"We gotta move 'em out!" barked Dilly's second in command. "They're fucking cooking in the kitchen!"
There was no gentleness to the evacuation of the crackhouse. These men specialized in taking down places like this and they knew that breathing the air in a house where crack was being cooked could fuck you up for life. Their intelligence hadn't turned up any information that this place was anything other than an abandoned building, where they'd find fifteen or twenty wretches inhaling the fumes of burning crack cocaine. Cooking meant volatile chemicals, and it wasn't at all unusual for a crack kitchen to blow up spectacularly, as some addict's addled brain caused him ... or her ... to do something stupid.
Once the subjects were huddled in the street near the paddy wagon that had driven up while Harper was inside, things calmed down a little. A designated member of the entry team had stayed inside to deactivate potential sources of ignition, and four others had finished clearing the building before running out.
"You want any of the others?" asked Dilly.
"Just Jimmy," said Harper.
"He's yours," said the lieutenant. "We'll have to hang around until a decon team gets here. Thanks. It was fun."
Harper thought it was quite possibly crazy that someone had thanked him for arranging for them to risk their lives by assaulting a building, in which any number of armed and desperate criminals might be. He'd seen the team member whose job it was to collect evidence picking up handguns off the floor and dropping them into evidence bags. He'd picked up three in the few seconds Jim had watched him. He was amazed at how smoothly everything had gone ... how effortlessly the entry team had made it look. All those guns, and not a shot fired.
Harper went to Jimmy and told him to stand up.
"I was just there to deliver a message!" croaked the man.
"You can deliver it to me," said Harper, leading him away.
* * *
Lulu looked over her shoulder at Kris and pursed her lips in a silent kiss. He was no longer amazed at how turned on that made him feel. Then she walked around the end of one of the stacks in the library, still looking at books. Ambrose was in the art section, as opposed to the children's section. He was sitting on the floor, with a large coffee table type book open in his lap and was looking at pictures of surrealist paintings.
Kris had been awestruck when they first entered the library. He'd expected something small, maybe only one or two rooms, in a town the size of Pembroke. Apparently the long winters caused people to really cherish their library, though, because it was a two story structure that had to have forty or fifty thousand books in it.
Kris walked along, looking at author names, wishing that something would jump out at him. He didn't even know if he'd actually published anything and, of course, didn't know what section to look for it in, even if one of his books was there. He turned the corner, more or less following Lulu. She was halfway down the aisle. She looked over at him, scanned the area around them, then raised her shirt. The words "I WAS RAISED ON THE STREET" were replaced by her bare breasts. She giggled and pulled the shirt back down, looking behind her again.
"That's not what they do on Sesame Street," whispered Kris. "Not on any episode I ever saw."
"Libraries make me horny," said Lulu, running her hand down and between her legs.
"Let's go home then," suggested Kris.
"I haven't found what I'm looking for," she said.
"What are you looking for?"
"I'll know when I see it," she said. "Come stand behind me."
He wondered what she was up to, but did as she asked. She pressed her butt back against the front of his pants and bent over to look at a lower shelf. The Sesame Street shirt fell forward and he knew that, if he bent over too, he could look up it and see her hanging breasts. He moved back and brought his right hand down on the tight fabric covering her butt. The sound was unbelievably loud to Kris.
"Hey!" she yelped, standing up.
She looked both ways and shot him a murderous look.
"You're acting like a slut," he whispered.
"So?" Her face didn't soften. "Maybe I am a slut ... for you." Her whisper was strident in the calm of the building. "Maybe I was a slut for you! You better watch it, mister. Maybe I should stop being a slut for you!"
"Awww, don't be like that," he said, unable to keep a smile off his lips. He loved it when she got all cocky like this. "It's just that we're in a library. What would someone think if they saw us messing around?"
"We're not messing around," she hissed. "I was going to let you mess around ... but not anymore. Go find a book!"
"Okay, okay. Don't get your panties in a wad," he said, backing up. For the first time he thought she might actually be angry.
"I'm not wearing panties," she said, sticking her tongue out at him.
He went to another row and wandered along. A few minutes later he heard a hiss from above him and looked up to see Lulu on the second floor, crooking her finger at him. He found his way upstairs and saw her at the end of a row that let her look down on the central hall of the building. As he walked toward her, she went down the row toward the wall. He turned the corner, but she'd vanished. He went to the end of the row and looked both ways, still unable to see her.
He was almost tackled from behind as she smashed into him, causing him to bump up against the wall of books in front of him. He turned and her lips crushed his as she pinned him against the books. One book, longer than the others around it, pressed painfully into his back. He couldn't think about that, though, because her kiss transmitted urgency and passion that couldn't be resisted. In seconds he was kissing her back, his hands sliding up and down the back of her body.
Twenty seconds later she drew back to drag in a breath.
"I'm sooooo horny, Kris," she moaned.
"I thought you were mad at me," he whispered.
"I was teasing you!" she giggled. "You're so easy to tease!" She kissed him again and reached between them to squeeze the lump in the front of his pants. He pushed her back gently.
"You want to do it?" he asked, incredulously. "Right here in the library?"
"Yes," she said, astonishing him. "But I know we can't," she added. "Now leave me alone so I can find a book. Then I'll take you home and deal with your incessant horniness."
She said it so seriously that he blinked. Then she grinned, giggled, and danced off, to leave him standing in the middle of books on fighter pilots and warships in World War Two.
* * *
Harper looked through the one way mirror of the interrogation room. Jimmy was starting to fidget. He was still cuffed, both to himself and to the chair. He'd been sitting there for over an hour, so that the crack could leave his system before the interrogation started. Courts had a tendency to throw out confessions made by people who were high when they made them. The added benefit was that Jimmy was starting to get strung out. That's why he was moving around so much. At the same time, he was starting to doze, so Harper went into the room.
It took over an hour to break down Jimmy's initial resistance and then he wilted. Though Harper didn't know it, Jimmy confessed for his own good. He knew what crack was doing to him, but couldn't control himself when the longing gripped him. His teeth were rotting in his mouth and he weighed less than a hundred pounds. He knew that if he didn't get locked up, he'd be dead within a year. So he copped to taking down the courier to get money for drugs. He admitted to selling the gun to Moe, who'd claimed that he and his brothers were going to come into a sizable fortune by transferring the money from some rich guy's pockets to their own. But that was all he knew, and that was all Harper got.
* * *
In Pembroke, a month passed under conditions that were wholly acceptable to Lulu and Kris. He went to her house almost every evening, spending time with both Lulu and Ambrose, while the boy was awake.
Then, when Ambrose was down, more often than not, one or the other of the adults would begin a sexual game. Sometimes Lulu initiated things in a very straightfor
ward way. Kris did, too. But both of them loved to tease and be teased, and there was a lot of "reluctance" in their play sometimes. It was actually all very straight forward, such as this example of how it started one night:
"I'm too tired to fool around," sighed Lulu dramatically.
"No you're not," said Kris. "Your nipples are already hard."
"You're not supposed to notice that," she complained. "You're supposed to woo me and seduce me."
"I must be an old country boy," he said. "You know what foreplay is in redneck country, don't you?"
"Do I look like a redneck?" she asked archly.
"A mutant redneck, perhaps," he suggested, smiling.
"What is redneck foreplay like?" she asked with an exaggerated sigh.
"Get in the truck, woman!" he said in a drawl.
"No it's not. It's 'Get in the truck, bitch,'" said Lulu.
"I thought you didn't know what redneck foreplay was."
"I never said that. I just asked you to tell me."
"Never mind. I want to lick you down there."
"Okay."
It was like that sometimes. Whichever one was trying to resist could never resist for very long. Both were still much too horny for each other. Their relationship was based on an honest liking of one another, even though they came from wildly different backgrounds. They fit together well now, and that was all that seemed to matter.
* * *
While they were at a movie one night, Kris recalled another memory. In the film, one of the actors pointed a gun at the audience and, quite suddenly, the man Kris knew he had run over was back in his head. He was lying on the ground and his arm was pointed straight at Kris. His hand flashed and then flashed again.
The sound of gunfire from the screen made Kris jump. His head throbbed and he suddenly realized Lulu was whispering to him.
"Let's go," she said. "This is dumb."
"It's only half over," said Kris.
"I can think of better things to do than watch the rest," she said.
He was distracted as they drove away from the movie theater. Had the man he'd hit been shooting at him? That didn't make any sense. He didn't mention it to Lulu, because he knew she'd have questions, and he had no answers.
Instead, he let her distract him from thinking about it when they got home.
* * *
Two days later, Kris walked into the diner after work. Jessica was sitting at a table and he joined her. They chatted a little until Lulu came to take their order. She acknowledged it and then put her pad and pen in her apron pocket.
"There's an art show over in Willow Flats next month," she said, looking at Kris. "I think Ambrose would really enjoy it."
"I want to go!" said Jessica immediately.
Lulu looked at her. "Okay," she said.
Jessica looked across the table at Kris. "Maybe you could invite Mitch to come with us," she suggested.
"What?" Lulu was obviously shocked.
"Well," whined Jessica. "He had another fight with Carla. I saw her in town yesterday and she was moping around complaining about him."
"I didn't know you were interested in him," said Lulu, peering at her friend.
"I'm not," said Jessica. "Not like that. He's kind of interesting ... that's all." She folded her arms. "And they did have another fight."
"I'd think you'd be wanting to invite Carla," said Lulu.
"It was just an idea," complained Jessica. "I still want to go, though. I don't get nearly as much time with you since he showed up." Jessica jabbed her finger at Kris, who smiled shyly.
"I said you could come." Lulu's voice was firm.
"Okay, then," said Jessica. "Are you going to get our orders or do we need to go somewhere else?"
"Don't go there," warned Lulu.
Jessica slumped. "Okay, I'm sorry. It's just that you get to have fun, and I'm still all alone. It's not fair."
"I told Mitch about the naughty nurse outfit," said Kris, trying to defuse the situation. "He seemed very interested in it."
"Great," said Jessica glumly. "Like I'll ever get to show it to him."
"I was thinking of borrowing it from you," said Lulu, her voice light. She laughed as Jess' face wrinkled up. "Oh stop! We'll find you a man."
"Sure you will," sighed Jessica. "You may as well just take the damn thing."
"I'll watch you wear it," offered Kris. "I liked it on you the last time."
He had to duck from Lulu as she slapped at him, then duck further as Jessica picked up the menu and launched it his way.
Chapter Twenty-six
Harper sat, staring at the four cases laid out on his desk. It was late and everybody else was gone, except for Dick Chapman, who was catching up on paperwork on the other side of the room. Both men wanted quiet and neither had spoken to the other for over an hour.
Jim knew there was something he was missing in his review of the cold cases. He couldn't put his finger on it, but he knew it was there. His eyes kept drifting from one cover sheet to another. His gaze landed on the date that the young boy's body had been found. The kidnappers had killed him on purpose, shooting him execution style in the back of the head. They'd left a warning that maybe the next victim's parents would follow the "rules." His eyes closed and he realized he was falling asleep. But that dozing state allowed him to see multiple things in his mind at the same time so, as if he had left his body, he just looked at everything. Moe had gotten the gun from Jimmy Four Fingers about a month before the boy was shot.
His eyes popped open and his hands reached for the file, lifting pages until the lab report was exposed.
The bullet had all but exploded the child's head, shattering the skull into multiple pieces that only the skin had kept in general relation to each other. The bullet had lodged in the jawbone, where it had almost penetrated the lower teeth, breaking them, but not pushing its way through.
His eyes dropped to the description of the bullet.
The boy had been shot with a forty-five.
* * *
Nine hours later, Harper was waiting by the lab entrance lab holding two sheets of paper, copies from the reports that had been on his desk the night before. The lab supervisor arrived first and tried to ignore him, going straight to the kitchenette to start brewing coffee. He wasn't much interested in the agitated detective, and succeeded in ignoring him until Harper swept the coffee machine off the counter. The carafe smashed and what little coffee had dripped into it splashed all over the floor. He turned to berate the detective, but stopped as he saw the man's face.
Thirty minutes later a tech lifted his eyes from the binocular microscope that had two bullets stuck to the viewing plates with wax, and turned to Harper, who was just then plugging in the new coffee pot he'd gone out and bought to replace the one he'd broken.
"It's a match."
The DNA evidence from the other cold cases took longer to process. In the end, the donor of the hair found on the girl's body that had been thrown in a dumpster, still bound and gagged, was positively identified as coming from Larry Higginbotham.
Quite suddenly, relatively speaking, a group of serial kidnappers and murderers, already in custody and under charges for attempting to kidnap Chantal Custer, were identified and two cold cases were solved.
Jefferson, for once, smiled when he hung up the phone from his conversation with Jim Harper.
* * *
Ambrose struggled with the wrapping on the large, flat package that was decorated in brightly colored birthday paper. He finally got a purchase on the paper and pulled, ripping a large swath of it away from the box inside. Line after line after line of brightly colored artists pencils was exposed, along with various colors of chalk and a full array of watercolors, brushes and other accoutrements of the artist's trade.
"Cool!" squealed the excited little boy.
Lulu looked at Kris, who had brought the package.
"That's a professional set," she commented, thinking of how much it must have cost. The kit included a
case to store everything in, with hundreds of little loops to hold each pencil, brush, and pot of paint.
"He's got a real future in art," said Kris, shrugging his shoulders. "I just figured he should have the tools to explore his talent."
For Want of a Memory Page 30