by Frank Zafiro
O’Sullivan smiled and nodded.
“How bad is it?” Chisolm asked.
Saylor called the room to order before she could answer. “Listen up,” he said. “There’s not a lot to go over tonight, but let’s get to it.”
He read off a pair of recent stolen vehicles, then turned to a memo. “As some of you probably know, the FBI is working the case against our local Russian criminal element. They’re currently in a surveillance mode, so the chief’s office wants you to be aware of that. Should they need our assistance on any operational need, we will respond. Also, we’re going to continue to help babysit their prisoner. Sergeant Shen’s sector has that duty tonight.”
Lieutenant Saylor turned the page and read off some more administrative matters before turning the roll call over to the sector tables.
Sergeant Shen looked around the table. “I believe it’s your turn, Officer Kahn,” he said.
Kahn groaned. “Don’t we go on seniority or something?”
Shen turned his attention to Katie. “We have our prodigal daughter back. At least for a moment. How’s the ankle?”
Katie shrugged. “Busted in a few places,” she said. “Once the swelling goes down a little bit more, they’re probably going to have to put in a pin or two.”
“Ouch,” Sully said. “You’ll never get out of Wal-Mart without showing your receipt again.”
“At least I won’t get busted for going through their garbage,” Katie said with a playful grin.
Sully’s eyebrows went up. “Whoa. That’s two in one night. Girl’s on fire.”
“How long before you’re back?” Sergeant Shen asked.
“Six to eight weeks,” Katie said, her grin fading. “Unless they have to operate. Then more like twelve.”
“What are they going to do with you until then?”
“It was on-duty injury,” she said. “So I have to work light duty. I’ll be down in Crime Analysis helping out Renee on all this Russian stuff.”
“So you’re some kind of expert now, huh?” Kahn said with a hint of a sneer.
“No,” Katie said. “But she wanted a cop’s perspective.”
Kahn grunted, but Katie ignored him. “After that,” she continued, “my guess is I’ll be out in dispatch.”
“That’ll be fun,” Sully said sarcastically.
“It’ll be fun for me,” she said, “when you and Batts end up going on every natural DOA or rape of a horse that comes in.”
Sully shook his head and mimicked a drum snare. “And there’s the hat trick,” he announced. Chisolm grinned. MacLeod still had it.
“All right,” said Shen. “Let’s hit the streets.”
2213 hours
Anthony Battaglia stared out the window of the patrol car. Houses jammed together like big city row houses flit by.
“This block always makes me think of Boston,” Sully said from the driver’s seat.
Battaglia knew it was an opening for him to say how the closest Sully ever got to Boston was watching a Red Sox game on TV. Instead he let the moment pass.
The two rode in silence for another several minutes. The radio squawked with the occasional service run, but the dispatcher didn’t call their number and none of the incidents were close enough to divert, so they just cruised through West Central on routine patrol. Battaglia was glad to have Sully back from his bout with food poisoning, but he didn’t feel much like talking.
“What’s the matter, goombah?” Sully finally asked. “You don’t like this district? Because we can switch with Kahn and work Hillyard tonight if you want.”
“I don’t care one way or the other,” Battaglia answered. His chest burned with indigestion. He wanted to blame it on the taco he’d eaten after they left the station, but he knew the truth. It was Carson.
He didn’t know what to do. He felt excited and alive with her. He felt like he was smart. It was different than with Rebecca; his wife made him feel dumb. In high school and for a long time after, it didn’t matter. He was the jock and she was the brain. It worked. But his physical prowess was slowly declining while her brain just seemed to keep getting sharper. Now she was writing fucking poetry, which he couldn’t make heads or tails out of, while he played recreational league softball.
It seemed to him that she was going places he couldn’t follow.
He avoided looking at Sully. If the Irishman got a good enough look at his face, he’d know something was up. That might be a relief. Battaglia wanted to talk to him about it. Sully was his partner. Hell, he was his best friend. But he knew what Sully would say and he wasn’t ready to hear it just yet.
“Your turn to be sick, lad?” Sully asked.
“Maybe.”
Maybe he should tell Sully. Maybe Sully wouldn’t jump his shit about it. Maybe he’d just be his friend and understand what Battaglia was going through, or at least try to. Maybe-
“You want me to run you home?” Sully asked. “Maybe you need some of Rebecca’s homemade chicken soup.”
Battaglia swallowed and shook his head.
“No?” Sully shrugged. “Okay. But if I were you, I wouldn’t miss a single opportunity to eat some of that woman’s soup.”
But Sully wasn’t him. Obviously he couldn’t tell Sully what was going on in this fucked-up head of his. He couldn’t let on that anything was wrong.
Battaglia cleared his throat and amped up his Brooklyn accent. “Yeah, well, I’d rather crush a little crime, yaknowwhudImean? So why don’t we go up to Hillyud and kick that fenook Kahn outta da district.”
He glanced over at Sully and forced a smile.
Sully’s face lit up. “Now yer talkin’, lad!”
2253 hours
Ludmila Malkinova slid her timecard into the slot and punched the red button. The time clock clunked and she withdrew her card. It read 10:58 PM. Her own watch read 10:53 PM. The clock in the hotel break room was matched to her own watch.
She shook her head. Clyde set the clock late so that they had to arrive early. There was no overtime unless they went over thirty minutes, so he lost nothing by her clocking out five minutes after the hour.
It was the same everywhere. Always the rich took advantage of the poor. Always the business owners took advantage of the workers. Even in her homeland it was the same way. The Soviet government may have professed to treat everyone equally, but that was a lie. At least here, all it cost her was an extra five minutes.
Still, some things were different here. Over dinner tonight, her husband told her about a Russian gangster who had betrayed his own people. That would never have happened in the homeland. America corrupted almost everyone.
She checked at the front desk. Clyde, the night manager who thought he was so sly with his clock games, gave her an appraising eye. “You look tired, Millie,” he said.
“I am mother,” Ludmila answered. She ignored the nickname. She thought it was far too assuming for an unmarried man to talk to a married woman so informally. “My husband works much in the daytime. I must care for children and then work the night. Is hard.”
Clyde shrugged. “Times are tough all over,” he said, though it was clear to her that he had no idea what tough times were like. “Take over for Constanza.”
Ludmila suppressed a scowl. Constanza was a pretty young Hispanic girl who didn’t know the meaning of the word “work.” If she was taking over for Constanza, she’d already be behind in her duties.
Ludmila tried the break room first, and wasn’t surprised to discover the girl there chattering with two other housekeepers. One was Hispanic, but the other was a white girl who must not have spoken Spanish, because Constanza was speaking English to them both.
“And then I see the gun,” Constanza was saying. “It scared me almost to death!”
“Oh my God!” the white girl said. “You’re kidding me!”
“Es la verdad,” Constanza said, crossing herself and kissing her thumb. “I think that maybe they are going to kill each other. Then I think that maybe they are
going to kill me.”
“Was he a policeman?”
Constanza nodded, then shrugged. “Si. I mean, I think so. He said they were. At least two of them. I don’t know about the other one. He sounded Russian.”
Ludmila’s ears perked up.
“All of them had guns?”
Constanza shook her head. “No, only two. Not the Russian.”
Ludmila’s mind raced. If the Russian was the only one without a gun, then he must be their prisoner. It had to be the ones that Vladimir told her about.
“One of them spoke Spanish,” Constanza said. “And… el es muy guapo.”
The other Hispanic girl burst into a fit of conspiratorial giggles. Constanza joined in.
“What?” the white girl asked. “What did she say?”
“I say that the one who speaks Spanish, he is very handsome.”
“Oh,” the white girl said. Then she joined in with their giggling.
These girls were in their twenties, yet they still acted like thirteen-year-olds. Ludmila’s instinct was to snap at them, get the cleaning list from Constanza, and leave them in the break room to carry on with their immature prattle. But not tonight. Because Vladimir had mentioned something else to her over dinner. Something about a reward.
“What room?” Ludmila asked Constanza.
The girls stopped giggling. Constanza eyed Ludmila suspiciously. Ludmila tried to put on a friendly face, but it didn’t come naturally for her.
“What do you care?” the white girl said.
Ludmila smiled and shrugged. “I only want not make same problem. I no like guns, either.”
Constanza’s disapproving gaze rested on her for another few moments, then she shrugged. “Whatever,” she said. “It’s room 420.”
“Thank you,” Ludmila said. “You have cleaning list?”
Constanza pulled it from her apron and held it out to Ludmila. Ludmila reached out to take it from her hand, but Constanza pulled it back.
“Oops!” she said in mock distress.
Ludmila let the friendliness drain from her face and sent Constanza a dark scowl. She kept her hand extended.
Constanza pouted for a moment, then slapped the list into Ludmila’s open hand. “You’re such a sourpuss, Millie,” she said. The other two girls tittered nervously.
“I here to work,” Ludmila said.
“Den go verk,” Constanza said mockingly.
Ludmila left the break room without looking back. She ignored the list, too, slipping it into her own apron pocket. Instead she went into the nearest unoccupied room and flipped the deadbolt behind her. She swung the safety lock over, too.
Ludmila picked up the telephone and dialed her house. Vladimir picked up on the third ring. “Da?”
Ludmila smiled, this time for real. “I have something to tell you,” she said.
Friday, July 18th
0716 hours
Thomas Chisolm cruised slowly down the street near the large apartment complex. He wasn’t sure where Carson’s apartment was, so he kept the truck in first gear and let the engine pull him along. It didn’t take long.
He spotted a blue Chevy parked near the corner and stopped. He stared at the truck for a little while. After all, lots of people drove trucks in the Pacific Northwest. Even Chevys. But the joke did little to lighten his mood. Especially not when he saw the license plate holder on the truck that read, “Italians Do It Better.”
Definitely Batts’ truck.
Chisolm sighed. His suspicions at the roll call table last night had just been confirmed. This was going to cause complications. Lots of them. Battaglia and Carson would start going to a majority of their calls together. There would be tension between Sully and Battaglia over it. There would be resentment from some of the other platoon mates, as well.
But the most important thing was the safety implications. Neither one of the officers would operate on professionalism alone if emotion was involved. If a critical incident occurred, he knew that the reaction of either one couldn’t be counted upon.
God damn it. There were about 2.5 billion women in the world. If Battaglia was going to step out on his wife, the least he could do would be to choose one who didn’t work on the same fucking platoon.
Chisolm put his Ford in gear and headed home. He knew that he was going to have to deal with this, and soon. First and foremost to keep the sergeant from finding out and getting involved. But most importantly to eliminate the distraction for either one of them.
“A distracted soldier is a dead soldier,” he said quietly, recalling the words of his commander in Vietnam. Captain Mack Greene had taught him a lot about being a warrior. And Chisolm knew that it was his responsibility to pass it on to the next generation.
Whether they liked it or not.
NINE
0913 hours
Day Shift
Battaglia waited until Carson’s breath evened out with sleep, then he slipped out of the bed. He scrounged around for his clothing in the darkness. He found his jeans balled up near the head of the bed, and his T-shirt lay in the doorway next to his shoes and one sock. He searched for the second sock for a little while, then gave up.
He dressed in the living room. He knew he should probably shower before leaving; if Rebecca wasn’t busy, she might get close to him before he could get into the shower at home. And she’d smell what he’d been up to.
Battaglia pulled his shoe on over his sockless foot. She might ask him about that, too. Still, a missing sock was easier to explain than the scent of another woman’s sex on him. If she caught a whiff of that-
“Fuck it,” Battaglia muttered. So what if she did? Maybe he wanted her to. Maybe that would push things in the direction he wanted them to go-irrevocably toward divorce. He knew Rebecca could forgive him many things, but he was pretty certain that screwing around on her wasn’t one of them.
He pulled the front door shut behind him. Out of habit, he checked to ensure it was locked. Then he turned and trudged toward his Chevy.
He headed home, already rehearsing the lie he might have to tell. Which one would it be this time?
I got popped with a late burglary call with a ton of evidence to put on the books.
I had to back up a day shifter on a late domestic violence situation.
The sergeant had me babysitting a natural DOA until the detectives sent someone from Homicide to confirm.
Or how about: I used to be the star third baseman and you were the brain. Now I’m the star patrol officer, but you’re getting way too smart for me with this poetry and college classes and shit, so I decided I’d start fucking my coworker B.J.
Maybe he should just tell her. They weren’t a good fit anymore. They’d grown apart. She didn’t excite him. Whatever. It wasn’t like divorce was the worst thing that could happen. Hell, he knew a dozen guys on the job who’d been through it. Women, too. It was a bear at first, and there was a considerable financial hit, but people survived it. Kahn was living proof-he had at least three ex-wives.
Battaglia frowned. Now he was comparing himself to Kahn? That was a sad day.
Besides, what about the kids? He thought of Maggie and little Anthony. The idea of hurting his kids made his stomach tighten. But plenty of kids went through it, didn’t they? It wasn’t like he was moving to Turkey or something. Divorce might not be good, but it wasn’t death. He could see them on the weekends. Hell, he might end up being an even better dad than he was now. And he was sure B.J. would-
No. Battaglia stopped. He might be able to talk himself into believing that he and Rebecca weren’t right for each other. He might even be able to find a way to believe that falling into bed with B.J. was inevitable or excusable. But he would never even try to convince himself or anyone else that getting a divorce was somehow going to be a good thing for Maggie or Anthony.
The image of two badly burnt bodies lying on the grass outside of the house on Grace sprang unbidden to mind. He clenched his jaw but couldn’t force it from his mind.
> Is that what he was doing to his family? Setting the house on fire? Burning up a life that they all shared?
He didn’t know what the hell he was doing. Or why he was doing it.
Before he knew it he was pulling into his driveway. He turned off the engine and sat in the truck, staring at the white house with its dark trim. He remembered how excited Rebecca had been when they found it. “This is our home,” she’d said. “This is where we’ll grow old together.”
He didn’t think much about the statement when she made it. It was just some mushy chick thing for her to say. But now Battaglia shook his head. She probably believed it, but he doubted her prediction would come true now.
The whine of a garage door opener kicked in and the white door rose slowly. Rebecca’s green Subaru backed out. Her hair was drawn back into a ponytail. Little Anthony’s hands reached into the air above him. That made Battaglia smile. The little guy loved the garage door opener.
Rebecca spotted him in the driveway and stopped. She pressed the button and rolled down the passenger window. “Hey,” she said, smiling.
“Hey.”
“You’re home late,” she said.
He looked for suspicion in her eyes, but found none. “Late call,” he said.
She seemed to accept his answer, giving him an easy nod.
“Where’s Maggie?” he asked, not seeing her in the Subaru.
“Having some Grandma time,” Rebecca said. “Mom’s taking her to Riverfront Park to go on the carousel and feed garbage to the mechanical goat.”
It was Battaglia’s turn to nod. “Where are you going?”
“Grocery shopping. You need anything?”
He shrugged. “Maybe some beer.”
“Already on my list.Anything else?”
He thought about it and shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay. Then I’ll see you when I get back.”
“I’ll probably already be asleep,” Battaglia said.
“I figured.” She gave him a sly smile. “But if you’re still awake when the Great Bambino here goes down for his morning nap…”
