Private Heat (6 page)

He waggled his fingers. I delivered.

He disappeared through the doorway behind the counter, and I could hear him fingering me into a computer terminal. The trainee backed up to the wall, folded her arms over her blue blazer, and regarded me suspiciously. The surveillance camera mounted high on the wall behind the desk deflected in my direction with a hum, then the lens screwed me into narrow focus.
Ten minutes. If I'm not out of here in ten minutes I get to meet Randy Talon, maybe his whole squad
. Franklin was busy but it was a good
bet that someone else was on his way to the dispatcher.

Four minutes into the program I heard the printer ratting me out. I was curious as to what Sergeant Franklin thought worth printing. There was nothing active, not even a parking ticket.

“Social Security number?” he asked through the door.

I told him.

“You got a Social Security card with you?”

“I got a retired military ID card with my number on it. I lost the Social Security card a long time ago.”

“Give it to the CLIP.”

“CLIP” is what they call their interns. Someday I'm going to ask what that stands for. I handed it to the girl.

He got the card and said, “Jesus!” I guess Sergeant Franklin is a veteran. He rattled the keys some more. The girl came out and sat at the desk. The printer rattled on again.

At the north end of the Hall of Justice there's a door that the public can use to exit the building. Only police officers have a key to use this door as an entrance. At nine minutes and counting, it crashed open and a herd of heavy footsteps thundered up the hallway that ran perpendicular to the desk, well to the right, and out of sight from where I was standing.

“Where is this piece of shit?” said a gravelly voice.

I heard Franklin intercept them in the hall, then the rustle of paper being passed around. Officer Talon came around the corner alone, five-eleven, and a very hard and square two hundred and thirty or forty pounds. His mustache drooped around the corners of his mouth like a Mexican bandit's, and he'd gathered his shoulder-length, dark brown hair into a pony-tail. He wore blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and a plaid flannel shirt untucked and unfastened. His right pants leg was frayed at the cuff and dragged the floor at his heel, which betrayed a habit of carrying the Browning Highpower in his waistband behind his right hip.

“You the guy?” Talon wanted to know.

“I'm the guy.”

“Gimme the paper. I'm Police Officer Randal Talon.”

I fished a copy out of my pocket and held it out. Since I was already in the video camera's eye, I held my ground.

“If you want to earn your … twelve bucks … you got to touch me with the paper,” he said. “Or didn't they tell you?”

“No, Randy,” I said. “They told me I'd get thirty pieces of silver if I kissed
you on the cheek.” Police Officer Randal Talon stomped over and snatched the paper out of my hand.

“Now I'm served,” he said. “Now you can go fuck yourself.”

“I'm not a process server. Some officer of the court is going to get fat on those twelve dollars. I'm here because your wife and her family are afraid of you. I came down to ask the watch commander to send out a supervisor or patrol car when you go to get your personal possessions.”

Talon balled up the service. He looked up at the camera and then back at me. “Yeah, well, they wasted their money.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No. I just meant that I knew this was coming.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with the heel of his left hand. His pupils were large, given the light. Sunglasses dangled by a leg from his shirt pocket. I suppose that wearing a flannel shirt in the building would explain the sweat, but not his twitchy fingers.

“Just tell Karen to put my shit on the porch. I'll pick it up when I get off shift. It won't be too late unless I have to arrest some creep and put him in jail.” He leaned toward me to emphasize the “creep” and the “jail” parts.

“I'll tell her.”

“Great. So you're done. So get the hell out of here!”

“I'm waiting for my paperwork.”

“Randy, let's go,” said a voice from around the corner.

Officer Talon backed up several steps, then stopped, drew a breath, and held it. The CLIP had vacated the desk area. She and the sergeant had filed through the door and pulled it shut after them. Talon smiled and beckoned me over with a finger.

I smiled back and wagged my head slowly in the negative. “Ain't happening,” I said.

“Randy, let's go, dammit!” Same voice.

Randy poked a pointed finger in my direction. He mouthed the words “I'm going to kick your ass” silently, then left.

“Cost a lot more than thirty bucks for me to kiss your ugly ass,” said a third voice as the herd shuffled down the hall.

“Aw, fuck you!” said Randy.

I heard the door close behind them.

The CLIP came out with Sergeant Franklin close on her heels. He threw my ID on the counter and asked, “This registration match the numbers to the piece on your hip?”

“Yes, sir, it does.”

He fingered the green gun registration out of the pile of cards and said, “Lay it on the counter.”

“You want me to clear it?”

“No, I don't want to play with it, I want to look at it.”

I eased the weapon off my hip and laid it on the counter with the barrel facing away from the sergeant and the CLIP.

He held the card at arm's length just over the pistol and tipped his head up to make the best use of his bifocals as he compared the numbers.

“What the hell kind of piece is this, anyway?”

“Think of it as a chop-and-channel Colt. Detonics built it to some famous Border Patrol pistolero's specifications.”

“So the feds are carrying these now?”

“I have no idea. I'd guess they're carrying fat nines like everybody else.”

A smoke smile washed over his face. “Right, put it away.”

I holstered my sidearm and was picking up my ID cards when Sergeant Franklin reached across the counter and tucked the service into the hanky pocket of my sport jacket. “Just don't be rude,” he said, “and you won't have any trouble.”

“So?” I asked, “I take it no one is going to be available.”

“Depends,” he said with a shrug.

“That's a maybe?”

“That's a product. If you stay in this line of work, you may need them.”

I'm pretty sure that was the good sergeant's idea of a joke. I smiled, gave him a nod, and departed.

Happily, the parking lot was devoid of Officer Talon and his playmates. But as I pulled out of the lot and onto the apron to turn right onto Bridge Street, one of the Community Service crew's ratty Ford Escorts with two men in the front seat charged out of the police garage. A short opening in traffic let me onto Bridge but blocked their exit.

I went right on Monroe half a block and turned left into the city parking structure. I grabbed a ticket and watched my mirror. As the arm on the ticket dispenser came down behind me, the Escort crossed traffic to turn into the parking structure. Neither occupant was Randy Talon. The car held a salt-and-pepper crew that went shoulder to shoulder and door to door.

I scooted to the down ramp and shot down one floor to exit on the other side of the structure. The attendant took my buck and I scorched up to the street, turned right, and honked on it for half a block to the Old Kent Parking Lot. By the time the beef trust in the red Escort had driven up the chute to street level, I had hustled out of sight among the crowd of cars in the street level bank lot. The twenty-something professionals flashed by the lot, and after a panicked, head-swiveling hesitation, burned the light at the corner of Ionia and Lyon.

I hit the Kmart on Buchanan and Twenty-eighth Street, happily unescorted. Inside, I picked up a can of pepper spray. On the way to the register I recollected the size of the two characters in my rearview mirror and went back for a second can.

“Got a lot of mean dogs in your neighborhood?” asked the honey blonde at the register. Svelte and in her mid-thirties, she wore one of those dorky green smocks over a pleated skirt.

“Yes ma'am, I do,” I said. “Suppose if I went to Sam's Club Warehouse, I could get a really big can?”

“I don't know, I'm still trying to figure out what to do with a twenty pound can of Crisco.” She added a flash of eyelid flutter. “That's thirty-two eighty-seven,” she said.

I paid her and fled. Finally in the Union Street S.E. neighborhood I keyed the hand mike with my thumb and spoke, “Five-six, five-seven, radio check, over.”

“This is five-seven,” Ron answered, “I hear you Lima-Charlie, over.”

“Natives leaving you alone?”

“Local constabulary came by. They said I should have checked in at the station.”

“I was just there. I didn't mention you.”

“Told them it was an insurance thing,” he said. “Our charge had a visitor when I got here: male, white, six foot, two hundred pounds, late thirties, and driving an emerald green newer model Corvette. It had one of those vanity plates.”

“Did you run it?”

“Yeah, came back to some outfit called Alton, Burns, and Fay Securities—no lien.”

“Wonder if they have any openings?”

“If you find Karen Smith dead,” Ron said, “the cops just might free up a position for you.”

“You're just trying to get rid of the competition,” I said as I rolled by Ron's position. The placard on the side of his van now read: “
AAA CEMENT/RADON GROUND TEST/PHOTOGRAPHIC PLATES IN USE/DO NOT DISTURB.”

“Love that sign,” I said. “Does it work?”

“Like a charm,” Ron laughed. “Told the neighborhood watch guy that we use radon emissions to X ray the pavement for hidden cracks and faults.”

“I'm convinced. Maybe we can sell some of that work when the insurance stuff gets slow.”

“I can do that job,” he said. “You call Wendy yet?”

“Nah, I'll call her from the client's house.”

“Five-six, out.”

“Seven, out.”

I pulled into the charge's drive and filled it up so that the subject would have to park on the street and I'd have a few seconds to eyeball him before he got to the door. A pile of domestic rubble—two battered suitcases, a collection
of cardboard boxes, and a two suiter, zipped up but lying unfolded across the pile—lay stacked on the porch.

The porch was less than a dozen strides from my car and only one step up from the walkway. Crowning the pile, a shirt box lay open so as to place the contents on display.

The contents explained a lot. Several hypodermic syringes and a half dozen pharmaceutical cartons containing liquid anabolic steroids filled the box. I pried the top loose with my ballpoint pen and was fitting it back over the box when someone snatched the door open and startled the shit out of me.

“Who the hell are you?” Karen Smith demanded to know. She was in her mid-twenties and lean, with a firm but hardly extravagant figure, and just over five feet tall. Her hair made a halo of permed auburn that framed her face and her penetrating slate gray eyes. She was braless under a bare-midriff tank top, wore shorts that revealed more than a hint of cheek, and had a tan Velcro and plastic tether strapped to her right ankle.

“Art Hardin. I'm the minder your uncle hired. Get your ass back in the house.”

“Fuck you,” she said. “You're fired.”

“Ta-ta, sweets,” I said and shrugged as I fished out my keys. I was all the way back to the car and starting to feel real relieved when she yelled after me.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Come back!”

She didn't sound sorry. I opened the door.

She closed her eyes and crushed her bosom with folded arms. Her fists were clenched. “Please, come back,” she said and made a little stomp with her right foot.

I looked at her and scratched my five o'clock shadow.

“Plee-hee-hee-ze!”

I went back. I'm easy. “Let's go inside,” I said.

“You're covering up for him.”

“You have a phone?”

“In the kitchen,” she said looking at me a little askew.

“Go call the police department and ask for Internal Affairs. Rat him out. They don't want their people using that shit. They'll come and get the stuff. They'll help him.”

“I don't want to help him,” she said. Looked real sincere.

“No, you just want to be a weasel.”

She fixed me with hot eyes. “How can a stupid old has-been like you do me any good?” Her arms were folded again.

“Listen, doll,” I said. “In my business you don't get stupid and old in the same package. And I ‘has-been' a lot of things, none of which were a slut, a thief, or a weasel.” I paused and waited for an answer.

She twisted her head and exhaled a snort through her nose.

“If we're done with ‘Dear Abby,' show me around the house.”

The kitchen was on the north end with a door leading to the attached garage. A sliding glass doorwall in the west wall of the kitchen provided access to a deck that ran the length of the rear of the house. Four-foot cyclone fences guarded the right and left boundaries, and at the back of the yard, an eight-foot wooden privacy fence. I opened the garage door, stuck my head in, and found a twenty-two-foot Ski Nautique powerboat on a trailer. Decals boasted a 454 Chevy engine and jet drive. I closed the door and locked it, then locked the doorwall as well.

“I didn't see the boat on your divorce filing,” I said.

“We're just storing it for a friend.”

Next to the kitchen, first door on the right and down a short center hallway, was a bathroom. It had only one window—one of those frosted and textured things—high on the back wall. It was locked and painted shut.