Watts’ eyes showed a flicker of doubt as Billy came to his full height. Watts wasn’t used to seeing a man look down on him and in spite of himself he stepped back a bit to give Billy room to turn around on his way to the door. Billy heard more snickering from the table. That seemed to anger Watts and he gave Billy a shove toward the door as he walked by. Billy felt warmth flood his face as he stumbled a bit—Watts was strong—and then kept going.
“Fuckin’ pervert,” one of the other men said loudly just before the door closed behind him. He heard one of them laugh.
It was cold outside. Billy stood still, fumbling with the zipper on his coat, and remembered he’d left his gloves on the counter. He could feel the men watching him through the glass. He thought of going back inside to get the gloves but knew it would be bad if he did. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and headed toward his truck.
He was almost there when he heard footsteps moving fast on the sidewalk behind him. Something hit him hard in the back and he pitched forward, slamming the top of his head against the side of his truck. He buckled to one knee and then got hit again, a succession of punches across the back of his head and neck. A couple of them caught the back of his heavy coat but the rest connected, stunning him. He could feel the weight of a heavy body pushing him down to the sidewalk. Instinctively he pushed up with one flexed leg, his foot planted on the ground. He brought his elbow back hard and heard an explosive grunt from behind him and the weight went away as the man buckled onto the sidewalk.
There was more than one, though—they were all out there now. Someone grabbed his left arm, trying to twist it behind his back. Billy was too strong for that, pulling the arm forward and bringing the man with it, slamming him against the truck. He still had his back to the others and he felt somebody else reach around his neck from behind. He spun and backed up hard against the truck. He heard another loud grunt but the man hung on and then the remaining two were on him. He got a hand free and clubbed outward with it, his fist coming down on empty space.
He didn’t like fighting, and most of the time he’d never had to. It got him into trouble and most of the time his size had been enough to keep potential antagonists away from him. To the men attacking him fighting was just something they’d always done, and in any case it wasn’t a fight. They thought it was justice, and once Billy was pinned against the truck it just became a beating.
Except that one of them—the smallest one, even though he was still well north of two hundred pounds—got too close. Billy wrapped a huge hand around his neck, hauled him in close, and then literally tossed him into the street.
Wheelock was lucky, although later he would attribute that luck to his razor sharp reflexes. He’d seen the clump of flailing bodies up ahead and was still accelerating the car to get there when the man came sailing out from the gap between Billy’s truck and the car parked in front of it. Wheelock slammed on the brakes, the big Impala slewing to a stop only a couple of feet from the man who’d hit the pavement. The guy slowly brought himself to his hands and knees, his eyes wide.
Wheelock shoved the transmission lever into Park and blipped the siren, the strobes coming up at the same time. One by one the men at the curb looked around and started to pull away from the huge form—had to be the same monster from the schoolyard—who was at the center of it.
All Billy knew was that suddenly he could move, and he lashed out again. It was a clumsy punch, but it caught the man with his head turning away toward the street and it had all of Billy’s weight behind it. He went down like he’d been poleaxed.
Wheelock was still trembling with reaction. He looked at the men and wasn’t sure if he could brazen this one out or not. They all knew Wheelock and Wheelock knew them, so there was no use trying to run anywhere. They also knew that any one of them could eat him for breakfast. Wheelock knew it too. He got out of the car and toned down his cop swagger as he approached them.
“What’s goin’ on here?” he was trying hard to keep his voice calm, authoritative.
Watts assumed the role of spokesman, the way he always did.
“What does it look like?” he waved a hand toward Billy, “He just went nuts, started beating on Terry here.”
The guy who’d been tossed into the street had gotten up and was moving toward the curb. Wheelock glanced over at him, trying to remember the guy’s name—Dunning, something like that.
“That what happened?”
Dunning looked confused, glancing over at Watts.
“Yeah—bastard suckered me.”
Billy was standing with his back to the grille of the old truck. Wheelock looked over at him.
“Is that right?”
Billy shook his head slowly.
“No, sir. They came up and jumped on me.”
“He’s fulla shit, Wheelock,” Watts was grinning, “Look at the size of ‘im. You think we’re crazy?”
Something like that, Wheelock thought but didn’t say. Watts was hard country stock, not afraid of anything or anybody. Wheelock weighed his options and figured he had a much better chance of getting Billy out of there than trying to get the other guys to move. There was a pretty good chance they’d just laugh and tell him to go fuck himself.
It wasn’t exactly police procedure, but taking the big man would get him out of there without looking like a fool—or getting the shit kicked out of him. He remembered how Frank had handled him at the school, knew that was probably his best chance.
Watts was still grinning at him. Wheelock had the unpleasant thought that he knew exactly what had been going through his mind.
“C’mon, uh, Billy.”
He could hear them snickering as he took Billy by the arm and guided him toward the cruiser. He looked like a small boy leading a giant.
7
Frank was sweating. He didn’t know what his time was but it had to be slow. He never wore a watch while running, never tried to time himself other than to check the time when he left and then again when he came back. That was all you ever saw in Pittsburgh—yuppies in designer tracksuits, jogging in place at intersections, one finger pressed to their necks and consulting thousand dollar chronographs. It hadn’t taken him long to hate the sight of the smug bastards. When he was in uniform he was too damn tired after a shift anyway and most of the time he had all the exercise he needed shoving assholes into cop cars. When he’d left the bag and made detective it was the same thing, only different, even more consuming. After a while it was—everything. All there was. Everything else was just downtime, waiting for the next rotation to start.
When he’d gotten the job here he’d promised himself to have something beyond his work, even though he didn’t really know how to go about doing that. The jogging had been part of it, although when he’d first started doing it he’d gone a bit overboard and had to force himself to back off and not be quite as ambitious about it. Now that he’d decided to have a life he figured dying young would be a bad idea.
He was wearing old gray sweats—no logo—and a pair of nondescript sneakers. He remembered the feeling he’d had watching the yuppies and didn’t want the locals here feeling the same way about him.
He rounded the corner off Fremont about the halfway point on his usual route, around a mile out and a mile back—and saw two women trying to wrestle a couch off a U-Haul truck. The couch was winning.
It looked like one of those things that flipped out into a bed—twin I-beam suspension, probably weighed about a ton—and just when he was within about twenty yards the tape holding it together let go and the whole thing cantilevered out and down, right on top of the girl struggling to take its weight.
He got there just before her knees buckled.
“I got it,” he grunted, pushing the wayward couch back up toward the bed of the truck. It took a moment for the woman in the truck—he recognized her now, it was the schoolteacher—to realize what he was trying to do. Then she got it and moved back into the truck a bit, keeping a grip on her end of the couch, giving
him room to shove everything back into the truck bed. She let her end down slowly, the neckline of her top dipping down to reveal the swell of her breasts. He could see the glisten of sweat and looked away quickly—right into the eyes of the younger one, who smiled slyly at his embarrassment.
“Thanks,” she told him.
“Sure—you guys okay?”
They were either mother and daughter or sisters with a long gap in age. He could tell the schoolteacher was trying to place him.
“We’re fine. It was just awkward that’s all.”
“I know what you mean,” he grinned, gesturing at the couch, “I hate these things. Why don’t the two of you take one end and I’ll get the other?”
He could tell the schoolteacher—couldn’t think of her first name, if he’d ever known it, she sure as hell hadn’t given it to him—he could tell she resented the offer.
It was serendipity at its finest, or at least it had seemed that way for the first few minutes. He’d given them a hand getting the couch taped back up and then helped them lug it inside. He would have been more than willing to stay around there and help them a while longer, but his offer to do so had been politely turned down. Actually the mother had turned it down. She said they were just moving some things in that had been in storage during ‘the move’ and she still hadn’t decided where to put everything. That was as much personal information as he got. The teenaged girl—her name was Emily—had rolled her eyes and given her mother a reproving look. It was clear she would have been more than happy with some extra help.
He didn’t push it, and afterward he wondered if the mother had caught his look when they were wrestling with the couch. It didn’t matter—he was sure her daughter would tell her anyway.
Old beyond her years, and dangerous.
“Didn’t take you long,” Adrienne looked up to see Emily smiling at her. The cop had just left, resuming his slow jog down the street.
“What are you talking about?”
“That guy. You know each other.”
“We met once—he’s some kind of police officer. We were having some trouble at the schoolyard and I had to call.”
Emily ran her tongue suggestively around her teeth.
“Oooohh—trouble at the schoolyard...”
8
He was sweating like crazy, hard as a rock—and she pulled her hand away. He felt like he was going to explode and all she did was smile, then reach for the door handle.
“Where you going?”
They were in the middle of—not nowhere, but a long way from most places. The windshield had fogged up and he could just make out the beach and the darkness of the lake beyond.
She stuck out her tongue, eyes dancing.
“I’m going for a swim,” she reached for the door and opened it, batting his hand away when he tried to reach across her and bring her back. One smooth movement and she was out of the car, then leaning back in with those Victoria’s Secret breasts bobbing in the low cut of her top.
“You want it, you come and get it.”
Shit. The sun had dropped hours ago and it’d be colder than hell out there. He hated swimming, wasn’t very good at it—she’d laugh at him. She was skipping down toward the raggedy little beach, pulling off her top and tossing it away. She’d probably seen someone doing that in a movie or something.
Fuck it—he got out of the car and followed her down, trying to catch her before she made it into the water. He caught a glimpse of that white, perfect little ass as she teetered awkwardly on the beach and pulled off her jeans. He almost got to her then but she splashed into the lake only inches ahead of his outstretched hand.
No backing out now—not if he ever wanted to fuck her. He hurriedly stripped off his clothes. He knew it stayed shallow here for a few yards and then dropped off like a cliff—she’d already kicked a few yards straight out, then turned, treading water, and stuck her tongue out again.
He took a deep breath—better to do this all at once—and dove forward into the water. Damn it was cold. She hadn’t expected him to plunge right in like that—she squealed and whirled around to paddle out farther, but she was too late. He pulled her in to him and she laughed, her legs coming up around him and his mouth going to her left nipple, erect and slick with lake water. She moaned and reached for him, guiding him inside her, her legs tightening around him and her hips beginning to move. He nearly drowned both of them while he steered her back toward the shallows, somewhere he could get some traction, finally getting back to where he could stand up. He wrapped his forearms under her thighs and let her fall gently on her back in the water. She gave a little yelp of fear and then a delighted laugh as she realized what he was doing. He tightened his grip on her legs, spreading his outstretched fingers across the top of her thighs.
She spread her arms out on the water and let him take her, keeping her torso above water with little pinwheel motions of her arms as he rhythmically pulled her close, let her slide away, almost to the point where she was clear of him, then pulled her back hard, again and again. He was vaguely aware of something floating nearby, but then his eyes drifted back to her breasts and he slammed into her harder. She bit off a scream, tightening her legs around his hips and using her heels to pull him closer.
She was coming and he couldn’t wait any longer. She screamed and writhed in the water and it was all beyond him and he let it go. When it finally ended she was still screaming.
That’s when he looked up and saw the horror bobbing in the water beside them.
Cop or not, nobody likes a late night phone call. Frank listened for a minute, got the location, and left.
It was a couple of miles out of town, a place that regularly hosted teenage couples who couldn’t get their parents out of the house long enough to have sex. Frank had been there often enough at the same age—hell, just about everyone in town had at one time or another. Not much to it—just a dirt road that went a couple of hundred yards through the trees to a little clearing overlooking a tiny lake.
Romantic.
Frank parked the truck as far as away as he could. There were two vehicles there already, one of the department cruisers and an old Dodge. Frank headed for the lights and was hardly halfway there when Raycroft, one of his veterans, came puffing down the track to meet him. He looked sick. Frank had the feeling he’d come back to meet him just to get away from whatever mess was back there, but Frank went along with it and told him to go back down toward the main road, stop any civilians from driving in. Tire tracks would be important, but even as Frank said it he knew there’d be so many tracks in there it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. Raycroft practically sighed with relief and lumbered down past Frank’s truck.
The boy and girl who’d found the body were huddled together against the flank of the Dodge talking to Wheelock, who’d been partnered up with Raycroft for the night. Wheelock didn’t look so good either, but the kids looked worse. Frank had seen both of them around often enough but couldn’t stick names on the faces. Raycroft’s cruiser was pointed out toward the lake, lights illuminating a bloated shape on the shoreline.
Like every cop Frank had seen way too many bodies, but no one ever gets used to one that’s been in the water for a few days. There were a lot of people who put up a good front—everybody from morgue attendants to paramedics to cops to M.E.’s—and it was usually the ones with the biggest fronts who actually had the roughest time. Their self-consciously hard-bitten jokes always seemed to have an undercurrent of controlled hysteria.
Frank could tell the body was female, and from the clothes probably quite young. That was it—the fish had been at her. He was dimly aware of someone coming behind him and used the excuse to turn around.
“Oh shit,” Wagner said.
“Yeah.”
Jeff Wagner was the M.E. He even looked the part, like some casting director’s idea of what a medical examiner should look like—metal framed glasses, dark overcoat, skeletal frame. In spite of his lugubrious manner Frank had g
ravitated to him over the years, maybe because, like Frank, he hadn’t spent his whole life in one place.
Wagner grimaced and hunkered down beside the body, then looked back over his shoulder.
“She’s dead, Frank.”
“Thanks for the tip. You can go home now.”
Frank saw Wagner’s eyes slide over behind him and turned around. Karl Jamieson was coming toward them, his face flushed either from exertion or excitement. Frank glanced back at Wagner and they exchanged a look. Wagner couldn’t stand the guy either. Frank hurried to head Jamieson off and block his path to the body.
“Whaddya got, Frank?”
Too many Pacino movies, Frank thought. The truth was they had nothing. Blurred tire tracks in a place that was filled with them anyway, no witnesses other than the kids who found her, and so far nothing from the state of the body to indicate what had happened to her. It was way too early to be dealing with Jamieson.
“Right now? Squat. How’d you hear about it?”
Karl smirked, looked like he was ready to brag about his ‘sources’, how he kept his ear close to the ground, etc...Frank cut him off in time.
“Forget it. We just found the kid.”
Karl tried to peer past Frank’s shoulder, but Wagner had positioned himself to block his view. Karl took a step sideways to get a better look. Frank put a hand on his chest. He didn’t want the little bastard puking all over his crime scene.
“You don’t want to do that, Karl.”
Karl huffed.
“I’ve seen dead bodies before, Frank.”
“Sure you have.”
Frank took Karl by the arm and guided him a few feet away, played to his self-importance, like he was getting privileged information. He gave him a couple of basic details and left it at that. Karl wrote them down, then looked up expectantly. Frank stared back at him.
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