“Before Detective Dey agrees to sharing,” said Gonzo. “You better tell him what kind of pizza you like.”
“Sausage, onions, and stinky cheese!” said Travis.
“Stinky cheese?” asked Lucky.
“The blue crumbly kind,” added Gonzo.
“Oh,” nodded Lucky. “I guess that means you get your own pizza.”
“My mom likes it too.”
Gonzo raised her hand. “Guilty as charged.”
“Then bring on the bleu cheese,” challenged Lucky. “As long as you don’t mind if I order plain pepperoni for myself.”
“Proves it,” said Gonzo. “PD cops are more adventurous than Sheriffs. At least in the epicurean way.”
“And thus end-eth the argument,” joked Lucky, revealing a rare show of teeth. The grieving detective’s skin crinkled at the corners of his eyes as he gave up a rare smile.
Travis hopped behind the family computer and ordered via the local pizzeria’s website. And while waiting for delivery, the threesome pulled chairs up to the dining room table and joined Kyle in puzzling together the tiny jigsaw pieces.
The familial like moment wasn’t lost on Gonzo. For a while, it went a hell of a lot further in easing her neck pain than her Advil and Aleve cocktail. By the time the pizza had been consumed and Kyle had retired to his own address, Gonzo’s fridge had been picked clean of beer. When she’d suggested that she and Lucky upgrade to rum and coke, Travis had trundled off to bed. The fan the boy employed to both cool and calm him through the nights was switched on to high, reverberating through the duplex with a consistent drone.
“Stick with me,” said Lucky, his body sunk deep into the couch. “Think I’m somewhere between dead tired and way too drunk to drive.”
“Like I’d let you drive,” said Gonzo, her back flat on the floor, pillow under her head, her feet propped on the couch’s corduroy arm.
“So if I got up to go…you’d stop me?”
“Too comfortable,” said Gonzo. “Maybe I’d try and trip you.”
“Wouldn’t be hard.”
They both laughed until their voices trailed with ease. She could’ve easily closed her eyes and counted up the fewer than ten hours that had passed since she’d stepped in front of the Kern detective hell-bent for leather on gunning down the Peterbilt’s driver. With a little more effort, she could have pictured how things might have gone down had Lucky had his way. The FBI tactical squad having secured their truck-driving suspect—possibly even lifting the handcuffed bastard off the pavement—taken by surprise when the head-shaved cop squared up to them. Nobody would’ve expected the pistol—the old school model 1911 .45—let alone to see the weapon speak so efficiently. Two loud pops dead in the center of the bad guy’s ten-ring. The double heart shot would’ve caused the target’s face to contort and knees to instantly give out. Like the storied moment when Jack Ruby plugged Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement garage of the Dallas PD. The Kern County killer would’ve been dead. End of story.
Instead there came that hellish explosion and subsequent, memory-rearranging blast wave. From thereon everything seemed to change. Most of Gonzo’s growing tally of complaints about Lucky, though not erased, were seriously mitigated. Maybe because the ugly chase to find the truck was over? Or was it because her assignment to assist the renegade deputy was near its end? Or even because she knew that Lucky’s pain over the loss of his brother was so piqued he was willing to sacrifice himself and his career to put a deserved bullet inside the murderer?
Do I feel sorry for him? she asked herself. Or do I just feel for him?
Gonzo was too tired to decide.
“I have one request,” she said without a flicker of forethought. “That you shower before bed.”
“You’re saying I smell?”
“I’m saying I’d rather you smelled like soap.”
With one eye open, Lucky stole a look at her. She was smirking again as if she carried a secret.
“What about the boy?” asked Lucky.
“With the fan on, it’ll take an earthquake to wake him.” Gonzo used her toes to stroke Lucky’s hairline. The stubble from where he buzzed it tickled.
“And I thought you didn’t like me,” said Lucky after an exhale.
“And you thought I played for the other team,” said Gonzo.
“Crossed my mind.”
“Well, I don’t,” said Gonzo, a little throaty. “And for the record, I haven’t decided if I like you or not.”
“Fair enough.”
Gonzo gathered up the usual guest stack: a clean towel, facecloth, and a new bar of Ivory soap. Then after voluntarily tossing Lucky’s clothes in the washing machine, she joined him in her small shower. What began with giggles and goosebumps and giddy anticipation, turned into a wordless conversation. After the unlikely duo washed each other in somber, ritualistic strokes, they slipped between a pair of laundered sheets and generated streams of clean perspiration. From the first squeak of the shower faucet to the last drop of sexual sweat, the carnal act lasted barely an hour before both Gonzo and Lucky fell asleep in a tangle of hair and legs.
It was 9:53 P.M.
31
Dulaney woke up screaming.
He’d had an awful nightmare.
He’d been standing at that same, floor-to-ceiling pane of insulating tempered glass. But this time he was without binoculars to protect his eyeballs. Instead, his hands were pressed against the massive sheet of glass as if pushing against it would prevent it from exploding into a million shards. The scene beyond was precisely the same. The traffic jam. The black Peterbilt semi. The FBI tactical squad, moving in two-by-two formation to take down the truck driver. That and he could see the faces of all the other players on the field. The casual passersby. The parking meter attendant. He was even able to spot a stranger, standing atop a park statue that looked like a huge anchor, home video camera held out in front of him.
“Who the hell is that?” asked Dulaney in his dream.
“Who’s who?” asked Lilly who, in the dream, was ten steps behind him, dressed in body-hugging sweats, working up some personal steam on one of the showroom’s elliptical trainers.
“The guy with the video camera? Do we know him?”
“This is your takedown. It’s all on you and the Bureau.”
The giant pane of glass began to rattle and vibrate. So Dulaney braced harder, splaying his fingers to their fullest as if his two hammy hands could prevent the oncoming blast wave from penetrating the air-conditioned second floor of Sports Authority.
“Need. More. Morphine,” said Dulaney, finally awake, but finding that speaking made his lips hurt. So he tried to puff a word at a time, putting a little extra air behind each syllable. His eyes were desperate to find some kind of focal point beyond the constant dull blur. He semi-recalled a barely intelligible neurologist urging him not to worry. Dulaney’s eyesight would most likely return to normal strength within a week. The same with his memory and cognition. Such was often the case with intracranial injuries.
What the hell happened to me?
Dulaney’s skin burned. The sting was excruciating. From his ankles to his forehead, he’d been penetrated by a thousand tiny specks of sharp glass. The blast wave had both shattered the massive window and propelled tiny shards through Dulaney’s garb, symmetrically lodging in his skin from head to toe. Some of the larger pieces of glass were easily removed by an emergency room intern with a flashlight and tweezers. The rest were best left to remain embedded until Dulaney’s body naturally rejected the micro-bits as if it was sweating out a toxin.
Until that day came, Dulaney would feel as if he’d suffered third-degree burns the length of his body.
The shadow of a nurse entered Dulaney’s cloudy field of view. He couldn’t tell much more than she was a female of color. Filipino or Indian, he guessed.
“You in pain?” asked the nurse.
“More…morphine,” said Dulaney.
“Not morphine,” said the nurse.
“But we’re using very strong painkiller.”
“More. Please.”
“Too much of a good thing—”
“Need. Lilly.”
“Is Lilly your wife? A sister?”
“Lilly…Zoller…Attorney.”
“Will your lawyer recognize you? Or have you remembered who you are?”
In the chaos following the explosion, between the EMTs, hospital staff and emergency volunteers, Dulaney’s ID was either lost or stolen. For the nearly eight hours he drifted between consciousness and searing pain, Dulaney remained a John Doe.
“F…B…I …” puffed Dulaney.
“Are you FBI? Or is this Lilly person FBI?” probed the nurse.
“White. Male. American. Marine. Danny. Palomino.”
“Wait. Lemme write all this down.”
“Tattoo. Anarchy.”
Dulaney’s brain was flooding with words. Recollections. He was remembering the five-minute walk from the Ralph’s parking lot to the Sports Authority. Rey Palomino was alongside him step for step. During which Dulaney realized he’d missed some background. It’d only been a matter of hours since Rey had made contact with the FBI, volunteering to assist in the apprehension of the man he only knew as an acquaintance of his deceased son.
“Okay. You said Danny…?” asked the nurse, who stood at a dry erase board.
“Palomino.”
“Like the horse.”
“Marine.”
“Got that.”
“Tattoo. Red A. Circle. ’Round it.”
The pool man had never gotten much of a look at the perp. His only crystalline memory was of a tattoo on the inside of Beemer’s left wrist. The capital letter A with a red circle drawn around it. Rey Palomino had mistaken it for a reference to The Scarlet Letter. But Dulaney knew better, cataloguing the marking as the universal sign for…
“Anarchy.”
“Right. Yes. I’ve written here,” said the nurse. “Who should I tell? Do you have family?”
“Lilly. Zoller.”
“Yes. Her. Who is she again?”
“United. States. Attorney.”
* * * *
It was as if the evening breeze that Gonzo depended on to cool her duplex had taken a vacation. For better than a week a sticky hot stillness had overtaken the neighborhood and, more importantly, Gonzo’s bedroom, waking her shortly after midnight. She’d shifted her position in the bed, making more room for herself and Lucky, then tried to fall back asleep to the leftover smell of soap and sex. Instead, her sore neck made nearly every reclined position impossible. So she found a fresh T-shirt, slipped it on, and shut the door to her tiny bathroom before flipping on the light. She temporarily squinted while attempting to examine herself in the mirror. She noticed that the pillow crease lines striping her cheeks matched the same red color in her eyes. She ran the cold water for a moment, splashed a bit of it on her face, towel dried then rummaged for an old prescription of Soma, a muscle relaxant she sometimes took when the permanent screws in her jaw aggravated the surrounding nerves. She found the bottle. Though it was sadly empty.
Whatever.
Gonzo washed back two ibuprofen by drinking directly from the faucet and crept back into bed, taking extra caution not to wake her guest. She propped a few pillows against the headboard and tried to decide between the book on her nightstand and the television remote. It was a coin flip in her head that she kept on delay as she rewound the last forty-eight hours over again and again. How had she gone from such utter loathing for a fellow cop to inviting him into her bed?
Weak, weak, weak.
She kept hearing the phrase mercy sex rattling in her skull. If such were true, which of them was the gifted screw-ee? It’d been well over eight months since Gonzo’d swapped spit, let alone orgasms with anyone. The most recent was an old high school boyfriend who’d long ago set up shop as a heart surgeon in Seattle. He’d somehow caught up with Gonzo’s involvement in the Simi Valley safety expert case—the one ending in the near-tragic attack on Gonzo and her handcuffed prisoner as they raced down a rainy San Fernando Valley freeway. The former flame successfully stalked her on Facebook, rekindled some days-gone-by interest via email and instant messages and the occasional Skype chat, then two romantic visits later, the pair hooked up in a suite at the Langham. Afterwards the bastard weirdly confessed to being unhappily married with two needy children. The man hadn’t so much as wrapped up his confessional soliloquy when Gonzo was slipping back into her panties and looking for the fastest exit. When he physically attempted to prevent her from leaving, Gonzo had dropped him to the floor with a quick strike to his nose. She could still feel the cartilage cracking under the heel of her palm. His knees buckled and he flopped next to the bed, bleeding over his naked self and cursing her with the worst of words.
Fucking cunt-bitch-whore.
Another in a long list of bad decisions she’d have to live with. But then she’d return home to Travis, her one and only true care, and the sole male deserving her unconditional affection.
As for Lucky? All that Gonzo knew about him was how much she didn’t know. He’d lost his brother to a terrorist. Or so said every talking head on every television news channel. She’d forgotten the mental coin flip and without a conscious decision, had picked up the remote control out of habit and flicked on CNN. She let the mute button cut the sound to zero. Then between reading the constant scroll at the bottom of the screen and matching the stories to the flash of images, she would glance left and use the flickering light to survey the landscape of Lucky’s body.
As if staring at a naked body’ll give me any damn answers.
Out of the corner of her eye, Gonzo spied the FBI rendering of the suspected terrorist. It was the classic Identi-Kit picture. Black and white. The large sunglasses pictured left little room for facial features. Gonzo’s instant reaction was that there were two million men in Southern California alone who would easily match the description of the suicide terrorist. But then came a second image on the TV. It was a sketch of a man’s left arm with a medium-sized tattoo on the wrist. The tattoo was a distinct letter A with a circle drawn around it.
Gonzo didn’t need to imagine the crime scene. Every five minutes, the network would cut to a high-definition camera they’d mounted atop a Long Beach high-rise. It was already permanently pointed into the hole left by the bomb. The entire scene was lit by massive banks of lights, each hung from one of six industrial cranes. Gonzo pictured one of the many inspectors, picking over her assigned block of the grid for evidence of bomb or body parts, eventually stumbling over a torn piece of skin with the bomber’s tattoo on it. Would it be a “bingo” moment or would the discovery bring a sickly bit of lunch up with it?
“What’s the news?” groaned Lucky.
Before he’d even finished his sentence, Gonzo had pressed the off button on the remote. The TV blanked back to black. Her motherly instinct was to assist Lucky’s fractured soul in catching up on some much needed sleep.
“Didn’t have to do that,” said Lucky.
“Sssshhh. Just go back to sleep.” Gonzo gently combed his hair with her fingertips.
“What’d the news say?” Lucky’s eyes were open and fixed on the empty television screen.
“Nothing new.”
Lucky rolled to his left and twisted his head until his eyes were full of her.
“I should be sleeping?” asked Lucky. “What about you?”
“Needed a coupla Advil. Was letting the TV do the rest.”
“Closet insomniac.”
“I usually go for a book but something made me wanna see what’s what in the world.”
“You look good in the middle of the night.”
Gonzo just shook her head then gifted him back the tiniest of smiles. She gestured with her chin toward the other end of the bed.
“I gotta ask,” began Gonzo. “The one tat.”
“Mine?” Lucky turned his foot counterclockwise, as if he needed to see his own ink.
“Lotta talk about the Reapers. But you know. Just talk. What’s it really mean?”
“Means there’s guys out there who are there for me. Anytime. Anyplace. All I gotta do is call.”
“Like Ghostbusters,” joked Gonzo.
“Somethin’ like that.”
“They all outta Lennox?”
“Current and former. Yeah.”
“And is it true you gotta make a kill before you get inked?”
“Why the sudden interest in cop ink?” shifted Lucky. “PD envy? You got any?”
“Ink?” asked Gonzo, shaking her head. “Used to think I might get somethin’ here—you know—across my abdomen to hide my stretch marks but…”
“But…”
“But once I realized I couldn’t get somethin’ as cool as a Reaper tat…” She capped her joke off with a smirk.
“Seriously,” said Lucky. “What would you get? One tattoo. Just for you. What?”
“I’ve thought about that so many times.” Gonzo chuckled at herself. “What would I get? But then it’s more like I know what I wouldn’t get.”
“Like?”
“Tramp stamp. Like a butterfly or a heart above my ass.”
“Cuz it’s such a great ass. Wouldn’t want anything taking away from that.”
“Thanks…” she said dismissively. “Moving on. Okay. So what else wouldn’t I get?” Gonzo’s eyes swirled, as if searching her brain for bad tattoo images. They came in a flood. “Ring of barbed wire above the bicep. That one’s too stupid for words. Chinese symbol on the back of my neck. Little red heart right here.” With that, Gonzo touched her index finger an inch inside her hip bone.
“Where?” Lucky rolled on to his stomach, trying to get a better angle.
“There,” she repeated with her index finger.
Lucky found her hip bone with his lips.
“Right there?” he asked.
“Little to the left I think,” giggled Gonzo.
“What else?” asked Lucky between sexy nuzzles.
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