Inheritance

by Joe McKinney

  “Seriously, Bobby, what is that stuff written on his face? Gang graffiti?”

  Cantrell studied the body without answering.

  “We need to canvass the area, right?” Herrera asked. “See if anybody saw anything.”

  “Yeah, right. You’re gonna get some great witnesses out of these oxygen thieves. I’ll tell you what this is. This here is misdemeanor homicide. Ain’t nobody gonna be broken up this piece of shit’s dead.”

  “Still, we ought to—”

  “Fine,” said Cantrell. “We’ll sweep the area.”

  There was another man sitting in the shadows just a few yards away from the body, and Herrera walked over to him carefully, his gun snug against his thigh. He kicked the man’s foot, hard.

  “Get up,” he said.

  The man didn’t move.

  Herrera kicked him again, even harder. “Come on, asshole. Get up. I want to talk to you.” The man fell over onto his side, landing face up. His face was smashed, just like the other junkie, the same strange symbols scrawled across his forehead. “Holy shit!” Herrera backed away from him. “Cantrell! Hey Cantrell, I got another one over here.”

  Cantrell was standing next to him a moment later with his gun in his hand.

  Herrera lit up the body with his flashlight. “Look at his face,” Herrera said.

  Cantrell shook his head.

  Herrera moved his flashlight over the rest of the scene. They were standing in what amounted to a long corridor. The walls on either side of them were rusted sheets of corrugated metal that the resident dopers had covered with blankets and piled high with trash. There were three more bodies further down the corridor, all of them dead, and it looked like parts of the walls were spattered with blood. Somebody had gone through here and torn everything to pieces. Walls, clothing, blankets, trash, bodies—everything was destroyed. Herrera thought, Run a tornado through a homeless shelter and this is what you’d have left over.

  He started to speak, but Cantrell put up his hand to silence him.

  “Shhh,” he hissed. “Listen.”

  Herrera stood perfectly still. Somewhere in the darkened gloom ahead of them, a goat was bleating quietly. He looked at Cantrell for guidance, but Cantrell’s eyes were focused on the dark.

  ***

  Both men had their weapons ready. They covered each other as they moved out, leap-frogging past each other, taking the hallway in stages all the way to the far end, where the hallway opened up on an immense circular chamber with no ceiling. The walls around it were twenty feet high at least. Three gray, crumbling smokestacks jutted up against the ash gray sky beyond the rim of the far wall. The air smelled like blood and the horrible gut-wrenching stench of decay.

  There were bodies everywhere.

  Most looked like they’d been beat to death with a bat.

  A weird-looking white goat was standing in the middle of the chamber, looking at them with black, glassy eyes. Another just like it, white and shaggy like a sheepdog, was nearby. It had been carved, neck to belly, so that now the carcass was open on the ground like a canoe.

  Something glinted off to their left, and both men immediately turned to the man seated cross-legged in the shadows. He wore a white, long-sleeved shirt, black pants, and a black Stetson cowboy hat. His hands were working furiously on a three foot high pile of sticks that he was tying together with baling wire while he rocked back and forth, murmuring in a language they couldn’t understand.

  Cantrell tried to tell the man to show his hands, but couldn’t quite get the words out. He was stammering, choking, like he had a walnut crammed down his throat. He tried to raise his gun, but it felt heavy in his hand. Part of his mind was screaming at him to get his gun up, front sight on target, scan the area for additional threats, but that was a small part, a distant far away part.

  He glanced at Herrera. The detective was standing too close to the man, his hands hanging limply at his side. To Cantrell he looked like a deer caught in headlights, frozen with fear.

  “Get back!” Cantrell tried to scream. But the words still wouldn’t come.

  The man on the floor glanced up at Herrera, though his hands never stopped lashing the sticks together. His forehead was marked with the same three symbols they’d seen on the bodies out in the corridor. His eyes were solid white, like they’d turned up into his head, and his mouth was hanging open, no teeth showing behind the man’s razor thin lips.

  The man’s hands stopped moving. The next instant, he rose to his feet in a series of jerks and starts, like a drunk moving through a darkened club under a strobe light.

  The strike was so fast and vicious that Herrera never even had a chance to react. The man punched out at him with one hand, locking an iron grip around his throat with a force that bent him over backwards like his spine was made from a rope of licorice.

  Cantrell fell backwards with a whimper. He felt a horrible nausea wash over him, the bile rising in his throat, his strength slipping away.

  Somehow, he made himself move. He brought his pistol up and fired twice into the looming figure, but the man in the starched white shirt and black Stetson didn’t seem to notice the bullets pounding into his chest.

  Cantrell turned and ran down the corridor, hitting his radio’s emergency tone the whole way.

  He ran past the bodies they had seen on the way in without really seeing them. Panic blinded him. He rounded the first corner he came to, and found himself facing a wall. He turned left, then right, and as his panic mounted he felt the fetid stench of decay crashing down around him, suffocating him.

  He sensed the man in the black Stetson behind him and turned to face him.

  He raised his pistol but couldn’t make himself shoot. It was as if the man’s very presence was sucking away his will to fight. He could feel himself weakening as the man drew nearer.

  He fell to his knees and sobbed. “Please dear God don’t,” he said, the word’s coming out all at once, slurred together.

  A white, shaggy goat emerged from the circular chamber behind the man.

  Cantrell looked up again into the man’s face, but couldn’t make out his features. He was veiled in heat shimmers. The man reached out a dried, mummified hand, the skin cracked and discolored, like old parchment, and as the fingers sought out his throat, pushing his chin out of the way, Cantrell knew that this was the end.

  Chapter 3

  Mike gunned the Ford onto Houston Street, the main road that ran in front of the Eastside Substation, the big V8 winding up under his expert touch, the car’s back end sliding into oversteer. All Paul could do was hold onto the dashboard, his stomach rising into his throat as Mike shot around a slow-moving Coca Cola truck and into traffic.

  “Jesus,” Paul said. His mouth had gone dry. He looked at Mike. “What’s the rush?”

  Smiling to himself, Mike slid around a turn and accelerated hard onto a straightaway. He’s trying to impress me, Paul thought. He’s the alpha dog, that’s what this is.

  Beside him, Mike chuckled.

  This is pointless, Paul thought. He leaned back into his seat and tried to keep from getting car sick.

  “Listen,” Mike said, after they’d gone a couple of blocks, “don’t take that shit that Collins says personally, okay? He’s just pleasantly disgruntled.”

  “What does that mean?” Paul had to speak up to hear himself over the Metallica Mike liked to listen to while he drove.

  “He’s a good guy,” Mike said. “He’s just a little—aw, fuck!”

  Mike jogged the wheel slightly to the right, then turned a U-turn so hard it threw Paul against the passenger door.

  “What’s going on?” Paul managed. He was holding onto the dashboard like it was the edge of a cliff. Before he had been irritated with Mike for showing off like this, but now, with the tires shrieking on the pavement, he was starting to get scared.

  “Drug buy,” Mike said. The smile was gone from his face now. His lips had pulled inward, his gaze lasered in on a small section of parking
lot across the street.

  They drove into the lot at high speed. The tiny stretch of cement was lit with weak, yellowish lights on leaning wooden poles. Paul saw a pair of men framed in the patrol car’s takedown lights—one old, leaning on a cane, the other young, wearing a wife beater t-shirt and jeans sagging off his ass. They were looking into the lights with wide open, terrified eyes.

  The young one took off running instantly, making for the darkened, overgrown alley behind the convenience store. Paul threw off his seatbelt and made ready to chase after him before the car even stopped rolling.

  “No!” Mike said. “He’s the buyer. The old man’s the one we want.”

  Mike slid the car to a stop and got out. And just like that his demeanor changed. He had the same calm, affable swagger Paul had seen back at the East Side Substation, when they were hanging out with the guys, though now there was a predatory glint in his eyes. He would have made a good linebacker, Paul thought.

  Mike walked up to the old man casually. To someone who didn’t know better, he might have looked bored, but Paul recognized it was just part of an act. This was some kind of ritual display of dominance he was witnessing, the time-honored dance of cop confronting crook.

  “Hey there, Wilson,” Mike said. “Whatcha doing?”

  Paul glanced at Mike. You know him?

  “I ain’t doin’ nothin’,” the old man said petulantly.

  “Sellin’ rock ain’t exactly doin’ nothin’,” Mike said.

  “I ain’t sellin’ no rock,” the old man snapped back.

  “Why don’t you save me the effort of searching you Wilson and just put your shit there on the hood of my car?”

  “Fuck you,” the man said. “I don’t have to talk to you. My lawyer said so.” He turned around and started to walk off.

  Mike shook his head. He glanced at Paul and smiled a winning, self-assured smile. “He always wants to do it this way,” he said. He walked after Wilson, caught up with him, and grabbed the man’s arm by the wrist and spun him around.

  The move startled Wilson, who turned and swung his cane high in the air, trying to get himself loose. Paul had closed in when he saw Mike making his move, and he was standing in the wrong spot when the old man swung. The cane caught Paul square in the forehead with a loud thwapp!

  Paul recoiled. He wasn’t hurt, but the blow had surprised him.

  Mike tossed Wilson unceremoniously onto the hood of the car, kicked his cane aside, and handcuffed him.

  “You okay?” he said to Paul.

  Paul held his forehead. He looked at his fingers, as though he expected to see something there. His fingers were dry, though.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Nothing to it.”

  Mike went through the man’s pockets and came up with twenty-four little blue Ziploc baggies and a big rolled up wad of money. Inside each baggie was a chunk of white crack cocaine about the size of Paul’s pinkie fingernail.

  Holy shit, Paul thought, staring at the load. Holy shit!

  Mike stood Wilson up near the front of the car and read him his rights. When he was finished he said, “I thought you told me you weren’t selling no rock.”

  “You fuckin’ put it there, man. I done tol’ you, I ain’t sellin’ no rock.”

  “My partner’s the one makes things magically appear in people’s pockets,” Mike said, smiling at Paul. “Not me. Paul, call this in, will you? You know what I want?”

  “Yeah,” Paul said, running through the narcotics arrest procedures in his head. “Case for narcotics, uniformed detective with a test kit for the crack, and a drug dog to sniff out the area in case he or the buyer tossed anything.”

  “Don’t worry about the dog.”

  “But the General Manual says—”

  “Haven’t you been listening to the radio?”

  Paul swallowed, mentally kicking himself. Between the excitement of the arrest and Mike’s crazy driving, he hadn’t heard anything. He shook his head.

  “Carlson and Jeffers just got a stolen truck down in 230’s district. You heard them calling for the drug dogs?”

  Paul hadn’t. He shook his head.

  “They’ll be searching that thing for meth for sure. There’s a lot of it around there. The drug dogs’ll be tied up for hours.”

  Paul nodded.

  Then he saw the video camera on the corner of the convenience store’s roof and said, “What about that? They might have caught the arrest on video.”

  Mike shook his head. “Good instincts, but no. That camera hasn’t worked in months. That’s why old Wilson does his business in this lot. Ain’t that right, Wilson?”

  “Fuck you, man.”

  Mike chuckled. To Paul, he said, “Just get us a case and call for a DI.”

  “Okay,” Paul said, and got on the radio. When he was done he went back to where Mike and Wilson were talking. Wilson was trying to tell Mike he had to take him to the hospital.

  Paul’s spirits fell. When a prisoner complained of injury there was always paperwork, endless paperwork. Then there was the trip to the hospital, the tedious, depressing, boring-as-all-hell hospital. Babysitting duty, the guys called it. It was a detestable assignment, sitting in some industrial-lit teaching hospital for hours on end for some tired old doctor to make a seven second diagnosis. If they had to take Wilson to the hospital, the rest of the night would be a wash.

  Mike caught the look in Paul’s eye, and it was like he could read the thoughts in his head. “Wilson here says he’s sick,” Mike said. “He says we got to take him to the hospital. What was it you said you’ve got, Wilson, Dutch Elm Disease?”

  “I’m sick, man. You can’t refuse to take me to a hospital. I know my fuckin’ rights.”

  Mike smiled.

  “Look, Wilson, how many times have I arrested you now? Four, five times?”

  “Fuck you, man.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right. It is six times, isn’t it?” He said, “Look, you know how this goes, Wilson. The hospital’s got better things to do than babysit an old crackhead. I’ll tell you what. How about I go inside that store there and buy you a cinnamon roll and a Slim Jim? If I do that, will you stop being such an asshole?”

  “Say what?” Wilson tried to wheel around on Mike. From his tone, from the defiance in his stance, even with the handcuffs locking his hands behind his back, it was obvious all he had heard was a Hispanic cop calling him an asshole.

  “A cinnamon roll,” Mike said patiently. “And a Slim Jim. When was the last time you ate, Wilson?”

  Wilson hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Yeah, maybe. I ain’t sure. Maybe yesterday.”

  “That’s a long time,” Mike said. “I mean, if you can’t remember, that’s a long time, right?”

  Wilson thought about that. He said, “I want a coffee, too.”

  “With cream?” Mike asked.

  “Yeah. And sugar.”

  ***

  Later, after they’d dropped Wilson off at the Magistrate’s Office and turned in all the paperwork and secured the drugs and the cash in the property room, they were on the road back to the East Side, back to their district.

  Mike was driving. Mike insisted on driving. He said, “I was telling you about Wes and Collins.”

  “Yeah,” Paul said, “I remember.”

  “Those guys are my friends. I mean, you know, they’re good guys.”

  “Sure,” Paul said. “I get it.”

  “I don’t want you to think wrong of Collins. I know he comes across like he’d rather piss on your toes than shake your hand, but he’s a good friend. He’ll have your back when it counts. He may not seem like it, but he’s a good cop.”

  “Does he always act that pissed off?”

  Mike chuckled. It was a warm sound that made the interior of the police car seem warm, welcoming. Paul liked this guy. He could tell that already. Something about Mike put him at ease. New as he was to police work, Paul went around most of the time fe
eling exposed, unprepared, like he was up in front of an angry crowd and had forgotten his lines. Every encounter with the public threatened disaster, every decision he was forced to make haunted by self-doubt. But Mike, Paul sensed, had his back. He was a joker, and could be cruel as pranksters often were, but he wasn’t going to let Paul fail. Of that Paul was certain.

  “It was the bit with that detective that did it to him tonight,” Mike said.

  “Yeah, what was that about?”

  “How much did you hear?”

  “Just that last part about Wes and Collins doing an illegal search. You kind of saved their ass, from what it sounds like.”

  Mike shrugged, as though to say: Yeah, maybe. “Their heart was in the right place,” he said. “Those two, Wes and Collins, sometimes they get a little overeager.”

  Paul laughed. When they taught the rules of Arrest, Search, and Seizure at the Academy, overeager wasn’t exactly the kind of virtue they praised.

  “No really,” Mike said, as though picking up the train of Paul’s thought. Mike could do that. He had a facile ease when it came to reading people. “That bit about the young girl screaming?” Mike went on. “That was all for real. They really did kick down that guy’s door because they heard a young girl screaming. They were there for a family disturbance. The girl was even the one who called it in.”

  “Sounds straightforward enough,” Paul said.

  “It was. At least until they knocked the front door down. Then, when they got inside, they saw all that jewelry. I mean, it was laid out everywhere. All over the couches and the beds and the floor. Most of it still had the price tags on it. It was like the guy was taking inventory, you know? He meant business, too. He had police scanners and bulletproof vests and Chinese-made SKSs. He was the real deal. Then they saw all that stuff from the robbery, and they froze.”

  “I thought that detective said they beat the guy up.”

  “Oh, they did. You got to remember, that guy killed four people in that robbery. He’s looking at the death penalty easy. Wes and Collins knew that. They knew the guy would do anything to stay out of jail. So when he tried to push them back out the front door they ended up in a massive fight. They managed to get him out onto the front lawn, and that’s where the fight got really bad.”