The Second Girl

by David Swinson

  He takes out three more photos and hands them to me.

  “These guys had records, though. Didn’t lock them up, but I pulled these to show you.”

  I look them over one by one. One of them I recognize as a crackhead that frequents the area of 16th and Park. The other two, young Latino boys, I don’t know.

  “No, not these boys.”

  I hand them back.

  “Would you recognize the other subjects if you saw them again?” Davidson asks.

  “Hell yeah. The two you got, they talking?”

  “No. They lawyered up right away.”

  “You got some goods on them, though? I mean once you hit the place.”

  “Oh yeah. Couple of guns…lot of drugs.”

  “I knew you would. I’m assuming the girl’s a good witness.”

  “She’s still at the hospital. She’s pretty messed up, mentally and physically, but we managed to get a positive ID on the two I showed you pictures of as her captors. They’re held without bond.”

  “She brought up another guy who is more than likely involved. I only got his first name—Edgar. She mention him?” I ask.

  “She told us about him. We’re looking into it.”

  “But she should be okay?”

  “She’ll be all right. Physically, I mean. She asked about you a couple of times. Apparently you’re her hero.”

  “She knows I’m not a cop anymore, then?”

  “I didn’t tell her. Even if I did, she wouldn’t have cared.”

  “Well, happy she’s safe now.”

  “Amen, brother,” Davidson says. He repositions the memo pad on his lap and twirls the pen between two fingers. “Okay, so when I last spoke to you on the cell, you said something about exigent circumstances that led you to kick in the door of the house.”

  “Yeah, I did,” I say with a slight nod.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “First, where’s the bathroom? I gotta take a mean piss.”

  “Back out the door and directly to the left. Hit the buzzer and I’ll let you back in.”

  “Be right back.”

  I walk back out.

  I open the door to the men’s room. It has two sinks, three stalls, and two urinals. I scan the room as if I think it’ll have surveillance cameras, but I realize I’m being paranoid so I enter one of the stalls and lock the latch.

  I look around the ceiling area again just to make sure, then remove the pill container from my front pants pocket. I close the toilet seat, straddle it backward, and pull out two capsules. I twist one of them open and squeeze the powder onto the inner part of the pill container’s cap so it’s a little pile. I do the same with the second because I want a big hit. I carefully set the cap on the toilet’s water container.

  I twist the pill capsules back together and drop them into the pill container for later use, and flush the toilet for the noise. I pick up the lid and snort the pile of blow up my right nostril and then sniff a couple more times to bring it all in. I wipe the inner lid with my finger to gather the rest of the powder and rub it on my gums.

  At the sink I check my nose, run a bit of water, sniff a couple more times, clean my nasal passages with a little water, and then wash my hands and exit.

  I buzz to get in.

  Davidson opens the door.

  “I think I’ll take you up on that soda,” I say, and then walk in.

  Fifteen

  The cold soda feels good going down my throat; even the burning burp afterward feels good.

  Davidson reclines in his chair with the memo pad on his lap and pen at the ready. He’s waiting for my answer to his question on how I came to discover the girl in the house.

  Having been a cop gives me a certain advantage. I know the types of questions cops ask. I was up all night thinking about every possible question that Davidson might ask and how to answer it. How I came to find the girl is an obvious first question.

  So I say, “First of all, my client does not know any of the boys you arrested and is not involved with anything illegal.”

  “All right.”

  “He’s just a hardworking man who lives in Virginia with his family and does a lot of handyman work here in the city. He was doing some work on a home in the Adams Morgan area and got all his tools stolen. I’m talkin’ air compressor, ceramic tile cutter, circular saw, drills, reciprocating saw, and on and on. Everything he owns to make a living. Shit’s expensive, and he certainly didn’t have the money to replace any of it. Well, an associate of mine who works this kind of stuff gave me a call and asked if I’d be willing to take it on ’cause he didn’t have the time. He advised me that the client didn’t have a lot of money, but would be willing to trade in labor. And you know my house on Twelfth, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I still got a lot of work I’d like to get done, so I told him that I’d meet with the guy, but couldn’t promise anything. So I meet with him and come to like him and feel sorry for him. Actually, I don’t know why I took it on, except that I felt sorry for him having his livelihood taken like that. I don’t work cases like this and don’t know the first thing about recovering stolen property. But I do know drugs and that most of those types of crimes are committed by crackheads. And I still have my contacts on the street. One of them led me to a burglar in the area who is known to target construction sites and homes under renovation. This source of mine told me that they’d commonly trade the stolen property for crack at Sixteenth and Park. So I set up a bit of surveillance there.”

  “So you have photographs?”

  “No. I didn’t get a chance to do that. So it doesn’t take me long to figure out those boys you showed me the photos of are running things pretty hard. I also manage to see some deals being made in exchange for possible stolen property. I watch them put the shit in the trunk of their vehicle, and at the end of their workday I follow them and that’s what leads me to the house on Kenyon.”

  “So that’s why you busted into the house, to get his tools back?” Hicks asks, like I’m an idiot.

  “You outta your head? Of course not. I’m not crazy. For a drug house like that, I would’ve used one of my sources,” I say with a smile.

  “Sheeit,” Hicks grunts.

  “Seriously, though, I decide that the next day I’ll sit on them at Sixteenth and Park some more and start taking pictures of the deals, maybe get some good photos of them transporting the property from the trunk of their vehicle into their house. And then when I think I have enough, I was gonna take everything to McGuire and Luna, who I knew would jump on it. They’d maybe send in one of their confidential informants to trade bait property, like power tools, for narcotics. We used to do that kinda shit all the time, and it’s good for a quick hit. I figured once they hit the place, my client could ID his property and get it released back to him. It woulda been nothing more than a few hours of work and then maybe I’d finally get my kitchen remodeled. Would’ve saved hundreds in labor.”

  I sip my Coke. I can tell by the look on Davidson’s face that he’s a believer. Damn, I even believe it.

  “I go back the next day, early in the morning, but this time to sit on their house. I wait for them to leave, which is at about ten hundred hours, and I decide to sit there for a bit to see if they got anything working at the house, too, because that’d be easier work for a CI. Nothing is happening, so after about a couple hours I exit my car to scope out the area, get the layout of the house, see if I can see anything through a window. When I’m at the side of the house, I notice one of the boys has returned and is walking up to the patio. I’m figuring he’s there to re-up. I scoot myself tight against the side wall, and that’s when I hear his cell phone ring. You know I speak Spanish, right?”

  “No, I didn’t, but go on,” Davidson says.

  “Well, I speak good enough to understand. He answers the call and greets some dude he calls Angelo. Had to be the one you locked up, right?”

  “More than likely, yes,” Davidson says.

>   “He’s talking to him on the patio, and I hear him ask this Angelo about a girl and if he should ‘let her out to eat.’ Obviously I couldn’t hear what this Angelo was saying, but the way this boy was talking, it sure as hell sounded like they had a girl being held against her will and locked up in a bathroom. I mean things like, ‘I won’t fuck her,’ ‘She has to eat or she’s going to die on us.’ Man, I knew they had someone in there. My mind started working, and I remembered on the news about some of these young teenage girls that had gone missing in Fairfax County recently, and how the police there had made a stop on these young Latino boys after it was reported they were following a young girl that just got off the school bus, but she ran away and got home.”

  “I remember hearing that,” Hicks says.

  “This boy finishes the call and enters the house. After about half an hour he leaves. I watch him get in the car and head out. I wait about twenty minutes, try to look through some windows, and don’t see shit. Actually, I do see power tools on the floor in the kitchen, but that didn’t mean anything to me anymore. I walk to the front door, ring the bell a few times. Nothin’. I knock hard and still nothin’. That’s when I decide, based on everything I heard and what little experience and intuition I have left, that I’m going in. So I did.

  “I find her in the upstairs bathroom. She was handcuffed to a chain that was secured to the floor with a heavy eyebolt. She was handcuffed in the front, and that made me think they knew she wouldn’t try to escape because she was brainwashed or some shit like that. All she was wearing was her underwear. She was terrified. I didn’t know what she was thinking about me being there, so I told her I was a cop and showed her my badge but covered the part that said ‘retired.’ All I wanted to do was make her feel comfortable. Would you believe, she didn’t want to go with me at first?”

  Davidson shakes his head. “Why?”

  “She was convinced they’d kill her family if she left, said that they knew where she lived.”

  “She told us that, too.”

  “So then you have someone sitting on her house?”

  “We have it handled. But why did you just drop her off at Leslie Costello’s?”

  “I’ve been retired for close to two years now. I don’t know what I was thinking ’cept to get her someplace safe and where I knew she’d get help. I knew Costello would do everything right, so that’s where I took her.”

  “But still, man, you should know better than that. You take a victim like her to a hospital, right? You remember that much, don’t you?” Davidson says.

  “I’m not a cop anymore, and I wasn’t thinking straight. Now, I sure as hell know the boys you locked up ain’t gonna put any charges on me and neither are you, so why are you beating me down like this?”

  “I’m not trying to beat you down, Frank. I just have to ask. You should know that. Hell, you’re a hero. The chief might even give you an award.”

  I seriously doubt the chief would consider that, but I say, “Don’t even think about writing me up for an award. I’m serious, Scott.”

  “You’re something else, Frank.”

  Ain’t that the truth, but I don’t say it.

  Sixteen

  I usually go out of my way to find good grapefruit. They gotta be fresh, though. They’re tougher to find when they’re not in season, but you can still find them at some of the better grocery stores, like the Whole Foods on P Street. I always keep a couple in the car. They’re good for days like this, when my immune system needs a boost. I cut into one with my knife, suck the juice out, and chew the pulp. It’s like my body knows when it’s in need, because most of the time I have to force myself to eat, but not when it comes to grapefruit. I devour everything but the skin, which I drop out the car window. I feel like my body’s been washed afterward.

  The temperature is dropping every day. Winter’s closing in. I push the button to raise the car window and recline in the seat. I watch the pedestrians passing by on the sidewalk. Most of them are law enforcement, uniform and plainclothes; attorneys; and other folks who work in this area. There are a few homeless people, though, moving like zombies. Crackheads, junkies. They’re letting out from the shelter on 2nd and D, just a couple blocks away. I watch them and I gotta think the only thing that separates me from their kind is a meager pension, an occasional paycheck, my drug of choice—and, of course, grapefruit.

  I light a cigarette. I inhale. I come back to reality.

  The meeting with Davidson didn’t go so badly. I’m thinking it was a damn good story. He even said he was sorry that I couldn’t get the tools back for my bogus client and that if he had known about it beforehand, he might’ve recovered the power tools he saw on the kitchen floor when they were executing the search warrant. I thanked him anyway and told him my client would be all right, that I might just buy him the tools myself in exchange for his labor.

  I start the car, don’t even know where I’m going, but I got a couple hours to kill before I have to meet with Claypole at DC jail.

  My hand on the shifter, my phone rings.

  Screen shows that it’s Luna.

  I put the car back in park and answer, “What’s up, Al?”

  “Just that good hit you passed our way. How the hell’d you stumble onto that?”

  “Man, don’t make me go into all that again. Davidson’s got all the details. Let’s just say right place, right time, and leave it at that.”

  “I’ll be getting a copy of his write-up, then.”

  “What’d you get there?”

  “Couple of guns and enough crack and heroin to get us to district court. We’re going to wrap these boys up for a while.”

  “Do me a big one and get them to plead out; save me from having to be a witness, all right?”

  “Well, they’re sure as hell not talking to us right now, but we’re not done with them, so I’ll let you know. We got so much on them they’ll probably plead out. What do you got going for tonight? McGuire and I are going to hit Shelly’s for drinks when we’re done here.”

  “What time you looking at?”

  “Around seventeen thirty.”

  “Yeah, I’m good for that. Haven’t been there in a while.”

  “Evening’s on me.”

  “Sounds good, bro.”

  “Okay, man, see you then.”

  “Yeah, okay. Be safe.”

  “Always,” he says, and then disconnects.

  It’s been a while since I’ve done anything social. But then, I don’t know many folks I can socialize with. I have to think hard about it and all I come up with is Leslie, Albino Luna, and sometimes Stan McGuire. Luna and McGuire are the only two real friends I have left on the department. We all made detective together at 7D Vice, then got transferred to Narcotics Branch. We’d been in the shit, but even they don’t know the real story behind my early retirement. All they know is that I retired early, after seventeen years, and that I had had enough. The only ones who know the real story are the chief and a couple of his cronies.

  I put the car back in drive and ease my way out of the parking space. Since I got some time, I make my way to Georgetown, see if I can spend some of this hard-earned money, maybe buy a new suit.

  Seventeen

  I hate DC jail. I hate everything about it, especially having to walk in, secure my belongings, and submit myself to being searched.

  When I was a cop, I’d drive my cruiser into a secured area just under the guard tower. I’d lock up my weapon, clips, and handcuffs in a lockbox that looked more like a P.O. box. The COs looked in the car, sometimes even opened the dashboard, then popped open the trunk to make sure I wasn’t trying to sneak in any contraband. I’d get a quick pat-down after that, and drive the car into another gated parking lot. I’d buzz to gain entry into a prisoner-holding area. The entry door was made of heavy steel and the sound it made when it slammed shut was deafening: steel against steel in an empty concrete vault. The only way back out was when the guards sitting on the other side of scuffed-up sha
tterproof Plexiglas, in an office area with several monitors, buzzed you out again. I hated that trapped-in feeling, especially when I had to rely on some underpaid, overfed officer on the other side to push the button.

  Walking through the front, like I have to now, is a little less claustrophobic, but still, I leave all control behind after those doors shut, even if the sound of them closing is quieter. If I ever get caught because of the shit I do, hopefully not for anything that’s gonna get me held, I might be making a trip to Canada, though more likely Mexico ’cause someone like me can get away with a lot more in Mexico.

  The corrections officer escorts me to the interview room, unlocks the door to let me in. Claypole’s sitting on an old wooden chair, leaning back to rest his large bald head against the dirty white cinder block wall. His goatee has grown. He keeps it well groomed, combed to split into two ponytails with rubber bands wrapped tight at the ends. He’s a big man, taller than me by a couple of inches, and I’m six one. He’s also got me by about a hundred pounds—a prison build. Granted, I’m not in the kinda shape I used to be, but I still have some good weight and can hold my own if I have to.

  He’s wearing prison-issue orange pants and a matching short-sleeve V-neck pullover with a white T-shirt underneath. Old biker tattoos cover his neck and most of the space on his arms.

  He drops the chair back down on all four legs, gives me an upward nod.

  “You looking beat up, Marr,” he says, and then leans forward to fold his arms on the small table.

  I sit on a chair at the other end so I can face him.

  “I’ll catch up on my sleep over the weekend.”

  “You got some news for me?”

  “No, but I’m supposed to go over all the details of your case again, maybe see if there’s something useful for trial, something we mighta missed. But we both know that’d be a waste of time, right?”

  He tightens his lips, straightens himself in the chair like he’s gonna say something, but doesn’t. I realize that wasn’t a good start to the conversation, so I adjust my tone.