomorrow.”
“So do I.”
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