by Faricy, Mike
Our drive down to the station was, with the exception of the radio, very quiet. We were ushered into a conference room on the fourth floor. Manning was in there, along with wild and crazy Detective Schumacher, a stack of files and lots of reports.
“Glad you two are finally here, have a seat,” he said, not glancing up. He arranged stacks of papers, stapled various sheets together creating more stacks and said something unintelligible to Schumacher who responded in kind. Then he looked up.
“How we feeling, Miss Bauer?”
“Great,” Heidi said flashing a fake smile.
He stared at her for a moment like he didn’t believe her, then shrugged and shuffled some papers.
“We’re going to take a statement from you, in the interview room. It’s procedure, nothing to worry about. Just answer the questions to the best of your ability. Detective Schumacher here will take your statement.”
Schumacher nodded slightly, indicating she was at least partially alive.
“We’ll have two other officers in there with you, basically to serve as witnesses and possibly ask some questions. You have done nothing wrong here, so I don’t want you to worry. We’ll be recording this just as a safety measure to make sure we don’t misquote you and to make sure you’re protected. Okay?”
Heidi nodded yes, but I knew her well enough to see she was more than a little nervous, or maybe it was just her hangover.
“You’re probably going to be done a lot sooner than me, take my keys, you can drive back home and rest up,” I said to Heidi, sliding my keys across the table.
“Okay, ladies,” Manning said, then looked at Detective Schumacher.
“It’s going to be a while,” Manning said, once they’d left. “Do you want to grab something down in the cafeteria? I can send someone for you when it’s your turn.”
“Aren’t you worried I could get food poisoning or something?”
“Food poisoning is probably the least of your problems down there.”
“I don’t know, like I said last night, she was passed out during most of it, she...”
“Well, we still need to have her statement and you’d be amazed how much people can remember once you get things going, Schumacher’s pretty damn good.”
“Yeah, okay, I’ll get some coffee.”
Actually, I got a Coke, a Panini sandwich, a piece of cherry pie and an ice cream bar. I had just sat down, pushed my tray back and was about to take a sip of Coke when a woman approached.
“Excuse me, are you Devlin Haskell?”
“Yes I am can I help you?” I said, racking my brain, trying to remember if I’d met her before. I was drawing a complete blank.
“Detective Manning says they’re ready for you up in interview room three.”
“Really, that fast, gee, go figure. Okay, I’ll just finish this stuff and be right up.”
“They’re kind of like, ready, right now,” she said, clearly uncomfortable with my response.
“Okay, I’m there,” I said, then wolfed down the cherry pie, picked up my sandwich, ice cream bar, Coke and followed her out.
Chapter Forty-Eight
I answered Manning’s first question correctly, my name. I went on to tell my version of events, leaving out my trip down to the Hustler’s locker room and shooting a Taser into old Sergeant Wayne’s fat ass.
Judging from the questions he asked, Manning seemed to be satisfied with my version of events although he did come back a half dozen different times with something like, “So at no time did you leave your private box.”
“I left one time to use the rest room, other than that, I remained in the box with Miss Bauer.”
“Yeah, she seems unable to verify that fact.”
“What kind of guy would leave a woman in that condition?” I said, and then quickly continued. “Following the derby bout we received an escort to a handicapped exit out the rear door. As soon as we left the building we were approached and held at gunpoint by Felicity Bard.”
Manning went on to ask details of our journey to the hotel, Heidi passed out and strapped to the two wheeled dolly, Emma waving her pistol around. I mentioned the guy with the top hat at the front door of the hotel as well as the woman working the front desk. Detective Schumacher made some notes. I made sure they got the part where Emma said she hid the finger in my garage, “amongst my bits and pieces and paint cans”. I went on to explain how Emma was probably going to kill us. How she slapped Heidi across her ass and Heidi came alive for four seconds, knocked Emma out, and then went back to being passed out.
“Yeah, we’ve photographed Miss Bauer’s hand and her bruise,” Manning said, straight faced.
If Schumacher took Heidi’s statement in twenty minutes, it took Manning about three hours and twenty minutes to take mine. At the end of his questions he said, “Mister Haskell, if there is nothing else you would care to add I appreciate your cooperation. I trust you’ll remain available, should we need anything else?”
“I’ve nothing further to add, at this time,” I said.
“State for the record this interview is concluded, at fifteen-hundred—hours-eighteen—minutes,” Manning said giving the twenty-four hour time and turning off the camera and recorder.
“Off the record, I want to thank you for your help, Haskell. Forty-eight hours from now this woman would have been on a plane heading overseas and we probably wouldn’t have closed the thing.”
“What set her off? All she had to do was sit quiet.”
“There was some sort of incident in the locker room. Your friend from the Veteran’s Auditorium came across something.”
“My friend?”
“The head of their security.”
“Jimmy McNaughton?”
“No, your pal with the auditorium security.”
“That fat guy, Sergeant Wayne?” I only had to half feign surprise.
Manning nodded, getting up from his chair.
“What could that guy have found?”
“Another finger, as it turns out. The Hustlers returned to their locker room after the bout and Wayne had discovered another finger in a purse, turns out it was her’s, Felicity Bard’s, the purse that is,” Manning said, tucking a stack of files under his arm. He gave me a look for a moment then walked toward the door.
I stood at the table, envisioning Wayne down on all fours, hand cuffed to the locker. His trousers still smoking from the high voltage Taser in his fat ass as I dumped out the contents of that purse all over him.
“Coming, Mister Haskell, or have you grown fond of our interview rooms?” Manning smiled.
“Wait, she had all these fingers, I mean, why? How? Fat Wayne found it?”
Manning nodded. “Turns out she had them shipped to her, some wigged out boyfriend packed ‘em in dry ice, overnighted the things to her.”
“From England?”
“Yeah, its why they didn’t match our database, well one of the reasons, they weren’t from here.”
“But still how? Why?”
“He’s some surgical intern, or was, London Metro has him right now. Why? Money, I guess everyone was pretty much a volunteer, except for the main fundraiser, that Simmons woman, Harlotte Davidson. She got a percentage based on her contract. Nothing wrong or illegal, the arrangement just made the Bard woman jealous and apparently she thought she could scare the Simmons gal off and do it herself. When that didn’t work things escalated to this point,” he said shrugging his shoulders.
“I was just thinking,” I said walking toward the door, “if perhaps Officer Trang was around she could give me a ride home. I gave Heidi Bauer my keys,” I said.
Manning nodded, “I’ll see what I can do.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Officer Linh Trang opened the rear passenger door of the squad car and waited for me to step out.
“I don’t know if that would be the smartest career move,” she said.
“What can possibly happen? We’re just meeting for a drink, in a very public place. We
’re arriving in separate vehicles, from separate locations. If it makes you feel any better you can say we just ran into one another. You don’t have to admit we were on a date. It really isn’t a date, as a matter of fact.”
“You’re sort of known around the department,” she said, smiling, maybe.
“In a good way?”
“Depends.”
On what?”
“On who you talk to. From what I hear and saw the last woman to go out with you was strapped to a two wheeled dolly and got her ass slapped.”
“Well, yeah but that… Wait, from what you saw?”
She smiled wide. “Now I suppose if I don’t go out with you, you’re going to threaten to expose me for being one of about fifty officers laughing at the evidence photos. A certain bruise after your lady friend was slapped across her very nice ass. ”
“You mean if I threaten to tell on you, you’ll meet me for a drink?”
“Okay where?” she laughed.
I decided to sound trendy. “You know the Dew Drop?”
She nodded.
“How about eight tonight?”
“I can do that,” she said.
Chapter Fifty
I hadn’t been in the place since the night Carol left with that French guy Nicholas and I met Justine. It seemed like a century ago. What passed for music here didn’t start blaring until nine and I hoped we could pound down a couple of drinks and then decide on someplace better, maybe like The Spot, or better yet my penthouse suite before it got too noisy here.
“Funny finding you at the bar,” a voice said.
I turned and saw Linh, looking delicious in a short little off white outfit. I stared, running my eyes up and down her figure.
“Linh, you look fantastic, not that you wouldn’t anyway, but wow, you really look great.”
“Thanks,” she said, then examined what I was wearing, jeans and a green golf shirt with an embroidered Jameson logo, she didn’t comment but I think she made a mental note.
“Get you something?”
“Maybe a cosmopolitan?” she said.
“Oh, Sex in the City fan?” I asked, remembering what Justine had said the night I’d met her.
“Don’t you just love that show, even though it’s in reruns now, I still really like it.”
We stood at the bar, chatting for about ten minutes. All of a sudden I caught Linh staring wide eyed over my shoulder and turned to look.
She grabbed my arm and said, “don’t look.”
“Why some old boyfriend?” I smiled.
“No hardly, big doper, major dealer, we heard he was in town, but we could never get any confirmation. We’ve been looking for the guy for a month. I can’t believe he’s in here, out in the open. I’ve lost count of how many roll calls I sat through listening to what a jerk that guy is and staring at his picture up on the screen. I got a BOLO on him in my purse.”
I started to turn and look.
“Don’t, Dev,” she said, then grabbed my arm again. This time she placed some excruciating pressure on my wrist using just her thumb and forefinger.
“Ouch, okay, okay, man let go that really hurts.”
“It’s supposed to, you might do well to remember that, now don’t look over there again, I’m going to call this in,” she said taking a cell phone out of her purse. She pulled what looked like a wanted poster out, nodded at the thing as if to confirm, then dialed.
She had her back to me, phone up against her right ear and a finger in her left as she talked.
“They should be here shortly,” she said, once she hung up and turned around. “I think I’ve got time for another Cosmo.”
“Don’t you want to go strap on a Kevlar vest or something?”
“No, I don’t think so, but it might be a good idea to get out of the way and move down toward the far end of the bar.”
She sat sipping her Cosmo at the corner of the bar, back near the rest rooms. I can’t recall what she was talking about for the simple reason I wasn’t paying any attention. I figured if things got hot I’d just jump behind the bar, pull the fat bartender on top of me and hope for the best. Linh’s cell rang about twenty minutes later. I could hear her giving directions to whoever was on the other end.
“Yeah, five tables back, in the corner, he’s wearing a blue shirt, sitting with a blonde woman. She looks kind of bitchy and she’s got fake boobs. No I’m not kidding. You can’t miss them. Yeah, I thought you’d like it,” she chuckled then clicked her phone shut and reached in her purse.
“Dev, do me a favor and step back here, will you?”
“Hunh,” I said, then glanced down and saw her little hand demurely wrapped around the grip of some sort of snub pistol.
“Get your ass behind me, now,” she said.
I didn’t need to be told a third time and moved behind her just as three Swat officers burst in the front door. A second later three more ran in through the back entrance. They had weapons drawn, and were screaming, it seemed like déjà vu all over again for me.
“Everyone down, down,” they yelled charging into the far back corner of the Dew Drop.
“Get ‘em up. Get ‘em up.” They yelled at the blue shirted guy sitting at the corner table.
He had longish hair and what looked like about a three day growth of trimmed beard, just the right amount to be cool. Some guys could pull that off, I can’t. If I tried, it would just look like I’d been on a three day bender.
Mister Cool moved left, right, turned around and then just stopped and raised his hands above his head. Linh was moving toward him in a shooters stance with her pistol pointed directly at the guy, sexy and cat-like.
One of the Swat guys had stepped in and was placing handcuffs on the guy, none to gently. I recognized the cop as the jerk who’d pulled me over the stair banister and cuffed me in my own house.
The bad guy’s date was on her feet, shaking her head back and forth screaming at the cops. “No, no there’s been some mistake. Stop this, stop it.” She was stomping her foot, then jumping up and down screaming, “Stop, stop”.
Linh had been right the woman did have fake boobs. I recognized their bounce and her bitching, Carol. I knew it was her the moment she stomped her foot. And there, cuffed and being read his rights was my French friend, Nicholas. Pepe le Pew. Oh man I thought, he’s guilty, he has to be guilty.
“Look Dev, I’m sorry, but I have to go downtown. We’ve been looking for this guy forever. I hate to do this to you, our first date, but, well do you understand?” As she spoke she was shoving her snub back into her purse.
“Actually Linh, I can’t tell you how you made my day, really.”
Linh turned back to watch the excitement for a moment.
“No you don’t understand, you’re not listening to me…” Carol screamed, following behind the Swat team as they led Nicholas out the door and into a squad car.
“Thanks for understanding, Dev, gotta run, maybe latter,” Linh said, then reached up and kissed my cheek.
I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.
Chapter Fifty-One
The phone rang and kept ringing. After a while I stumbled out of the four poster bed made my way to the end table and the offending noise.
“Hello,” I said sitting down on the couch half wondering why room service was calling so early.
“Well, well, Mister Haskell, I hope I woke you.”
“Hey, Detective Manning, how’s it going?” I said, then used my foot to shove a pair of open toed shoes off to the side.
“Not so well.”
“Oh?”
“There’s the little matter of a hotel bill that came across the department’s desk yesterday. Does the term city—wide budget cuts mean anything to you?”
“Hotel bill, mine?” I picked up the little off-white garment from the coffee table, arranged it neatly over the back of the couch.
“Have you been getting spa treatments and massages every damn day?”
“Well, see…”
<
br /> “Ordering room service morning, noon and night, hundred dollar bottles of champagne?”
“I suppose…” I looked at the champagne flutes over on the large table one of them sported a half moon of red lipstick.
“Did you run up a tab for close to eight hundred bucks on two tickets and a fully stocked bar at the Roller Derby bout?”
“Yeah I suppose, but actually that led in a way to an arrest and you guys…”
“It’s eleven-fucking-o-clock, Haskell. Check out is at noon,” he said and slammed down his phone.
“Who was that?” Linh called, her head was still underneath the pillow.
“Feel like going somewhere for lunch?”
The End
If you enjoyed Dev’s adventures in Bombshell, check out the sample of Bite Me just after my thank you and the list of other available titles.
Thanks for taking the time to read Bombshell. If you enjoyed this book please tell 2-300 of your closest friends and don’t miss these Mike Faricy titles;
Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick
Baby Grand
Chow For Now
Merlot
Finders Keepers
End of the Line
Russian Roulette (A Dev Haskell Novel) Mr. Softee (A Dev Haskell Novel) Bite Me (A Dev Haskell Novel) Bombshell (A Dev Haskell Novel)
Visit http://www.mikefaricy.com
Email; [email protected]
Twitter; @mikefaricybooks On Face Book; Mike Faricy Books and Dev Haskell
Here’s a free sample from Bite Me, happy reading.
Bite Me
Chapter One
It was bigger than a steak knife, not quite a carving blade, but still capable of doing some very serious damage. The knife came with a bright red handle, the kind sculpted to fit your fingers and hold a blade that gleamed viciously. I dodged the swipes again and pleaded.
“Put the knife down, just put the knife down, please,” I tried to sound calm.
Another wild swipe, this one slashing very close to the tip of my nose.
