by phuc
“Secure this scene right now and get more detectives from the task force here now!” Steve Howe said, eyes darting around. The crowd was getting to him as well, and Steve could make out what was being said in the anger of the rapidly flowing Spanish: another body had been found, the killer was going to keep killing in the neighborhood and the cops weren't going to do a thing about it and—
Across the lot Steve saw more police cars pull up to the scene. He heaved a sigh of relief. One of the vehicles was the white non-descript van of the coroner's office.
And as more back-up officers arrived to control the crowd, the more excited the onlookers became and the more Steve wished this nightmare would end.
How he wished it would end.
Chapter 28
They headed to the front door of the home Charley Glowacz shared with his mother with service revolvers and shields out and ready. The four of them raced up the driveway in a crouched position, moved up to the porch, and Daryl knocked on the door loudly, gun held up and ready. “Open up! LAPD and FBI!"
When nobody answered the door, Daryl signaled to Douglas who was positioned slightly behind him. Douglas stepped back and gave a fierce kick to the door. The door cracked and Douglas kicked it again, snapping the lock. Daryl pushed the door open and the three men burst in, guns drawn, adrenaline running a mile a minute, pumped up with the energy to take this bastard in.
As they rushed in, the first thing Daryl saw was the blood spatters on the far wall.
He tensed up, a million bad thoughts running through his mind. He motioned to the left of the house. “Check the kitchen,” he said to Douglas. “Espana, cover me."
The two men crept forward, guns ready. Haskins trailed Douglas, covering him.
The living room was dark. Daryl reached toward the wall and flipped the light switch.
The room was bathed in light. The cream colored walls made the bloodstains more stark in contrast to the rest of the room, which was small, but tidy. Homey. It was obvious from the knocked over lamp and the turned over chair that a struggle had ensued. Douglas and Haskins came out of the kitchen. “Clear,” Agent Haskins said. His face was tense and pale.
Daryl motioned to the darkened hallway. “Let's check it."
They crept down the hallway. Daryl's senses were on full alert: he heard every sound that was made, which mostly consisted of the creak of the floor as they walked through the house. The rest of the house was silent.
Haskins came upon a closed door on the left and opened it with his left hand, flattening himself out against the hallway. Gun pointing into the room, Espana checked the room out. “Empty,” he said, as they continued down the hall.
They paused at the closed door at the end of the hall. Faint sounds emitted from the room. It was hard to tell if they were the sounds of sobbing or laughter, male or female.
Oh God, please let it be her, let her be alive!
“LAPD! Come out with your hands up!” Daryl shouted.
There was no movement from behind the door. The only sound that came was the hitching sound of a voice that might have been sobbing or light, mad laughter.
Daryl kicked the door in. It banged against the wall and they swarmed into the room, guns out and ready, fingers itching on the trigger. What lay before them leaped out at them like the shock effects of a horror movie.
The room was bathed in blood. It smeared the walls and ceiling and the floor. It stained the sofa against the far wall. Lying on the tan carpet, now turning a deep crimson from the massive amount of blood, was an elderly woman dressed in a faded blue dress.
Or what remained of an elderly woman; what they could tell that the mangled lump of flesh in front of them was a woman was by her neatly severed head, now resting comfortably in the lap of a tall, portly, middle aged man with balding, curly blond hair.
He was rocking back and forth, his glasses slipped down to the bridge of his nose. His clothes were drenched in blood and he sat cross-legged on the floor, the head of the old woman cradled in his lap. He was laughing and crying madly. Daryl was so stunned by the scene that he remained frozen, gun pointed at the man, feet rooted to the spot. By the time he got his senses, Agent Haskins was already snapping out of his shock. “Put your hands above your head, motherfucker! Now!"
Charley looked up at the officers, his eyes red and wet with tears. His lips quivered. “Sh ... she's dead!"
No shit, sherlock, Daryl thought. He took a deep breath and brought himself under control. Charley Glowacz wasn't holding a weapon of any kind and he looked very well over the edge. Nutty as a fruitcake. Daryl stepped around the hacked up body of the old woman on the floor, who he assumed was Charley's mother, and with Detective Espana covering him he stepped further into the room, gun drawn, heart beating, looking for any sign of Rachael.
There was no sign of her; just a trashed room with books thrown to the floor, stereo and television equipment smashed and strewn around and blood drenching the walls and the floor. For the first time he noticed a big butcher knife, its blade stained with blood. It was lying on the floor, halfway between where Charley was sitting and the closed door.
His eyes trailed down to the bloody floor, tracing a trail of blood that ran down the room to a bloodstained door ahead of him, where it abruptly ended.
Daryl raised his piece. “Cover me,” he said to Douglas, as he stepped carefully around the bloodstains on the floor toward the door in front of him.
He approached the door, his muscles tense.
His hand gripped the doorknob. Twisted it.
It was locked.
And from within the room, a muffled cry.
“Rachael!"
Bracing himself, Daryl threw himself against the door, hitting it with his shoulder.
His chest blossomed with pain from his wounds, and he hit the door a second time, feeling the wood splinter. It banged open and he stumbled into a small bathroom, eyes darting around the bloodstained tiles, not knowing what to expect, afraid of what he might find, when the sound came again and then he saw her, cowering in the bathtub in the far corner of the room.
Rachael Pearce was scrunched up in the bathtub. At first she didn't recognize Daryl. Her eyes grew wide with fear as he rushed in, and she instinctively drew back, her hoarse voice trying to scream. “No, no, please, no, stay away—"
“Rachael, it's me! It's Daryl!” Daryl went to her and tried to take her in his arms.
Rachael tried to pull away at first, but then the fear seemed to suddenly leave her.
Her eyes sparkled with recognition. “Daryl! Oh Daryl!"
And then she was in his arms, sobbing with relief. And Daryl was holding her, not even aware that he was crying with relief, so damn glad that she was here with him, alive, hurt maybe, but alive. He held her, stroking her hair, holding her tightly, not wanting to let her go. He could feel that she wanted to hold him as well, but she was too weak to do so. She made wailing, crying sounds, the pain of her ordeal welling up in her, seeking release. He held her, soothing her, rocking her in his arms. His stomach was roiling now with the fresh smell of blood and sweat and piss and shit. His skin crawled at the thought of the bloodstained man sitting on the floor touching her, even looking at her. “Oh Rachael, oh Christ, are you okay? Are you hurt anywhere?"
“My side,” Rachael sobbed, wincing in pain. She motioned toward her left side and Daryl saw that her blouse was stained a deep crimson. “He ... he stabbed me ... a few times ... I ... he just went at me as we were talking ... and ... I tried to fight him off, but ...
he stabbed me and..."
“It's okay, baby, try not to talk,” Daryl got a better look at the wound. His mind quickly filled in the blanks. She somehow must have slipped past him and run into the bathroom, locking herself in. He saw that she had also tried to staunch the bleeding with a bath towel, which had fallen to the bathtub floor when Rachael tried to get up to come to him.
From outside the bathroom: “Everything okay in there?"
“Yeah! Call
for backup and an ambulance.” Daryl turned to Rachael. “How bad is that wound?"
“I don't know,” Rachael said. Daryl saw that she was pale and sweaty. “I know I stopped the bleeding. I ... I've just been trying to remain still and ... and hide from him because ... because I didn't know if he was still out there!” She began sobbing again.
Daryl leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “It's okay, baby. We got an ambulance coming. You just stay there, okay? I don't want to risk moving you until the EMTs get here."
Outside in the bedroom, he heard Charley cry out: “She's dead, she's dead!"
“Goddamn,” Detective Espãna said, his breath sounding harsh and heavy. “We got him. Goddamn it if we didn't get him."
“Yes, we did,” Haskins said.
Daryl Garcia was dimly aware of what was going on outside the bathroom. All he could focus on was the incredible rage he felt at almost having somebody else he loved taken away from him. It made him so angry that he felt ready to explode. Daryl cupped Rachael's face in his hands and kissed her, marveling at the sight and touch of her with him, alive and breathing and crying and living. “You okay, baby?"
Rachael nodded, her cries trickling. She had cried hard upon seeing Daryl and being taken in her arms, but her face wasn't as wet with tears as it should be. Most likely she had cried them all out during her captivity.
Daryl kissed her again and lowered her against the tiled wall of the shower stall.
“You lay back here and relax, okay? I'm gonna get something to cover you up with and then when the EMT's get here we'll get you on a stretcher."
“I'm okay,” she said, hissing the words more than actually saying them. It sounded like it was difficult for her to talk.
“I want a medical professional to assure me you are, okay?” His eyes saw a towel in the bathroom and he darted inside to snatch it off the rack. He draped the towel over her and she drew it around herself. Her large brown eyes looked up at him with gratitude.
And love. My hero, they said.
Detective Douglas pounded back in the bedroom. “I've got back-up and an EMT
on the way,” he said. Daryl rose to his feet and exited the bathroom. He approached Charley Glowacz, who was still sitting on the floor cross-legged with his mother's head in his lap, seemingly oblivious to what was going on around him. Daryl walked around till he was facing him. Then he raised his weapon, taking careful aim. His eyes narrowed into hard slits. “You're lucky Rachael's alive, Glowacz, otherwise you'd live through extreme torture for the rest of your life. Count yourself lucky that a gunshot to the head is relatively quick and painless."
Bernie tensed. “Daryl. Come on, man, this isn't the way—"
“Oh, but it is the way, Agent Haskins,” Daryl kept his piece trained on Charley Glowacz, who seemed oblivious to the danger on his life. He cocked the hammer. “It's the only way to bring any measure of peace in the city. We came here to follow our lead and look what we find. Mister pervert psycho himself with a dead old woman, probably his mother, and we bust in and find him like this. Only instead of sitting here and laughing like the fucking weirdo he is, he lunges at us with the knife he used to kill this poor woman with, the same knife that he almost killed Rachael with, and I shot him in self-defense. Oh yeah, I think that will go over real well with not only the public, but the Chief as well."
“Daryl, put the gun down,” Bernie said sternly, but pleading. “I understand very well where you're coming from—God knows I want to kill the bastard myself—but this isn't the way. There's a better way to deal with this. I know it looks bad, but trust me, we've got him and he's going away for a long time. Hell, with over eighteen murders he's facing a death penalty for sure in California. So come on, let's do the right thing and—"
“No,” Detective Garcia said. “This is the right thing. All the goddamned courts will do is let this scum live off our tax money for the rest of his life while he gets all the rights in the fucking world. Free weight training, free fucking cable TV, free education.
That's not right."
“And this isn't right, either,” Bernie said. “Trust me, Daryl, we've got him. It's an open and shut case. Rachael is safe, and we got the bastard. Come on, put the gun down."
Detective Garcia's face was sweaty as he held the gun on Charley Glowacz. His hands were shaking, his eyes narrowing in anger as he locked his sights on Charley.
Images flashed in his mind; busting in the room and finding Charley sitting on the floor amid the blood and viscera, the severed head of—
(Rachael's bloodied features looking up from her bugged-out eyes, her lolling tongue)
—his mother cradled in his lap, the sound of the gang member shouting at him to
“get the fuck out of the car now!", the joy he had felt when Shirley had told him that she was pregnant and then hearing the loud report of the gun—
(glancing back and seeing Shirley lying in the street, a widening pool of blood spreading beneath her shattered head)
—as she was shot, the feeling of loss and pain he had felt ever since that awful day and then coming to the realization that this hole had now been filled by Rachael Pearce. And realizing she had come dangerously close from being taken away from him as well.
His features broke in a sobbing grimace. “It just isn't right,” he cried. He looked down, away from Charley for an instant, gun still trained on him, and Bernie stepped away from Charley, out of the line of fire. Charley Glowacz remained on the floor with his mother's head cradled in his lap, holding it to his chest protectively now, body curled forward in an almost fetal position as if to protect it.
“Come on, Daryl,” Bernie said softly, soothingly. “Put the gun down."
“Yes, Daryl, put the gun down."
Daryl looked up and saw Rachael standing near the doorway to the bathroom. She had wrapped the towel around herself. She was favoring her left side, and she held the towel against the stab wound. Despite the fact that she was in obvious pain and discomfort, she looked at Daryl with a kind, gentle look. “It's not gonna work, Daryl.
Trust me, I'd love nothing better than to beat this bastard to a bloody pulp with my bare hands and make him suffer. But if I did that I'd be no better than he is. And I'd be in deeper trouble than I could ever imagine. You will be too if you pull that trigger."
Detective Espãna joined her sentiments; he pointed his weapon at Daryl. Espãna's face expressed pure despair. “Give it up, Daryl,” Espãna said. “It's not gonna work."
Daryl glanced back casually at Rachael and Detective Espãna. “What are you going to do, Espãna? Shoot me?"
“Don't make me,” Espãna said, both hands aiming his weapon steady at Daryl. “If you shoot this man you will be committing a felony and we'll have no choice but to take you in to custody."
Daryl's heart was racing as he trained his sight back on Charley Glowacz, who seemed to snap out of his trance and was looking up at the detective with a solemn look.
His features were white and pasty. His eyes beckoned to be put out of his misery. Go ahead, they said. Shoot me. I don't give a fuck anymore.
Rachael pleading: “Please, Daryl. Put the gun down."
Daryl slowly lowered the gun.
Bernie stepped forward, hand stretched out to take the weapon.
Daryl lowered the gun to his side, fingers relaxing from its grip. He shuddered, his features quivering with rage. “I could have had him,” he murmured softly, struggling to rein in his emotions. He looked up at them, eyes wide and pleading. “He doesn't deserve to live."
“I know,” Bernie said, reaching forward and taking the gun swiftly from Daryl's grasp. He uncocked it and placed it into the small of his back. Rachael hobbled into the room and took Daryl gently into her arms. Detective Carl Douglas joined them and gently moved the two of them past Charley, who was still on the floor, toward the living room.
Daryl started crying the minute they were out of the room. Espãna donned a pair of latex gloves that Douglas had brought
in and stepped toward Charley Glowacz to take him away. The sound of cars stopping outside amid the sound of car doors closing and footsteps running up the walk told Daryl that the rest of the calvary had arrived.
The house was swarming with detectives and other police officers in minutes.
Bernie directed them to the back bedroom and nodded as the forensics team arrived. He pointed down the hall. “It's all yours,” he said.
Bernie joined Daryl and Rachael on the front porch. Rachael was holding Daryl, whose crying had now trickled down to sniffles. The paramedics arrived and Bernie turned to a female officer who was standing nearby and motioned to Rachael. “Can you please help the EMTs and get her into a stretcher?” The officer nodded and scampered off to do just that.
Bernie glanced back toward the house then toward Daryl, who was now under control. Daryl looked at Bernie, his eyes red. “He's not going to go anywhere, is he?"
“No,” Bernie agreed. Bernie clapped him on the shoulder. “We did it, buddy. We nailed the bastard.” For the first time in months Daryl felt something like an incredible burden lifting from his shoulders.
And it lifted even further as Charley Glowacz was led out of the house in handcuffs to a waiting squad car and placed in the backseat, lifted even further as he turned to Rachael and with tears in his eyes took her in his arms again and whispered in her ear that he loved her, lifted completely off as he held her tightly and felt the wonderful sensation of her body against his and felt her vibrancy, a vibrancy that was strong and destined to go on forever.
Chapter 29
Daryl Garcia was at his desk in the homicide unit at Parker Center going over the arrest report and files they had amassed on Charley Glowacz. His back hurt and he was getting a slight headache, but the cup of coffee sitting on the desk was helping to stave off the headach. Around him the sound of phones ringing and conversation created a fog that helped him plow through the work that had waited for him when he got to work that morning, two days following the dramatic arrest at the Glowacz residence.
