At some point, Gantry took the phone from her hands, and told me I’d better go downtown, and at least answer some questions. He’d talked to a few of his contacts down there, and according to him, they wouldn’t arrest me, but just wanted me for questioning for now. He said he’d smoothed over what he could, and told me his cover story for me while I’d been in Nik’s dimension, which, truthfully, was probably better than what I would have come up with.
He said if I went in now, it would look better.
That was as close to a warning as I’d get from him over the phone.
I knew him well enough to know to take it seriously.
“Where’s Nik?” I asked him then, before I signed off.
“He’s fine,” Gantry said.
“That’s not what he asked.”
“He’s with my people,” Gantry said, clearly still in his cryptic, I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-this-on-the-phone place. “We’ll be here when you get back.”
Sighing a little, I nodded, more to myself than him.
I hung up without bothering with a goodbye.
So yeah, I resigned myself to the fact that I’d be calling on my friends at the Seattle PD today after all. I got Gantry’s reasoning, assuming I was understanding it correctly. He likely figured I should go in now, before it started looking like I was avoiding them...which, of course, is exactly what I’d been planning to do.
I knew he was right. Better to be upfront with them now, versus waiting until Razmun did something to get me in even more trouble.
Anyway, I wanted a look at those police sketches they’d gotten from the hotel manager.
My friends at the station might help me out in that regard––assuming I asked nice––and even if they wanted to grill me on the Yesler bombing first. I really wanted to compare those sketches to the photo I’d gotten off Laurie’s phone...which apparently she’d never bothered to show them for some reason. Maybe just being able to share the photo itself would be enough to get me a glimpse of the sketches they’d gotten off the hotel manager.
After all, I’d be helping them out, too.
I figured I should run the few things I’d pieced together by Jo, P.J. and Ravi anyway. Ideally, I’d love to talk to whoever they had working on the case, see if I could get them to share anything they’d uncovered in the week or so before I got involved.
I knew how unlikely that was, but I might get a high-level snapshot from Ravi, at least.
He tended to be the most share-y of the three of them.
I knew the sketch artist had to be Karen, since she did the majority of their work. I’d have to go through Jo or Ravi to get a look at it, however, since Karen was a kind of odd duck and probably wouldn’t let me see it without a warrant or something.
Karen might not be a cop technically, but she was by the book all the way.
Getting up from the table as the girls got ready to go, I thought about bringing my friends at the Seattle PD coffee again, too. After all, I was right here.
Nothing greased the wheels like high-octane mochas.
9
Police Sketch and a Pissed Off Cop
A long, low, and strangely ominous whistle greeted me, bare seconds after I pushed my way through the glass doors of the Seattle police station headquarters in downtown Seattle.
As I used my hip to help me open the door, I found myself greeted by the weirdly familiar mixture of stale and fresh air that smelled vaguely of feet. And Lysol. And the tiniest bit of blood, although that may have been purely in my head.
It smelled sort of like a bowling alley, I guess.
“Holy Christ. Look what the cat dragged in...” a familiar voice said.
I paused, still not far from the door. Gripping the tray more tightly in my hand, I glanced around before I took a step deeper into the area behind the main counter.
A few other people looked up at the whistle, some wearing uniforms and some not. More than a few stared at me hard enough that I figured I must look familiar.
It wasn’t exactly an auspicious beginning.
I answered the whistle and the shout-out with a half-smile and a shrug anyway, setting my cardboard tray of whipped-cream and chocolate sprinkle covered mochas, only slightly melted, on the main counter in front of me.
“Does that mean you don’t want these?” I said innocently.
I directed my question to the most familiar face I’d picked out of that group.
Leaning against the edge of the counter so that I was still technically behind the line between police and civilian access, I quirked my eyebrow at Ravi, who’d been the one to first see me and fire off his none-too-kind, if vague, appraisal.
“You’ve got balls, Reyes,” Ravi said, shaking his head and smiling, as if in spite of himself. “Great big dragging-the-ground balls...of iron...”
I still couldn’t help finding it funny when Ravi did the tough guy cop speech. He still had a pretty thick accent from where he grew up in Mumbai.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” another familiar voice said.
That voice pulled off the angry, tough-cop thing a lot better.
I craned my head and neck around the guy doing desk duty in front of me, who was obviously ignoring me since he’d figured out I wasn’t there for him, and saw a pair of dark brown eyes I recognized.
“Hey, Jo...” I began, sing-song.
I was about to recite the rest of our running joke, meaning the one from the Jimi Hendrix song about the guy who shoots his girlfriend, but Jo didn’t give me a chance.
“––Do you seriously think you can just waltz in here and offer us fucking coffee?” she snapped. “You think coffee is the thing that will convince us not to split your head open with the butts of our guns for your damned disappearing act of the last year?”
I flinched, a little taken aback. Glancing around the front desk area, where a handful of uniforms were already watching us, listening to the exchange, I looked back at Jo. Seeing the anger darken her face even more, I blinked at her in surprise.
Then I tried for a smile.
“I thought it was worth a try,” I muttered, shrugging.
“You little piece of shit,” she snapped, unamused. “Of all the nerve. A fucking year, and you saunter in here, cracking jokes? You could at least pretend you give a shit...”
“It wasn’t a year,” I protested, holding up a hand. “Jesus, Jo. Calm down––”
“––Or that we will talk to your pathetic ass at all? At least before you’ve deigned to tell us where the hell you’ve been all this time?”
When I didn’t say anything to that, Jo snorted.
I heard the anger there, though.
It wasn’t put on. It was the real deal.
“You armed, Jo?” I smiled, still trying to lighten the tension I felt building in the room.
“What the fuck do you think?” she snapped, glaring at me again.
Jo folded her arms as she stood up from the desk behind Ravi, giving me the slant-hip tough cop pose once she’d reached her feet.
“Seriously, Reyes? You must have hit your head pretty damned hard during those eight months, if you think you can just walk in like nothing happened. Those same eight months where we did everything but dredge the fucking Sound, looking for your skinny white ass...”
I glanced over my shoulder at my own ass.
“It’s not that skinny,” I said a beat later, as if appraising it for the first time. Looking back at Jo, I grinned at her. “...Or that white, really. Not like you’d know that personally.”
“You’re hilarious,” said Jo. “Where the fuck have you been? Seriously.”
Seeing the continued and clear lack of amusement in her dark brown eyes, I glanced at Ravi, and saw him giving me a pretty hard stare, too. Which was saying something, really. Ravi was usually the mellow, easygoing one of the bunch. Jo was the hard-ass. P.J. was a weird mix of Aspergers and country boy, at least when he wasn’t on the gun range, where he could be kind of a nut. According to Jo, P
.J. had a personal collection of quasi-legal assault rifles that might have gotten him flagged as a potential terrorist if he wasn’t already a cop. A little too much time in Iraq, she’d said, pursing her lips with that dry humor of hers.
They were kind of the weirdos of the Seattle PD, I knew.
Weirdos as in, non-white bread, didn’t-really-fit-in with cop culture types.
All three of them were super smart, which probably didn’t help...and which is why Jo got promoted to detective so young, despite her being, in her own words, “difficult to get along with.” I knew them initially through P.J., who served under Gantry for at least one of his tours over in the Middle East, and who I’d also dated briefly. Really briefly...although I suspect it would have been longer if it had been up to P.J.
In addition to our back and forth with me as a P.I. and her as a cop, Jo was also my sparring partner at the gym. A lot of us trained in the same place, including Gantry, P.J., Jo and a bunch of other cops from the headquarters station and the one on the West Side.
Jo had been my sparring partner for years...really, right up to the time where I fell through that dimensional portal and disappeared off the face of the Earth for nearly a year.
“Yeah, well,” I said, when the awkward silence stretched. “I thought Gantry filled you in? Family stuff. You know how it is.”
“No, I don’t know how it is,” Jo said, walking around the desk. Without a pause, she marched right up to the counter where I stood, moving so fast I contemplated backing up. She didn’t stop talking, however, or glaring at me. “...Are you seriously going to tell me this is about that fuck-up brother of yours?”
I glanced around me again, nervous at Jo’s expression. Most of the faces I saw looked angry now, though, so that glance wasn’t particularly reassuring. I knew Jo got a lot of respect around here. They might think she was weird, but they knew she was a good cop. Most of those faces looked familiar, too, which meant they likely knew who I was, and who I’d been to Jo, Ravi and P.J. before I disappeared. They also probably knew stuff I didn’t know, like what Jo, Ravi and P.J. had done to try to find me while I was gone.
And yeah, I felt pretty crappy about that.
I also didn’t really know how to break the impasse.
Shrugging, I inclined my head towards the mochas.
“You really don’t want these?” I said.
When I looked back at Jo, she was gritting her teeth.
I could tell because the muscles in her jaw stood out more than usual. She had a pretty face, in a feral, bad-ass chick kind of way. I never got a straight answer out of her as to her exact ethnicity, but Jo’s basic features reminded me of some of the people on my father’s side of the family, so I’d wondered if maybe she was part Latina, like me.
She had one of those faces that was kind of ambiguous, overall, in terms of where her ancestry might originate. She could have been Middle Eastern even, or Indian, like Ravi. I’d asked her once what Jo stood for, and she said “Jo” and gave me a death stare.
So yeah, I didn’t ask again.
She was armed, after all.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry I took off without a word. I really am. It was a family thing, like I said. I thought Irene knew where I was, or I would have checked in.”
“She didn’t,” Jo said, blunt.
I nodded, then folded my own arms, copying Jo’s pose without really meaning to do it.
“Yeah, well.” I shrugged. “I already got reamed by Gantry. And Irene. And I’ve not finished hearing it from them. So I guess...get in line.”
Jo’s frown deepened.
She moved again, reminding me only then that she’d stopped. Her steps were jerky but swift, closing the gap between the row of desks and their dingy-looking computers and the front counter where I stood. I flinched a little when she reached me––she’s like four inches taller than me, and I knew from personal experience just how hard she could hit––but Jo only snatched one of the mocha cups out of the cardboard container and took a step back.
“You’re going to need to bring a lot more mochas,” Jo muttered darkly.
I noticed she continued to give me her cop’s stare, which told me she wasn’t believing my story about family issues.
Knowing her, she’d probably already tried to check up on my story, even in the half-hour or so since she’d talked to Gantry.
I wondered suddenly, if they’d talked to Jake...while I was gone, that is. Or my parents for that matter. It struck me in the same set of seconds that I’d better keep my damned mouth shut until I’d synched up stories a little better with Gantry...along with Jake and Irene and whoever else. I knew Gantry wouldn’t have given her a cover story she could overtly disprove, but I wanted all of our nuances and details in synch, too.
As it was, my story and Gantry’s were the same...just vague.
“Yeah, well,” I said lamely. “I’ve got a case.”
Jo snorted, lowering the cup from where she’d been sipping the mocha.
“Unbelievable. Un. Fucking. Believable. You want something.”
I held up my hands. “Look, it’s not like that. I’m trying to help.”
“Sure you are. For the right price.”
“The city doesn’t sign my paychecks,” I reminded her. “I have to pay rent somehow.”
“They would if you weren’t such an asshole,” she shot back. I watched her glare at me as she took another drink of the mocha. “...It’s not like you haven’t been offered a job here before, Reyes. More than once, as I recall. So go play that violin for someone else.”
I bit my lip, not answering.
I wasn’t about to get in that argument with her yet again...not now, anyway. The last thing I needed was another lecture about how badly the Seattle PD needed good detectives...especially female detectives...and how I owed it to the city and my gender and maybe small puppies to put my talents to a real use, instead of using them to subvert the law and entrap citizens in the name of my perverted brand of vigilante justice...
...and yadda, yadda, yadda, whatever.
For a moment Jo only stood there, glaring at me, as if conflicted.
I wondered if she was deciding whether to launch into one of those lectures right now, or if she was contemplating yelling at me about something else. Abruptly, without so much as a glance in my direction, she turned on one heel and stalked back towards her desk.
I felt the implied invitation in her retreat that time, and relaxed a little.
It wasn’t exactly a warm invitation, but it was something.
Ravi, and now also P.J., who had joined Ravi at some point in the minutes that Jo had been glaring and snapping at me, remained silent behind Jo’s desk. Both had hung back while Jo pulled her she-alpha thing on me. Now the two of them slinked forward to claim their own mochas from the cardboard container on the front counter, moving like young lions after the head lion has finally eaten its fill.
Snatching two remaining cups off the cardboard tray, they continued to eye me up and down as they backed away.
They looked less angry than Jo, and more conflicted.
P.J. even gave me a sideways smile, nodding his head in greeting as that sideways smile slunk into a full-fledged grin.
“Reyes,” he acknowledged, still smiling as he lifted the cup to his lips. “You alive?”
“Jones,” I acknowledged back, giving him a returning smile. “More or less.”
“Glad to see it.”
Seeing the real relief in the tall, scarred-up and muscular ex-Marine’s blue eyes as he looked me over, I felt another twinge of guilt. Although why, really, I don’t know. It’s not like I truly was as much of an inconsiderate asshole as I was pretending to be. Pretty hard to text people when you’ve fallen through an inter-dimensional portal leading to another universe.
Pretty hard to plan ahead for a trip like that, too.
P.J. bumped shoulders with me as he and Ravi followed me back towards Jo’s desk. I burst out in a laugh, in spite o
f myself, and Jo glared at all three of us.
“What the fuck is so funny?” she snapped.
Watching her sink into her beat up, vinyl office chair with one of those orthopedic pads at the base, I sighed a little, plopping down in the worn, fake-leather chair across from her.
“Nothing,” I said.
When no one spoke but just drank their mochas and stared at me, I sighed again, combing my fingers through my hair.
“So I have a case,” I said again, propping my boot up on the desk.
Jo leaned over, shoving my boot off. “So have I.”
“What’s yours about?” I said, smiling.
“A bomb,” she said promptly, giving me a hard look. “Yours?”
“Missing girls,” I said. “Probably trafficking. Maybe international crime syndicates.”
Jo’s face contorted in another delicate frown. “Christ. Culare hired you.”
Resting my arms on the chair’s armrests, I shrugged. “Blame Gantry.”
“I don’t want to blame Gantry,” Jo snapped, setting her mocha down, hard, on her desk. “I’d rather blame you.”
A little bit of the brown, sticky liquid rippled over the rim of her cup, dripping down the sides of the paper cup and on to her metal desk. Jo pretended not to notice.
Or maybe she really didn’t.
“Okay,” I said. “Well. What are you doing on the bombing? Isn’t that Home Sec?”
“We’re helping,” she said.
“Any luck?” I said.
“Some.” Her voice sounded openly accusing that time.
Muttering under her breath in what sounded like Spanish but may not have been, Jo shoved a pile of loose papers into a manila file folder and slapped the file on top of a stack sitting on the corner of her desk. Pulling out and then flipping through another folder that sat in that same stack, Jo found whatever she wanted and pulled it out with an index finger and a thumb. Turning it around in her hands, she shoved the thick piece of paper in my direction.
“Look familiar, Reyes?” she said.
That accusatory tone sounded more prominent now.
Ironically, in a way, I found myself looking at a police sketch, probably done by Karen, the same person whose work I’d been hoping to see. Unfortunately, it wasn’t one of the sketches I’d wanted to look at, coming in here.
Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two Page 13