“I’m not mad. I can’t afford to play anymore.”
“But wait—” he says, pinching the bill by its corners, showing it off, “this time you could win.”
“Yeah,” Pete says, same as no, “I don’t see that happening.”
“But you could! This time, you get to guess. Don’t you want your money back?”
Pete’s sure it’s a variation on the scam and it does make him mad, a kid this age working on him like some street-worn bum, but the thing is, he is a kid, and even if the game isn’t fair, it looks like Ralla’s been on the losing end for a while now.
Pete faces him, square. “What do I guess?”
Ralla crunches the bill in his hand and rolls up his other shirtsleeve. Then he tucks his elbows to his ribs and turns his palms up and he shows Pete the burns, both arms. He doesn’t smile. “Where I got these.”
Pete hears himself say, “Jesus Christ,” which was not his answer so he says, “That’s not a guess. I mean, I don’t—” and then he is fumbling with his wallet, opening it and pinching all the cash that’s in there between his fingers, and he looks back out across the field, and he wishes he would’ve intervened, talked to that motherfucker Dontay who just took off, because it was him, wasn’t it? “Are you—” Is he telling him it was Dontay? Is he asking for help?
“The answer is easy!” Ralla says. “You know it. Come on, Mr. Murphy. Guess where I got these.”
“No.” Pete takes out a bill and he doesn’t look at it and he hands it to Ralla and he says, “I don’t want to know.” Then he puts his wallet away and says, “Bringen,” to Butch, who picks up the tennis ball and falls in line with Pete as he turns to leave.
When Pete gets a good ten yards out, as angry at himself as he is at this world—this fucking world—he hears Ralla call after him, “My arms! Hey, Mr. Murphy! The answer is my arms!”
Pete feels Butch looking up at him, but he keeps walking. Because sometimes he just has to walk away.
* * *
Pete rolls down the windows while he waits for the light to change at Ogden. He could save a few minutes backtracking to the lake, taking the Drive north, but this time of day, it’ll only take a half hour to get home going straight up Western. He’ll always opt for the direct route, no matter how many extra stoplights.
Besides, there’s no sense in driving the empty lakefront when it looks like it’ll rain, a cloud cover now pushing the sky toward the same dull gray as the water. He doesn’t mind the rain, but he hates the gray. It feels like waiting.
If it does rain, he’ll bring Butch into the house; they’ll have the place to themselves today—kids at school, Sarah at her temp job. Temp: an actual word. Pete said it wasn’t, told Joel it was an abbreviation, but of course Joel looked it up, informed him that while it can be an abbreviation for temporary or temperature, it’s also a word—both a noun and a verb, in fact. Pete conceded, but later told Sarah that even if it’s a word, it’s no way to live. When she sighed her objection, he cited her refusal to make a single plan beyond the foreseeable future. She said, once again she said, that what she refused to do was to make unrealistic promises.
Anyway, when they get home the place will be empty and if it rains, maybe Pete can really take the day off—no fixing shit around the house—he’ll read the sports pages, catch a nap. Also he should get online and check the latest airfares to Anaheim. He’s been watching the rates for months—ever since Sarah booked a solo trip there to bury her brother Ricky and, while deflecting death questions, told Joel about Disneyland. Joel has since worked Tomorrowland into his vocabulary.
The thing about Disneyland Sarah didn’t tell Joel is that it doesn’t seem to have an off-season. Pete thought prices might come down after spring break, and then certainly once summer was over but so far, they’ve held steady—as has Joel’s interest in an attraction called Innoventions, where a robot-host leads a tour through the Dream House of the Future. It figures.
Still, given the temp of things, Pete’s been reluctant to let go of the dough. There isn’t a side job in the world that’ll make up for missing his promotion, or selling their old place. Still, even though it’s a fucking cliché, he’d like to take his kids to see the happiest place on earth while they’re still kids. Even if he has to drag McKenna by her terrible bone-straightened hair.
He’s about to turn right at Western and go straight home to complete Mission: Mickey Mouse—that’s the plan—until he sees the maroon caravan pull out of the White Castle on the corner and roll right through a late yellow light.
The BFMs. Typical fucking bangers: they’ll stop for sliders on the way to kill someone, but not for the traffic signal.
Pete turns the squad’s cherry lights a few times and burps the siren, edging around the left-only lane to muscle through the intersection.
As he rolls up on the van, tight, Butch stands up in the back and barks in sharp clips like he knows the vehicle. What he actually recognizes is the change in his master’s temperament; sometimes he acts as though it was as obvious to him as a tug on his leash.
“Platz,” Pete commands, because everything’s going to happen fast now, and they’ve both got to beat back instinct and rely on the language and training they share.
Pete turns the lights around again and signals the driver to pull over as he runs the plates through ICLEAR and when he takes another look, he wonders if the van is more red than maroon; then, when he gets Dispatch on the line, he counts three heads in there, not four, but by that time he’s in the middle of telling the dispatcher, “I’ve got a possible stop on that Dodge Caravan, Roosevelt Road just west of Campbell,” and then—right then as he’s saying it—he realizes the van is not a Dodge Caravan but a Ford Windstar. But he’s already pulled up behind the van, parked curbside—its turn signal and both brake lights operational, tags up-to-date—and Dispatch is radioing for backup.
Then the plates come back clean, the vehicle registered to a man named Jeffrey Edwards, no record, and what all that adds up to is zero reason to stop the car.
Pete’s about to tell the dispatcher to forget it, and to get out and say sorry to Mr. Edwards, to send him on his way, but then he sees the guy in the backseat toss a burger box out the window into traffic. The first passing car swerves to miss it; the next one doesn’t swerve, and doesn’t miss.
The nerve: Pete can’t believe it. Doesn’t he have to do something, now?
But what? He doesn’t even carry a ticket book anymore; is he really going to get out and cite the guy for littering? I’m sorry, but you are in violation of city ordinance 10-8-480, casting refuse in a public way. Does he have any self-respect left?
No. It’s not him. It’s the other guy. A guy like this—and like Dontay—who have no respect. They’re the people trashing this city. And tormenting the good people—and the young people—who live in it.
Butch whines from the back.
“I know, boy,” Pete says, finding him in the rearview. “If only there were an asshole quota.”
Pete gets out, pops the trunk and straps up: his belt, his gun, then his vest, and all the while he feels that old rookie rush wash over him; he’s been at this game ten years plus and the car stops still call it up. Maybe because they’re the most dangerous part of a cop’s job; maybe because the only knowable thing on the way up to a driver’s window is the risk. Or maybe because when he was a rookie he stopped a guy for a broken taillight but the guy was high on meth and had just beaten the hell out of his girlfriend. Pete didn’t know it, but he was in for shit, head-on. He took home a black eye that night.
He shuts the trunk, rounds the squad, sizes up the area. They’ve stopped alongside a cracked-up sidewalk that borders a fenced-in grass lot where somebody parked a fleet of old semi trailers and storage containers. Traffic chases back and forth in four lanes but there’s also a bike lane, a driver’s-side cushion.
The minivan’s side windows are tinted, but through the back Pete can see the three occupants inside, the asshole si
tting directly behind the driver. There is no side passenger door on the driver’s side and the window is sealed, which makes Pete both more and less safe since the asshole can’t get to him, but could exit the other side and try disappearing in the storage lot.
Pete approaches straight up the bike lane, caution giving way to a show of confidence, and taps on the driver’s window.
The window comes down incrementally as the driver—presumably Jeffery Edwards—thumbs the button one, two, three.
Edwards and his front-seat passenger are in the middle of lunch, a half-dozen small paper boxes of sliders and fries in each’s lap, the passenger with at least one whole burger stuffed into his mouth.
“Hi,” Edwards says, which he must be, judging by the way his eyes are glazed. “What’d I do?”
Besides the obvious, Pete doesn’t know what else the guy has done, or how he plans to explain the obvious, so he decides to let Edwards confess. He asks, “Do you know why I stopped you?”
“No.” Edwards glances over at his passenger. “Cedric, you know why?”
Cedric looses his wet lips around the straw of his giant Coke to say, “I ain’t ’bout to guess.”
Edwards turns to Pete, says, “Cedric don’t know neither.” He tilts his chin back, looks in the rearview. “Whitey, you got some idea?”
“Got some,” says the kid in the backseat, and then Pete angles in to get an ID and no shit: it’s Ja’Kobe White, the haunting, spitting image of his twin brother, Felan.
“Do tell, Mr. White,” Pete says, because now there’s got to be a good reason, nothing but trouble happening with this gangbanger in the car.
White says, “You stopped ’cause of me.”
“Oh yeah? What is it you did?”
White leans forward, eyes half open, halfway to gone. “I ain’t done shit. It’s because who I am. You know me, and you mean to fuck with me.”
A backup car turns the corner and parks behind the squad and the driver cuts its siren and Pete gets the feeling this is about to turn into a real shit show.
“I know you,” Pete says to White, “but the first I saw of you today was your left hand when you threw that trash here on the street. So I think that means you mean to fuck with me.”
“For real: he know you, J.K.?” Edwards asks the rearview.
“Doesn’t matter if I know him or not,” Pete answers. “What matters is if you boys are breaking the law. Sit tight.”
Pete turns to meet his backup and he’s thinking fuck, fuck, and then he sees it’s Frank Majette getting out of the car, which makes him think worse, think, I’m fucked. That’s because the last time they saw each other, Jetty was the architect of a long-running investigation that Butch dismantled in a matter of minutes. It was a drug case at a westside dive where a bartender was allegedly moving crack through the joint with money from the nightly drop. Jetty had a warrant and he was ready to tear the place apart; naturally he was pissed when his sarge pulled rank and decided Butch should give the place a once-over first.
It was also natural that he was more pissed when Butch didn’t find anything.
After the search, Jetty cornered Pete and went into this whole thing about how he thought K9 was nothing more than a public relations unit the bosses liked to parade around—to schools, the occasional crime scene, and, well, parades—so that moms and kids in nice neighborhoods thought the police were nice, too. That’s magic, he had said, except that the real part—the work part—might as well have been part of the act. Butch was trained above all else to please his master, and would sooner have sniffed out a packet of mustard than come away with nothing.
Pete said Jetty’s argument was backward, because what it implied was that Butch would find something that wasn’t there, and in saying so, he realized that what Jetty was actually pissed about was that Butch hadn’t found the drugs that Jetty didn’t have the chance to put there.
Everybody knows Jetty is loyal to the blue, third-generation CPD, all that. They also know he thinks a junkie he talked to six years ago qualifies as today’s snitch if he’ll help move a case. But until that night, Pete didn’t know evidence was as adaptable, and that Jetty was the one planting the mustard.
“Pony,” Majette says, stalking brick-shouldered toward Pete, hands in fists, eyes dilated, the Job his drug of choice. “What the hell are you doing police work for?”
“Vehicle matched the description for the Hustler car that Dispatch put out citywide. Turns out the bangers inside are just regular assholes.”
Majette looks at the van. “It’s not them.”
“I just said.”
“So you stop them and what, you’re waiting around for them to get themselves arrested?” Jetty’s being a dick, but he knows—hell, every cop who works the street knows—that all it takes to arrest a guy like Ja’Kobe White is a little time. And that’s because a banger is always up to something; it’s just a matter of waiting long enough to catch him while he’s up to it.
The rub of the Job, once again, is that Pete can’t do anything. A badge doesn’t give him the right to stop White from doing wrong; a badge only gives him the so-called privilege to go get the guy after he’s done it.
A light rain starts, angling off Jetty’s balding head, and Pete knows he should cut them loose—Ja’Kobe and friends, because they’re more trouble than the bust is worth and Jetty, because he’d base a narc case on the munchies—so he says, “I’m going to let them slide.”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Majette says. “Is this how it goes with you? You stop them. You’re the one with the dog. And you’re going to waste my time?”
“You can go, Jetty.”
“What I mean is, I’m on this BFM case now three weeks, and I come over here, and you’re not going to take your dog for a walk around the vehicle?” He licks a raindrop from his upper lip. “What. Is he still afraid of the rain?”
“Butch is fine,” Pete says. It’s Jetty who’s jonesing for a bust, and he must figure Pete owes it to him.
“Then how about you get your sidekick, and I’ll get mine.” Majette waves a stiff hand toward his squad, summoning a young cop Pete doesn’t recognize. He gets out, gets rain gear from the trunk.
“Who’s that?” Pete hopes it’s somebody who doesn’t recognize him, either.
“Name’s Bellwether. Comes over here from Twenty-three after the redistrict. Curious as a retarded cat.” Majette has a habit of saying everything in the present tense. It bothers some people, mostly the kind of people who pick a stupid thing to get bothered about and then let it be important enough to be the basis of an opinion about the guy, an opinion which can’t be any good, especially if it’s based just on the one stupid thing. What should bother them is that talking like that makes him sound like he’s telling the truth—the story as it happens, facts over recollection or hearsay—and that seven times out of ten, he’s good and full of shit.
Still, he’s here, now, so this story remains to be told. And since it’s well within the law for Butch to sniff the exterior of a vehicle, and a positive alert equals probable cause for a search, Butch’s nosing around could confirm what Pete already knows—that Ja’Kobe and his pals are up to something. Or at least buzzed up on something. And it could also provide Jetty with a reason to make an arrest.
And that’s all Jetty wants: a reason. Then maybe he’ll have a good story, and he’ll quit being such a prick. Now or later or whenever.
And right now, White won’t get away with being an asshole.
So, okay. “I’ll walk him around.”
“Do that,” Majette says, a shitty smile before he goes back to meet Bellwether.
Pete gets into his trunk again to retrieve Butch’s leash and blue KONG—his find reward—which he pockets before he releases the rear locks and opens the back door.
“C’mon, Butch,” Pete says, hooking the lead into a pinch collar.
Butch sits there, his most pitiful face. It’s true, he is not a rain dog—but there’s a reason he doesn�
��t like rain, and that reason is thunder. And that’s because when Butch first came to the Murphy household, Sarah accidentally left him in his run during a storm. In her defense, the front came in quickly; the sun was out when she went to the Jewel. But while she was in the store comparing hot dog prices, Butch was going batshit. When Pete finally rescued the dog, he’d torn all the siding off the garage.
“C’mon,” Pete says to him. “You won’t melt.”
The dog looks up, blinks away raindrops, and damn if he doesn’t nearly shake his head no.
“Fuss!” Pete commands so that the dog understands it’s time to work; there are no fear words in their shared language. “Hier!” he says, and Butch obeys, his front paws hitting the pavement just as a band of lightning cuts across the western sky. He heels to Pete’s left, hindquarters trembling.
“Pass auf!” Pete says, demanding Butch’s attention. He shouldn’t be so skittish; Pete’s been too easy on him lately.
“Okay, Pony,” Majette says on approach in wide steps, making room for himself while his partner trails behind, “Bellwether here hasn’t seen your magical show. So how about you and your nosy dog get on with it?”
Pete’s neck goes tight: a nerves thing. He is so sick of the nickname, and the way any cop thinks he can use it.
He looks down at Butch, sitting at attention, tail sweeping the rain-spotted street, an eye on Jetty. It’s as though he gets the subtext: that there’s some kind of challenge posed. But what’s he supposed to do? Of course he wants to please his master. And he won’t lie—can’t—it isn’t in his makeup. And he won’t feel bad whether he alerts or not. So why should Pete give a rat’s ass?
He decides he won’t, and offers a hand to Bellwether. “Pete Murphy.”
“Jim,” Bellwether says, shaking his hand and then self-consciously running knuckles over his mustache, awkward and thin and probably kept in protest of last week’s rank-wide reprimand about sideburns, beards, and goatees.
“This is Butch,” Pete says.
“What kind of dog is he?”
The Good Boy Page 2