by P. J. Tracy
He was folded over from the last punch he’d taken to the belly, and when he looked up she saw a baby-smooth face that should have been on a swing set instead of taking a beating. His eyes and nose were streaming, but his little jaw jutted defiantly, and he didn’t make a sound.
“Who the fuck are you?” The puncher’s small pale eyes made a disdainful sweep of her body that was intended to intimidate.
Grace sighed. It had been a long day, and she was too tired for this. “Let the kid go.”
“Oh, yeah, right, sure we will. Get the fuck outta here, bitch, before we start on you.”
Brothers two and three jerked on the black kid’s arms simultaneously, as if they were one organism instead of two, chiming in with their own colorful suggestions. “Fuck her.”
“Yeah, fuck her. Hey. Maybe we should really fuck her.” Nervous giggle.
“Yeah, teach the white bitch a lesson.”
The white bitch. Grace shook her head, deciding not to point out that they, too, were white. I’m getting old, she thought. I no longer understand the insults of young people.
The puncher hunched his shoulders and dropped his head, looking up from beneath lowered brows. “You like getting fucked, lady? You like it in the ass? That your problem? Your old man don’t give it to you in the ass like you like it, so you come over here looking for it?”
They were a year or two away from being truly dangerous, as long as they weren’t carrying. They could have blades, of course, and she was ready for that, but she didn’t think so. When they were this underdeveloped, weapons always came out early.
“I told you to let the kid go,” Grace said.
He took a step toward her and stopped, squinting in the near-darkness, something flickering in his eyes when he got a good look at her. “Oh, yeah, you did, didn’t you? Well, I’ll tell you what. You get down on your knees and suck my dick and maybe I’ll think about it.”
It was probably poor manners to smile, but Grace couldn’t help it. “You are a disgusting little beast, aren’t you?”
“Whaddya mean, ‘little’?” he snarled, and that made Grace laugh out loud. Funny, the things that set people off.
He took another quick step toward her, started to raise his arm, then screamed at an electric bolt of pain that started in his right trapezoid and shot down to his fingers.
Grace dropped her hand back to her side and calmly watched the would-be boxer scramble backward, clutching his shoulder, face screwed up in a furious effort not to cry. “Jesus Christ! What the fuck did you do that for? Who the fuck are you? Get the fuck away from me!”
Grace pouted. “What? No more romance?”
“You bitch. You motherfucking bitch, what did you do to me? I can’t feel my motherfucking arm!”
“What’d she do, Frank? What’d she do?”
“I’ll show you.” She took a step toward the other two, who exchanged an alarmed glance over the black kid’s head, then dropped his arms and quickly backed away.
“Your ass is dead, bitch!” one of them hissed at her, trying to swagger as he scurried backward. “You are one dead motherfucker.”
“Uh-huh.”
She didn’t chase them, exactly. She just walked after them at an unhurried pace, finally stopping when she got to the curb, reminding herself that they were only kids, and you weren’t supposed to frighten children.
She watched them disappear into a crumbling stucco across the street, and then said out loud, “Don’t come up behind me.” She turned to see the black kid frozen in mid-stride, a few feet away.
“You weren’t supposed to hear me.” Crestfallen.
“Well, I did.”
A full lower lip jutted. “No one hears me. I’m the black shadow. I’m quiet as night. I’m the best.”
“You are good,” Grace gave him. “But I’m better.” She started walking back toward the tree where she’d left Charlie. A loose sole flopped on the kid’s left tennis shoe as he trotted beside her. “You should have lifted a new pair of sneakers when you got the jacket. That’s what gave you away.”
“The jacket’s mine.”
“Sure it is.”
“Good leather lasts a long time. Sneakers don’t. Those, I lifted. Show me what you did to Frank, huh?”
She lengthened her stride. “Go home, kid.”
“Oh, right. Me and the blond brothers alone in the house after you made them look like pussies? Ain’t gonna happen. I’ll wait till Helen gets home.”
Grace stopped, took a breath, then looked down at him. “You live with those kids?”
He jerked his head toward the stucco that had swallowed Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest. “Foster home.” He shrugged.
One of Grace’s eyebrows shifted up a notch. “An integrated foster home?”
“Not enough black people signing up. Don’t you listen to the news? So sometimes the brothers get lucky, and sometimes we get Little Rock.”
“What do you know about Little Rock?”
“I read about it.”
“Oh yeah? How old are you?”
“Nine. Almost ten.”
Going on a hundred, Grace thought, and started walking again. It was almost full dark now, and she wanted desperately to be home. The kid stuck like glue.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked him without stopping.
“I’m just walking.”
“This Helen, is she your foster mom?”
“Yeah.”
“You like her?”
“She’s okay. At least she keeps the other three from killing me, when she’s around.”
“So where is she?”
“Work. Gets home at seven-thirty.”
Up ahead, Grace saw Charlie’s nose peek around the trunk of the tree. “You’ve got about half an hour to walk, then.”
“About. Hey, is that a dog?”
Grace’s arm shot out to block the kid’s chest. “He scares easy.”
“Oh.” The kid went down on his knees and stretched out one arm, pink palm up. “C’mere, boy, c’mere.”
Charlie flattened his head onto the ground and tried to disappear.
“Jeez, what happened to him?”
“He came that way.”
The kid cocked his head and studied the dog for a minute. “That’s really sad.”
Grace gave him a sidelong glance, considering. It was her opinion that anyone who could empathize with the suffering of an animal might not be totally irredeemable.
She made a small gesture with her hand that Charlie considered for a long moment before rising and moving cautiously toward them, head down in fearful submission.
“Wow,” the kid whispered, staying stock-still. “He’s scared to death, and he still comes. You’re some alpha dog.”
“Where do you get this stuff?”
“I read, I told you.”
“Nine-year-old kids aren’t supposed to read. They’re supposed to sit in front of violent video games, frying their brains.”
The kid’s teeth shone an unreal white in the dark. “I’m a rebel.”
“I guess.” She watched Charlie inching closer, his trust in Grace doing noble battle with his fear of strangers. “Come on, Charlie, it’s all right.”
But Charlie was having none of it. He stopped dead and sat down, worried eyes jerking back and forth between the woman who represented safety and the apparently terrifying visage of a four-foot-tall boy.
“I guess that’s as close …” she started to say, but before she could finish the sentence the kid was on his back on the ground. “What are you doing?”
“Exposing my belly,” he whispered up at her. “Total submission pose. Nonthreatening.”
“Ah.”
“That guy who went up to Alaska and lived with the wolves? He said this is what the outside wolves have to do to get accepted into the pack. How come you carry a gun?”
Grace sighed and looked down the dark street, thinking she must really be slipping if a fat cop and a little kid pegged
her in one day. When she looked back, Charlie was standing over the boy, washing his face with his long sloppy tongue, his hind end wagging like crazy.
“Hey, Charlie, you good ole boy, you,” the kid giggled, squirming now, trying to dodge the lashing tongue. “That old wolf man, he sure knew what he was talking about, huh?”
Grace folded her arms and looked on, her expression faintly disgusted. Charlie was all over the kid now, licking, whining, the stump of his tail beating the world, generally making a fool of himself. There was no dignity in this. Worse yet, it was distracting. A car seemed to appear out of nowhere, cruising slowly by the park. She hadn’t even heard it coming.
“Charlie!” A little panic in the voice as she watched the car pass, then turn into the driveway next to the stucco house. A woman got out, reached back in for a bag of groceries. Grace exhaled. “It’s time to go home.”
With obvious reluctance, Charlie moved obediently to her side and the kid got up, brushing dried leaves off his pants.
“We were just playing. Dog like that needs a boy. If you like, I could come over after school sometimes, keep him company till you got home.”
“No thanks.” Grace jerked her head toward his house. “Your salvation just arrived.”
The kid glanced over at the car, and when he looked back, Grace and Charlie were already walking away. “Wait a minute! You didn’t show me that thing you did to Frank yet!”
Grace shook her head without turning around.
“Come on, lady, have a heart! Thing like that could save my little black ass, you know!” he shouted after her.
She kept walking.
“Trouble with some people is they just don’t get what it means to be afraid all the time!” An angry shout now, frustrated.
That stopped her. She took a breath, let it out, then turned around and walked back. He stood his ground, looking up with the whites of his eyes showing. Defiant and wet, all at the same time.
“Listen, kid …”
“My name’s Jackson.”
She ran her tongue over the inside of her left cheek, considering. “You’re too short for the hold I put on Frank, got it? But I could show you something else …”
Chapter 19
Freedman and McLaren were thorough. They did one walk through the boat with Captain Magnusson, then another on their own, double-checking the three sets of rest-rooms, the food service areas, even the tiny cabin where the captain kept a book, a recliner, and a spare uniform hanging on a wall hook.
“Not a lot of space in here,” Freedman had told him, trying to maneuver his bulk through the doorway.
“All I need,” the captain had replied, eyes twinkling. “Now the wife, she needs a living room, a dining room, a family room, a breakfast nook, just room after room, God knows why, but me? Give me a chair and book and maybe a little TV and I’m in heaven. I’ve often thought if men really ran the world like the women claim, all the houses would be eight by ten and we’d have a lot more room in the suburbs.”
By the time crew and caterers arrived at six Freedman and McLaren had their squads and uniforms posted in the lot, helping Chilton’s men screen the arrivals, and the other plainclothes officers briefed and stationed on board.
At 6:30 they stopped at the bar in the center-deck salon before going back outside in the cold. They begged a couple of bottles of water from the young man polishing glasses, then drank them while they watched the caterer’s staff put finishing touches on white-linened tables crowded with crystal and silver and fresh flowers. A fussy, hawk-nosed woman in a dark suit was following them about, occasionally moving a glass or a piece of silver an inch this way or that.
“We’re ready,” McLaren said.
“Couldn’t be any readier,” Freedman agreed, his eyes taking in the two plainclothes officers by the restrooms, then following three of Chilton’s men as they paced the salon’s circumference like caged animals. “Damn boat’s like an armed camp.”
“Too much hoopla,” McLaren said. “He’s not gonna show up here tonight.”
“Nope. Which means we’re going to have to do this all over again Saturday.”
“I got Gopher tickets Saturday. They’re playing Wisconsin.”
Freedman clucked his tongue in sympathy.
The two of them each took a gangway once the guests started to arrive, watching Chilton’s people run the sweeps, eyeballing every single person who boarded. A colossal waste of time, Freedman thought, shivering in his wool suit-coat, watching a parade of the state’s rich and richer pass through a phalanx of armed men with metal detectors as if they did it every day. Maybe they did. How would he know?
When the boat finally cast off and moved out into the river, he and McLaren started making the rounds they had worked out, alternating levels inside and out. Cold as it was, after a few circuits Freedman began to feel more comfortable outside than in. You put a six-foot-nine black man in a cheap suit on a boat with a bunch of Fortune 500 white people, and pretty soon some ditzy broad wearing his year’s salary around her neck is going to ask him to refill the water carafe. It had happened four times in the first fifteen minutes, and his patience was wearing about as thin as his self-esteem.
“Hey, Freedman.” Johnny McLaren was coming out the center-deck salon doors as he was heading in. “I was just coming to get you … What’s the matter with you?”
“People keep asking me to get them drinks, that’s what’s the matter with me.”
“Assholes. Fuck ‘em.” He pulled Freedman inside and started weaving through tables toward the dance floor. The Whipped Nipples were on this deck, playing something that sounded like a classical waltz with a salsa beat. Freedman might have liked it if they hadn’t had such a stupid name.
“I’m not dancing with you, McLaren. You’re too short.”
“Play nice, Freedman. I’m taking you to the trough. Hammond had the caterers set up a buffet for us security types back in the kitchen.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Not a bratwurst on it, just caviar and lobster and shit like that, but it ain’t bad.”
Captain Magnusson was making his own obligatory rounds through the salon, smiling, answering questions, looking captainesque. Freedman wondered who was steering the boat. “Everything as it should be, Detectives?” he asked as they passed him.
“Shipshape,” McLaren answered with a little salute, staring at a wet pink splotch on the captain’s collar.
“Pink champagne,” the old man confided, dabbing at it with a snowy handkerchief. “I had an unfortunate collision with a lovely young woman and an overfilled glass.”
“Too bad.”
“Not at all. It was really quite invigorating. She ran smack-dab into me. Full-front.” He had a wicked little grin for an old man. “I was just on my way to put this in a sink of cold water and change into a new one. See you later, gentlemen.”
Freedman and McLaren watched him walk toward the forward door of the salon as they continued past the dance floor toward the food service area.
They both stopped at the same time.
“McLaren?”
“Yeah.”
“The restrooms are in the back.”
“Yeah.”
“He went forward.”
“Right. Toward his cabin.”
“So where’s he going to soak his shirt?”
McLaren closed his eyes, saw the tiny cabin with its single chair and book and narrow closet door—only the spare uniform was hanging on a hook on the wall, and why would he put it there if he had a closet to hang it in? “Shit,” he exhaled softly, and then they were both moving as fast as they could without actually breaking into a run, weaving through the tables, breaking apart a cluster of giggling bridesmaids at the door, then outside to the bitter cold of the deck, right turn, and then they both started to run, the little Mick and the big black man, up toward the captain’s cabin.
Tommy Espinoza’s shift had ended three hours ago, but he was still at his desk, slurping cold coffee a
nd hammering out commands on the computer keyboard. His eyes were raw from eleven hours at the monitor, but that’s why God made Visine.
He reached into the orange plastic jack-o’-lantern that grinned on the corner of his desk and fished out a mini Snickers bar. “Come on, come on …” He raked his fingers through his black hair, waiting for his computer to talk to him; it finally did, in the language of a shrill alarm.
“Damn it,” he muttered, his fingers busy on the keyboard again.
“Got anything for me, Tommy?” Magozzi was standing in the doorway, a battered leather satchel slung over his shoulder.
Tommy never looked up from the screen; he just waved Magozzi over. “Check this out, Leo. I’m running across the damnedest thing with these Monkeewrench folks.”
By the time Freedman and McLaren burst into Captain Magnusson’s cabin, the old man had already opened the sliding door to his private head and was scrambling backward. The recliner caught him by the backs of his knees and he collapsed into it, his eyes wide, his breath coming in short little puffs. McLaren went to him while Freedman took the first look.
It was the tiniest of rooms, everything reduced to the smallest possible size the way it is on all boats. Tiny stainless steel sink, tiny mirror, a shower stall Freedman would have been hard-pressed to squeeze into. Only the toilet seat was full-size; so was the man sitting on it. He was wearing a suit, but he was naked from the waist down, pants puddled around his ankles, fat white knees spread wide, shirttails dangling between flabby thighs. His head was propped against the back wall as if he were only resting, but this one had been a messy kill. Trails of blood had coursed down from the bullet hole in his forehead, spreading on either side of his nose, filling the lines around the mouth, sliding down his neck to stain the collar of his white shirt.
Freedman had seen enough gunshot victims to know that this one hadn’t died right away. There had been some heartbeats left to account for that much blood pumping out of the relatively small hole.
He stepped aside so McLaren could see inside the narrow doorway.
“Aw, Jesus.” McLaren exhaled in a rush. “I don’t believe this. Captain? When’s the last time you used the head?”