by Paul Bishop
“You were with the boy being rousted by the pimps down in West Hollywood. You told us about Rush.”
The girl nodded, and Brindle felt she’d passed some kind of test.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
The girl looked around her, as if she felt exposed in the lobby. There were several other people there dealing with vehicle releases and other problems.
“Do you want to go somewhere to talk?”
“Yeah,” the girl said.
Brindle led the girl to an interview room. The girl was skittish, like a kitten placed in a threatening environment.
“Don’t worry, I won’t bite you,” Brindle said, sensing the girl’s reluctance.
Under a fatigue jacket the girl wore a tee-shirt with the phrase, “What Are You Looking at, Dick Nose?” emblazoned across the front. Torn jeans and combat boots made up the rest of her attitude clothing. An outward defense worn like armor against a cruel world.
“What’s your name?” Brindle asked.
“Do I have to tell you?”
Brindle sat down in the chair opposite the girl. She pushed it back from the table, giving the girl breathing space. This was an interview, not an interrogation. “Look,” Brindle said. “I’m not stupid. I know you must be a runaway from somewhere. And it has to be somewhere pretty bad for you to choose life on the streets over returning home.”
The girl didn’t say anything, so Brindle continued. “I’m not going to send you home if you don’t want to go. You came to me, remember? You can leave any time you want. I won’t stop you. I will help you, though, if that’s what you want.”
The girl still didn’t say anything.
“Are you hungry?” Brindle asked.
The girl nodded.
“Let me see if I can rustle something up.” Brindle stood and started for the door to the room.
“My name’s Lake,” the girl said suddenly.
Brindle half turned. “Nice to meet you, Lake. I’ll be back in a minute. Okay?”
“Yeah,” Lake said, seeming to relax in the hardback chair.
Brindle left the door to the room open, not wanting to put any stress on the fragile truce she had established.
Taking the station’s back stairs two at a time, she made her way to the jail. Once there, she located Alphabet as he was finishing up with his terrorist threat suspect. She filled him in on the girl upstairs.
“You going to take her a couple of jail house burritos?” Alphabet asked.
“Yeah. They’re in the microwave.”
“Sounds like cruel and unusual punishment to me. If you fed me that stuff I wouldn’t tell you squat.”
Back in the interview room, Brindle half expected to find Lake missing. She was still there, however, puffing on a cigarette in defiance of the No Smoking sign on the wall. Brindle didn’t care. She wasn’t going to start picking nits at this point.
Alphabet entered behind Brindle and set two burritos and a can of Pepsi in front of Lake. “Remember me,” he asked.
“Yeah,” Lake said with a genuine smile. “You’re the guy who tore Bomber a new butthole.”
“And a pleasure it was,” said Alphabet. He watched as Lake tore open one of the burritos and chomped into it as if it were her first meal in a week.
“I know you didn’t come here for the cuisine,” Alphabet said.
“The cu-what?” Lake said, her mouth still half full.
“The food,” Alphabet cleared up his meaning. “What can we do for you?”
“You guys were kind of hard to track down,” Lake said. “I finally had to ask Hogan over at sheriffs’ vice if he knew who you were.”
“I’m sure he didn’t say anything flattering,”
“He never has anything good to say about anyone.”
“So, you worked hard to find us. What’s it about?” Alphabet hardened his stance. Brindle laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Easy boy,” she said, not wanting to lose Lake’s cooperation.
“It’s cool,” Lake said. “He’s right. It’s no big deal.”
“You came here for a reason other than a free meal?” Alphabet continued to push.
“Okay, man. Back down already,” Lake said. “I’m getting to it. You got a cab waiting or something?”
Alphabet laughed. “Now that’s more like it,” he said.
The banter had eased Lake’s emotions. She casually lit another cigarette and blew the first puff of smoke toward the ceiling. “The kid you saved from Bomber and Mace. His name was Terry Macklin.”
“Was?” Brindle said, picking up on the past tense.
“Yeah,” Lake said. A tear suddenly appeared in the corner of her left eye and ran down her cheek. Lake didn’t make a move to wipe it away.
“Did Bomber and Mace do it?” Alphabet felt his anger rising.
“No. He squared with them – ripped off some rich fag’s cocaine stash and gave it to Bomber to recycle. He overdosed. Got some spiked crank.”
“I’m sorry,” Brindle said.
Tears were freely flowing down Lake’s cheeks now. She didn’t appear to be embarrassed by them. “He was just a kid.”
The two detectives considered that to be an odd statement. Lake couldn’t have been over fourteen or fifteen herself.
“I felt like his mother or something,” Lake explained.
The two detectives were silent. Waiting.
“When he was alive, he didn’t want to come to you guys with this. He said you wouldn’t care. He said you’d arrest us. Make us go home.” She was crying hard now, almost shouting.
“It’s all right,” Brindle told the girl. She stepped around the desk and took Lake into her arms.
The girl clung there for a second, but then pushed Brindle away. She wiped her face on her sleeve. “Hey, no big deal, right? One less rabbit on the street.” Street tough was making a comeback.
“No,” Alphabet said softly. “It’s always a big deal. But sometimes there just isn’t anything that can be done. He was lucky he had a friend like you.”
“Terry! Terry! He had a name!”
“Whoa, girl,” Brindle said. “We aren’t the ones to be angry with. We want to help you.”
“Where were you when Terry needed help?”
“We were there the night he needed help with Bomber,” Alphabet said. “He didn’t seem to want any more help. There’s shelters, group homes, children’s’ services. It may not have been the perfect answer, but we would have done something if he’d asked. Not everyone is a predator.”
The assertion had a cooling effect on Lake. She got hold of herself, slipping back into her hardened emotional defenses. “Yeah. You’re right,” she said.
“What didn’t Terry want to come to us about?”
“JoJo Cullen.”
Brindle and Alphabet looked at each other. If Lake had wanted to achieve and effect, she’d done so. The atmosphere in the room was suddenly charged.
Ever since JoJo had been arrested, cranks had been coming out of the woodwork looking for their fifteen minutes of fame. This was different, however. Lake hadn’t gone to the tabloids, or the six o’clock news – wanting to get her face on national television. It had been hard for her to come to the station, and she’d come looking specifically for two detectives who she felt she could trust.
“What about JoJo?”
“JoJo cruised by one night and picked Terry up.”
Alphabet and Brindle both felt as if they were holding their breath.
“He didn’t do nothing kinky. Just an alternate around the world.”
Homosexual anal sex was kinky as far as Alphabet was concerned, but he didn’t want to argue the point. “How did Terry know it was JoJo?”
“Where have you been, man? The street knows these things. The guy was pretty hard to miss. Anyway, everybody knew the Jeep with the JAMMER license plate.”
“Where did JoJo take Terry?”
“Back to his pad. They did the dirty deed, and then JoJo brought him
back and dropped him off.”
“Had Terry been with JoJo before?”
“Once or twice. It was a no sweat, easy deal.”
“So JoJo was a homosexual who liked street rabbits. How does that change anything? Maybe Terry was just lucky he didn’t end up like Rush and the others.”
“That’s not the point,” Lake said.
“No? What is?”
“It’s what happened after JoJo dropped Terry off.”
“Yeah?” Alphabet ran a hand across the back of his neck in exasperation. This was getting to be a bit too much like pulling teeth.
“When JoJo dropped him off, the next john to pull in was this guy in a blue van. He called Terry over, but JoJo had tipped big and Terry figured we didn’t need to work again. Terry blew him off and we started walking away, but the guy didn’t want to take no for an answer. As we walked past the van, the guy tried to grab Terry.”
“Physically tried to grab him?”
“Yeah, but Terry was fast. He poked the guy in the eye with his thumb and we took off running.”
“Did the guy chase you?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t stand a chance. We laughed about it later. After JoJo got arrested, though, I thought about it some more. Terry said it didn’t mean nothing, but it didn’t feel right. I mean JoJo treated Terry cool. No weird stuff. He liked a little booty, but that was it. No hassles. But the guy in the van – he’d cut you up in a heartbeat.”
“You get a good look at this guy.”
Lake shrugged. “Just a flash when he grabbed at Terry.”
“Black guy? White guy?”
“White guy with bad acne scars.”
“Hair?”
“Yeah, he had hair. Why? Are you jealous?”
“You’re not funny,” Alphabet said.
“Black hair,” Lake said, serious again. “Buzzed close. He was tall – about the same size as JoJo.”
“You ever see him again?”
“Yeah. He was around for a while. Cruising, mostly. A looky-loo.”
“Any word on the street about him?”
Lake took her time answering. “The other kid – Ricky Long – I asked around. Like Terry, he’d done JoJo a couple of times.” She paused, picked up the second burrito and put it in the pocket of her fatigue jacket. “But the noise on the street is that his last gig was the guy in the blue van.”
Chapter 43
Darcy Wyatt lay on his cell bunk listening to his heart pound. His cell mate was a buffed-up Aryan Alliance member who was awaiting trial on ten counts of armed robbery. Bubba Jack Henderson was built like an ape and had more tattoos than a warehouse full of topless dancers. His IQ, like his personality, had a lot in common with fence post.
Darcy’s previous cell mate had been a Jamaican check-kiter who’d been afraid of his own shadow. The check-kiter had been given his day in court, however, and was now on his way to doing a county lid at Wayside Honor Rancho.
The check-kiter had been little company, but he’d posed no threat. Bubba Jack Henderson, on the other hand, scared Darcy to death. He’d been moved into the cell earlier in the day, and his eyes had lit up when he’d seen Darcy. It was brutal lust at first sight.
“You hearing me, sweet cheeks?” Bubba Jack asked from the upper bunk. “You and me gonna be real good friends once the lights go down. I do hope you’re a screamer. I love a good screamer.”
The cells had just been locked down for the night and Darcy felt as if his heart was going to burst through his rib cage.
“Gonna be just like in that movie Deliverance. Gonna make you squeal like a pig.”
Icy sweat beaded on Darcy’s forehead and his stomach churned in fear and anticipation.
“You better not tell nobody, sweet cheeks,” Bubba Jack said, his voice filled with soft menace. “And you better not try to get away. If I don’t nail you here, I’ll nail you somewhere else later. And if I have to wait, I ain’t gonna be gentle.”
Darcy thought he was going to suffocate. He knew his father had pulled numerous strings to get him released, but a couple of detectives, Hammersmith and Lawless, had been in court at the arraignment and had fought to keep Darcy in custody. The Judge, who happened to have an eighty year old mother of his own at home, had agreed with the detectives and refused bail.
A preliminary hearing had been held two weeks later. Hammersmith and Lawless had been in court again testifying, under proposition 115, in place of the victims. They had made Darcy sound like a mass murderer. Darcy’s lawyer, Harley Bryson – a high priced contemporary of his father’s, had only been able to do limited damage control.
Without being able to pick apart the elderly victims themselves, Bryson had been faced with trying to crack the steel reserves of the two detectives. Between their testimony and Darcy’s confession – which Bryson had been unable to get suppressed for the preliminary hearing – Darcy had been easily held to answer and sent back to county jail to await trial. Bail had been denied again.
Darcy had tried talking to his father, pleading with him to get a different lawyer, or to find a way himself to get Darcy out on bail. Devon Wyatt, however, simply told Darcy to grow up. Things couldn’t be as bad as he was making out. Didn’t Darcy know how busy he was representing JoJo Cullen?
The other factor was that with Darcy in jail, Devon Wyatt didn’t have to worry about what further excesses Darcy might commit.
Darcy tried to accept the situation. He still believed his father would get him out sooner or later. And his father was right, it wasn’t too bad.
But then Bubba Jack Henderson entered the frame.
“You’re gonna love it, sweet cheeks, when I make you my woman. It’s gonna be a butt busting party.” Bubba Jack gave a bit of a sigh. “I surely do love popping cherries.”
Darcy was trying to think, trying to figure his way clear. He knew some things, some things that may just buy him a ticket out of this threatened hell. He knew he should have used this ace earlier, but he’d thought he wouldn’t need it. Even though he’d wanted to get at his father, he’d believed his father would somehow get him out. But that wasn’t going to happen fast enough.
Darcy knew what he’d done was bad, but he also knew about what somebody else had done. And what that person had done, made what Darcy had done pale by comparison. As he lay agonizing on his bunk, he tried to make himself believe he could work a trade-off – his knowledge for a get out of jail free card, or at least an escape from Bubba Jack.
He began to pray. Darcy prayed for access to a phone. And he prayed for those two detectives to believe him. That his sins had brought him closer to the devil than the Lord didn’t bother him. He knew God forgave all sins – even grave ones.
He kept his eyes closed, and tried not to concentrate on the rumbling in his bowels. His sphincter itched.
His lips moved in silent supplication.
He knew he needed a miracle.
And suddenly, he heard one walking down the row of cells.
Chapter 44
Rhonda Lawless put down the phone receiver and gave a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin to her partner across the table.
“Surprise, surprise,” she said. “Darcy Wyatt wants to talk to us, and he wants to talk to us right now.”
“Without his lawyer?” Hammersmith asked. There was mock amazement in his voice.
“Without his lawyer,” Rhonda confirmed. “And since Darcy called us, we don’t have to advise his lawyer that we’re going to talk to him.”
“No fuss, no muss, no Miranda problems,” Hammer said. He stood up. “Maybe we’ll get to the bottom of this thing yet.”
The two detectives had been working late at the station, catching up on a stack of minor cases that had been piling up. Darcy’s off-hours call had come at a good time.
“Darcy’s lucky he caught us,” Rhonda said.
“You know what they say about the Lord working in mysterious ways,” replied Hammer, buckling on his gun and handcuffs. “So, let’s not look a gift horse
in the mouth.”
“We’re going to have to work on getting you a new set of metaphors.”
“Can I also get one of those metaphor racks that hang on the wall? I’ve always wanted to be able to alphabetize my metaphors.”
“I swear, Hammer, you spew so much crap around, I’m beginning to think you’re anal-expulsive instead of anal-retentive.”
The trip to county jail took thirty minutes through the evening traffic. Another twenty minutes was spent checking in at the front desk and arranging for an interview room. A further fifteen ticked by as Darcy was brought down from his cell.
When he entered the interview room, Darcy looked even worse than normal. His long, dirty blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail giving full exposure to his weasel face and weak chin. His general anemic countenance was further intensified by the pale and clammy pallor of his skin.
“Sit down,” Hammersmith said. He pointed to a chair on the other side of a small wooden table where he and Rhonda were sitting.
Darcy almost scurried to the indicated seat.
“Thanks,” Rhonda said to the deputy who had brought Darcy in. The deputy tipped his finger to his head in a caricature of a salute, and left them alone. He closed the door behind him.
Darcy had his hands clasped on the table in front of him to stop them from trembling. “Hey, how you guys doing?” he asked.
“Don’t try and ingratiate yourself,” Hammer said. “We didn’t drive all the way down here to make small talk. You got something worth talking about then say it.”
Darcy felt sick. This wasn’t going to work.
He thought of Bubba Jack waiting for him back in the cell.
He swallowed.
Somehow, it had to work.
Hammer set a small tape recorder in the middle of the table and turned it on. He spoke the date and time and named those present in the room.
“Does your father know you called us?” Rhonda asked.
“No.”
