At first glance, it seemed empty. On the far side of the space I saw a wall of concrete cinder blocks. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t part of the foundation. It was one of the walls of a small room sunk into the clay floor of the crawl space. I felt slightly nauseated. You didn’t build rooms like that for any normal purpose. It wasn’t a wine cellar or a place to store tools. It was a tiny prison. There was nothing else it could be.
Circling silently around to the side, I saw that the next wall of the little room had a steel door in it, with a padlock in the hasp. But the door gapped open, the lock hanging free. I rushed over, crouched down so I wouldn’t hit my head on the floor joists. My heart banged in my chest as I pointed my flashlight into the room. There on the dirt floor lay a filthy little girl. I could have cried: a chain was wrapped around her neck, then went down her arm and looped over her wrists. Duct tape covered her mouth.
“Mmm!” she said. Her eyes were wide, flicking from side to side.
I rushed into the room, down three steps cut into the clay, swiveling my gun left to right in case anybody was there besides the girl. The tiny cinderblock room was empty.
“Mmm!” Her eyes flicked to the side again.
“You’re going to be okay,” I said.
She shook her head wildly. I couldn’t tell what she was getting at. I reached down and pulled the tape off her mouth.
“Behind you!” she said.
I whirled but it was too late. I had a vision of something—camouflage material—and a black thing moving fast through the air.
Then something smashed into my arms and I fell backward onto the floor. Everything went dark.
TWO
To this day I don’t know where he came from. Maybe he was doing that ninja-hiding-in-the-ceiling-joists routine, I don’t know. But he hadn’t been standing in the room when I’d entered.
By the time I came to, the man was standing over me, a shovel raised over his head, ready to bring it down for the kill. It wasn’t the shovel that had knocked me out. I’d managed to block it with my gun. But as I’d fallen backward, I’d hit my head on the ground and blacked out for a few seconds.
I tried to move as he swung, but I was still groggy. He was holding the shovel sideways so the blade was coming down like an ax bit. I thought I was a goner, but then I realized that I wasn’t in the path of the blade: it was the little girl he was trying to kill.
She rolled away at the last second, the shovel biting deep into the red clay floor. The man with the shovel wrestled to free it from the grip of the clay. He was an ordinary-looking man, six feet or so, white, with a camouflage hunter’s cap and a neatly pressed orange shirt.
I scrabbled for my gun.
Seeing me move, he kicked me in the arm. I fell back. But I still had the gun. I could see him thinking: stay and fight, or run?
I pulled the trigger of my Glock. Nothing happened. He must have caused it to jam when he kicked me.
Fortunately for me, the man didn’t know my gun wasn’t working. So he decided to run.
As quickly as the fight had begun, it was over. The man was gone.
“Hey!” I yelled hoarsely. “Help.”
I felt around for my walkie-talkie, then realized I’d left it upstairs.
I stood shakily, trying to clear my Glock. My mind was still fuzzy. I looked out the door, saw the legs of the man disappearing through the trap door. I didn’t want to leave the girl. But I knew there were weapons upstairs. The Chief had left his MP5 on the couch in the living room.
The girl was whispering something to me.
“What?” I said.
“Don’t leave me.”
“I’ll be back.”
“No! No! Don’t leave me!”
But I had to. “I promise. I’ll be back.” I started to go, but she grabbed my leg.
“Promise me!” she said. “Promise—”
“Of course I promise. I’ll be right back.”
“No. Promise . . . ” She whispered something.
“What?” I was trying to get her off my leg, but I didn’t want to hurt her.
“Promise me. You’ll—”
“If you’ll let go of my leg,” I said.
“Promise me you . . .”
“What?”
The girl’s blue eyes stared into mine. Finally she spoke, her voice a dusty little whisper. “Kill him.”
“Okay,” I said.
She subsided into silence the second I left the room. I had this horrible feeling that I was abandoning her. But I had to go. There was a good chance the guy in the camouflage cap would get his hands on the MP5 that the Chief had left upstairs. And with the suppressor on it, they might not even hear him firing until it was way too late.
I ran hunched over through the crawl space, climbed up the ladder, poked my head out. I could hear commotion outside still, the buzz of people talking, the officious voice of the Chief trying to get things settled down.
Inside, I could hear nothing.
I raised my Glock, then remembered it had jammed. I worked the receiver, pulled out the magazine. A cartridge was stovepiped, stuck in the chamber. I pushed it with my finger, then yanked the slide a couple of times. The jammed bullet didn’t budge.
I took a deep breath, slid into the hallway. Last time I’d called for assistance, no one had come. Should I try again? If the guy from the basement had laid hands on that MP5 yet, then he’d know where I was and he’d cut me down. I decided not to yell.
A shadow slipped across the mouth of the hallway. He was in the living room now. He had to have seen the Chief’s gun.
But did he have the gun yet? If I could get the drop on him, there was still no reason for him to know my gun was jammed.
I moved swiftly down the hallway.
My heart sank. Dammit! Too late. The man from the basement had the MP5 in his hand.
I yelled, “Backup! Gun! Gun! Gun!”
The man swivelled toward me.
“Drop it!” I yelled.
He responded by squeezing the trigger. Nothing happened. The Chief had left it on SAFE.
Unfortunately, the man was better acquainted with firearms than the Chief. Without taking his eyes off me, he flipped the lever to burst mode, then squeezed again as I dove back sideways into the kitchen. The suppressor on the gun worked amazingly well. It made a sort of clanking noise that didn’t sound much like a gun. It was a lot louder than the silly little compressed air noise that silenced weapons always made in the movies. But still, I had a hunch they probably wouldn’t even hear it outside.
Instinctively I grabbed a chef’s knife from a butcher block on the counter, crouched behind the table.
“Give it up!” I yelled. “You’re surrounded.”
Apparently my threats didn’t scare him much: he laughed, unleashed another three-round burst at me.
As far as he knew, though, I was armed and would shoot him if he came toward me. If he stayed in the house, he was cooked. All of which meant his best move was to barge through the front door, head out shooting. He had the only submachine gun in the group. There wasn’t a single hard-core street cop out front. Only pure luck would keep him from capping three or four people, including some citizens, before he got stopped or got away.
I knew I had to move.
But what could I do? I had a knife, he had a submachine gun. I looked at the chef’s knife. It had a cheap, mirror-polished blade. I poked it around the corner, using it like a periscope. My appraisal of the situation was right. The man with the MP5 was turning away from me, moving swiftly toward the front door.
No more than five or six seconds had passed since his first volley. My guess was that not a single pistol had cleared its holster in the front yard yet.
I glanced around the corner in time to see the man moving through the front door. I didn’t make any sort of choice. I just reacted.
I started sprinting toward him. As he hit the front porch he began firing. I had a funny thought in my mind as I ran: I should
have been hearing a noise from the MP5. But instead I heard nothing but a sort of freight-train rush, a whooshing of blood through my ears.
The man in the camouflage cap had just reached the lawn by the time I burst out the door. Surrounding us were five cops, all of them staring bug eyed at the man and clawing for their Glocks. He fired another burst, and blood spurted out of the Asian officer’s neck. The Hispanic kid may have been hit, too, but he was diving backward, and I couldn’t really tell.
The Chief was yelling something, but I couldn’t hear it. Everything seemed to move in slow motion.
The Chief was grabbing at his holster, fumbling with the thumb break as the barrel of the MP5 swivelled toward him. The man with the camouflage cap had his cheek to the stock, looking down through the sights. If there had been any question up to this moment that he was a trained shooter, it was gone from my mind now. He knew we were wearing vests, and he was aiming for our heads.
The Chief didn’t have a chance.
I leapt off the porch, screaming. The barrel of the MP5 kicked, but the shooter was flinching, hearing me behind him, I guess.
I didn’t have time to see whether he hit the Chief or not. I just sank the blade into his neck and then held on to him. His eyes went wild and he started jumping around, trying to throw me off. Everything was getting slick and wet. I held on as hard as I could, one hand on the knife, the other around his chest. He whirled and bucked and yelled. And just at the point I was sure I couldn’t hold on anymore, that I knew he was about to throw me off and shoot me, it was over.
His body went soft, almost as though his bones had dissolved. And then he hit the ground and didn’t move.
There was a long, long, long pause.
I could see lights flicking on, the camera crews shooting. Suddenly the Chief was on top of the limp—and obviously dead—man. He pulled up his soft, dead arms, cuffed them. He was wearing his Man-On-Fire face again.
“Pick another town, pervert,” he said.
Nice, Chief, I was thinking. Really nice.
THREE
Chief Eustace V. Diggs, Jr. made the news that night—jaw set, eyes blazing, a perfectly placed dab of blood on his cheek. “Pick another town, pervert.” The guy could have been a movie star.
I was a smear in the background of the television shot, looking wide eyed and scared, like some rookie girl that the Chief had just saved from sure death. Or better yet, like a black version of Sissy Spacek in that scene from Carrie where the cool jerks at the high school dump the blood on her head, and she flips out and kills them all with her freaky special powers.
The Chief did give me a medal, though. After the ceremony he said, “Welcome back to active duty, Detective.”
“You mean it?” I said. I had spent a year and a half on what the department called administrative diversion. Suspension with pay, basically. Suddenly I felt like I could breathe again.
“Here,” Chief Diggs said, handing me a manila envelope. “Go down to the basement. I want you in the new unit.”
I frowned. The new unit. I was not aware there was such a thing.
“Room B6,” he said. “See Lt. Gooch.”
I could feel my brow furrowing. Gooch. I’d heard of him before. Him and his unit.
“Sir!” I said. “I was hoping—”
The Chief’s eyes widened a little, like I had said something amazing. “Oh!” he said. “My bad! You having so much fun interfacing with all the fine homasexshools in our community, you’d prefer to continue on as Acting GLBT Liaison.”
Sometimes I’m slow to pick up on signals. “Sir, not to grovel or whatever, but I saved your life!”
“Hold on, now. Have you entirely forgotten the reasons that you were placed on administrative diversion in the first place? Have you lost all gratitude for the fact that, but for my intervention, you would likely be sitting in the penitentiary right now?”
“I know sir, but I just want to ask a favor—”
He smiled broadly. “Doll, you in no position.”
“Sir, yes, I know, I know, believe me I’m grateful. But, sir, this Jenny Dial thing—well, see, what it is, I feel called. I feel like a . . . a . . . a mission inside of me. Is that crazy?”
“A mission! A call! Oh my land, I do relish an officer who comes to work with that sort of conviction, that sort of fervor!” He leaned closer to me so I could smell his cologne. “Just remember, in this place I am God. I furnish the mission. I furnish the call. So I’m telling you. Get yourself on that elevator. Forget that little girl.”
I don’t know why exactly, but I wanted to cry. I wanted to just lay down and bawl. But I didn’t. Instead, I walked across the hall to the elevator, pressed the down button.
The thing that got lost in the shuffle was that the girl in the basement was not Jenny Dial. Her name was Lorene Holmquist, and she was the daughter of the man I’d killed. He had been taking her around the country for about three years, renting her out to sickos like Delwood James Anderson for seven thousand dollars a month. There were rust stains tattooed into her skin from the chain she’d worn around her neck since she was a toddler.
Where was Jenny Dial, the girl who’d gone missing earlier in the week? Nobody knew. The big kiddie porn sweep had driven her story right off the TV news. And best I could tell, nobody in the Atlanta Police Department seemed to care all that deeply.
Nobody except me.
FOUR
“Who are you?” The man’s pale blue eyes were looking through me.
I had just walked in the door of the dimly lit basement room and was looking at him across a scarred metal desk. A handwritten sign taped to the door said COLD CASE UNIT in black magic marker.
“Me?” I said to the man behind the metal desk. “I’m Mechelle Deakes. You’re Lt. Gooch, right? They had me posted up in Admin, temporary thing. Acting GLBT Liaison? After my leave of absence, medical leave, administrative diversion, whatever you want to call it? Before that I was doing Narcotics, over in Zone Three. The new detective? Mechelle Deakes? The new . . .” I blinked. He continued to look through me as I babbled at him. I tend to babble when I’m nervous. “They didn’t tell you? The didn’t tell you they were assigning you a new detective?”
The man behind the desk shrugged. It was such tiny motion of the shoulders that you almost couldn’t see it. And it was completely unreadable, inscrutable, impossible to parse. It could have meant he’d forgotten; it could have meant they hadn’t told him about me in the first place; it could have meant he didn’t give a hoot in hell about anything at all. I tried to see myself through his eyes: small, wiry, young, female; skin the color of caramel candy; straightened hair hanging to my shoulders. I probably represented everything he despised—everything he thought had gone wrong with the world in general, and with the department in particular. I knew what the white guys in the department said about black women cops—that we were mouthy shirkers looking for a fat government paycheck, people who couldn’t be trusted to back you up when the chips were down. I knew because they’d tell me to my face. They called black female officers “hairstyles.” As in: “Two officers and a hairstyle responded to the scene.” Hey, but you’re different, Mechelle, they’d always say. You’re not like Them. You’re mad! You’re crazy! Mad and crazy being cop slang for somebody who was good on the street, somebody who could be trusted, somebody who could throw down, who could flip out and go ninja when circumstances demanded.
Lt. Gooch—presumably that was who he was—held out his hand, palm up. “File,” he said.
“File?”
“File.”
“You mean like my personnel file?”
He didn’t answer, just kept holding out his palm.
“Here.” I handed him the envelope that the Chief had given me.
Lt. Gooch took the envelope, then pulled a knife out of his pocket—one of those big black-handled lockblades that every hayseed goober in Georgia seems to carry—and slit the envelope with it, pulled out my file, then made a show of going th
rough the folder, licking his thumb and peering at every page.
I studied his face while he inched through the file. I’ll be honest, I’ve always been nervous around men with blue eyes. A certain kind of pale blue eyes, I’m talking about. Those eyes, they go with a certain kind of Southern white man who is basically your worst nightmare—the eyes of a lynch mob boiled down to its barest, palest essence.
Other than the eyes, Lt. Gooch was undistinctive. His voice was quiet, like sandpaper on a piece of glass. But it carried. He was a little past forty years old, if I were to guess, with weathered skin, like he’d spent a lot of time outside; a blunt, square jaw; and brown hair that was starting to go gray, buzz cut like a kamikaze pilot’s, so short it was barely more than stubble. There was a lump of something in his bottom lip—snuff, I suspected.
Lt. Gooch kept paging through the file, slow as itch. It made me antsy.
“Look, sir,” I said finally. “I know they probably told you all kind of stuff about me, what I did, various things that maybe aren’t even in the file, and—”
I’m a talker, I know this. I open my big mouth all the time when I shouldn’t and sometimes I keep it open even when I can tell people want it closed. But when Lt. Gooch looked up from the file with those pale eyes, I just flat shut up.
Finally, after what was probably close to half an hour of reading my personnel file, Lt. Gooch looked up at me for a minute. “Desk,” he said. He pointed at a cheap metal desk pushed up against the wall, covered with a pile of papers. “Chair.” He pointed at the chair.
I looked at the chair and the desk, the anger rising in me. “Are you saying I have the job, sir?” I said sharply. “Or not?”
Gooch just looked at me, impassive as the sky.
Finally I said. “So, like, what do I do?”
This seemed to insult Lt. Gooch in some vague way. “You tell me.”
The Body Box Page 2