Shattered Glass

by Dani Alexander

  —Still in surgery. Waiting 4 updates. Will txt when no more.—

  Thank you officer Hutcherson. “You didn’t talk to Cai?” I asked Darryl.

  “She said Cai was in back, trying to get the anklet off.”

  It took one minute to locate the anklet resting on the shelf by Rachel’s legs. “Call his cell.”

  “We need—”

  “Quiet,” Darryl waved his hand rapidly at Luis as he pressed his phone to his ear and looked at the floor.

  Nearby, a cell phone began to play. We all began the mad scramble for the phone. It was Luis who thought to check under Rachel’s back.

  “That’s Cai’s phone.” Darryl grabbed it. “Weird. That’s not his ringtone.” He pressed some buttons on the cell and frowned, mumbling, “Thought he’d leave a text or something.”

  Luis held up something when Darryl turned around to concentrate on the phone.

  Shit. I started to adjust my thinking to the significance of the other syringe my partner found. “So he changed his ringtone?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but…it’s weird. Cai wouldn’t ever have that ringtone. He has this thing about how classical music expands the brain blah blah blah. And the only way Rabbit and I will listen to it is if he plays it on our phones.”

  “I’m going to wait by the door for the bus. You two can argue the semantics of fairy music.” Luis walked off.

  The ringtone. A thread of thought pulled. I tugged at it. Cai was smart. Too smart. His message would be obscure but seem perfectly reasonable in his mind. I walked to the end of the row and did what always worked when threads of thought were stuck. I worked it out aloud. “The ringtone. What’s that song?”

  “You got that look, Glass. You think it means something?”

  “Of course it means something. Idiots,” Darryl muttered.

  “Ambulance is here.” Luis walked out to meet them. My thread went with him. It was hard to concentrate with so much going on an so much weighing on me.

  We all moved out of the way while the EMTs worked on Rachel. I tried tugging my thread from new angles while they all tried getting some sense from her.

  I almost had something, but I lost it as they wheeled out the girl and I caught Darryl’s expression. His face was white, his eyes watering. “What?” I asked.

  “She— Lying bitch.”

  Whoa. “You got some sense out of her?”

  “No. She’s a liar. Just babbling.”

  “Darryl, if she said something about the—”

  “She lied. I told you. It’s bullshit. And it—”

  “She said the kid shot her up,” Luis provided.

  “What?” I repeated. That idea was more ridiculous than… Than what? Darryl admitted Cai did drugs. The kid obviously wasn’t the marshmallow I thought he was. And he was smart. Logical. And fucked up without effective meds.

  Luis and Darryl began arguing. I tuned it out. Think like Cai. You’re on the run. He’s smart enough to know the anklet was going to be traced. Maybe even he expected to be caught at any second. How fast was he? I remembered Peter dodging me when I ran after him. That was fast. Not just fast. Efficient. He ran efficiently. He’d be ahead of the cops, but not by much. And Peter ran just like him. He’d wait, expecting Peter, but as time ticked by… “Darryl—” The bickering continued.

  “You asshole cops always think the worst. He’s a kid.”

  “Who self-medicates and shot up his junkie friend with a heavy dose of—.”

  “She’s lying. I told you.” Darryl cracked his knuckles into a fist.

  “Shut up. Both of you. Shut the fuck up! This isn’t helping.” Their mouths clamped shut. “I need to concentrate.” My fingers tapped. “He expected Peter to get here eventually. He doesn’t know he’s hurt. He’d leave a message.”

  “Cai didn’t leave a text message,” Darryl said.

  I nodded my agreement. “Which leaves the ringtone. What is that fucking song?” I hummed a few bars. “Call it again.”

  Darryl picked up the phone and shook his head. “Or I could just look it up. Idiot,” he said quietly. He flipped through the phone, finger sliding across the screen until he looked up at me with his nose scrunched. “Last ringtone he added was Come Home.”

  I didn’t have to hear Darryl say where he was going to understand he was off to Joe’s. His eyes blew wide as he tried to run past me. I grabbed his hood again. He made a choking sound and twisted sideways, his foot arcing to connect with my stomach.

  I coughed, jerked the hood and pushed him into a shelving unit. It took Luis’s gun to get him under control while I doubled over and tried to get my breath back.

  “Calm down,” my partner growled.

  “I need to get to—”

  “You need to calm the fuck down.”

  “Wait” I tried to breathe, speaking between huffs. “Just think a moment.”

  “You’re going to get him killed. He’s there and waiting for us. Why are you still here? Call the damn cavalry!”

  “He’s not there!” I finally had a voice, even with the after effects of what felt like a baseball bat to the belly by a major leaguer.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Think.” Luis thumped him in the back of the head. He almost got a punch to the face in response. Darryl pulled his fist back at the last second and hit a nearby box with enough force to send it and several others flying off the shelf. They landed on my earlier pile.

  “He didn’t leave his phone so Peter could find him,” I said. “He did it so Peter would find something.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he’s too high to make it to Joe’s.” I lifted a hand at Luis. “Show him.”

  Luis held up the second syringe. “Kid gave her one shot, took the other one.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You two are idiots. Cai would never tell her to shoot up. And he’d never touch the stuff.”

  “Darryl, he saved her life by giving her that,” I explained. “He waited here for Peter too long. He needed to be incoherent when they got to him. He needed to make sure they couldn’t question him even if they wanted to. And he made sure Rachel was a useless witness so it would be pointless to kill her.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Maybe I Should Remove the Cummerbund

  We left Goth Nation arguing, and we continued doing so while we waited to hit Joe’s place. It was Luis who suggested we avoid Joe’s townhome until we had everything in place. I had a procedural suggestion of my own: throw Darryl out of the still-moving car. It had been five minutes since we exited the shop, and he hadn’t stopped complaining and ordering us around.

  “You don’t even know for sure they have him. I told you like twelve places we could look.”

  I grabbed the home-monitoring anklet we had found and twisted in the seat to show him it. “Do you see this cut here?”

  “So?”

  “See how he didn’t cut all the way through?”

  “He could have scooted his foot out after he got partway,” Darryl rationalized.

  I knew he was upset. He wasn’t thinking right. I was familiar with denial. But that didn’t stop me from getting irritated. “And then he took the time to unlock the anklet properly? After it was removed?”

  “Maybe it unlocked after his foot was out. Or maybe he cut a wire and—”

  “They don’t work like that,” I tried to explain.

  “You want the kid to live?” Luis asked.

  “Just when I thought cops couldn’t get more stupid.”

  Luis and I simultaneously leaned our heads back on our seats and exhaled. If we didn’t need Darryl, I might have flipped Luis for who got to shoot him. Luis must have read my thoughts. “You’re a lousy shot,” he said. “You’d miss, and we’d have to listen to his whining.” He pulled over and flipped off the air-conditioning.

  “Find him first. Not the stupid evidence! You’re more concerned with that than my brother.”

  “We
are concerned about the kid,” Luis said. “And we’ll find him. But we’re doing it in a way that doesn’t endanger him. What do you think they’ll do to him if they know we’re close? Listen, kid—”

  “I’m twenty-two,” Darryl sneered.

  “Act like it,” I said. “And think. Where would Cai have hidden something?”

  “I already said that I don’t know!”

  “How long do we have?” I asked Luis.

  “Maybe an hour until he’s lucid enough to answer questions.”

  My phone rang. I answered it immediately in order to avoid popping Darryl in the face. “Glass.”

  “Canada is cold, but this lady says she’s his mother,” Officer Hutcherson said.

  I covered the mouthpiece. “Did you tell Rosa about Peter?”

  “Of course I did. While you were getting spiffy for your job as a waiter—”

  “It was the only suit he had hemmed.” Maybe I should remove the cummerbund?

  “—I was calling hospitals and Rosa! And you look idiotic.”

  I shrugged off the insult and moved my hand off the mouthpiece. “Describe her.”

  “Which one?”

  “There’s more than one?”

  “Yup. One says she’s Rosafa Strakosha. No ID.” Of course Rosa had a WitSec name that she was not going to flash to random cops. I didn’t interrupt with that information though. “5’9 or 5’10. Black hair, brown eyes. Early forties. 115 lbs. The other has I.D. Zhavra Dyachenko…” He paused. “Sir, the FBI is with them. I may have to let them through when he’s out of surgery.”

  My head was spinning. Peter’s mother? ”Go ahead and—”

  “Mister Glass,” a heavily accented, stern voice said into the phone.

  I hung up in horror. The phone rang again a moment later. I turned it off. “So…we were…the drugs…” I cleared my throat. “An hour until they find a way to get the info out of him. Will we be ready?”

  Luis nodded and gave me a sideways squint. “We’ll be ready. Are you flaking out?”

  “Detective,” Darryl said gently.

  I avoided Luis by turning to Darryl. “What?”

  “I know where he hid it.”

  Never Ending Story

  “You know?” I asked. “Or you think you know? Because if you’re wrong…”

  “I’m pretty sure.” He nodded. “No, I’m positive. Last year Joe found an X tab. He went ballistic and searched Cai’s room. I mean seriously searched. Cai comes in right in the middle of it, and then they have a blowout. Cai takes off.”

  “Does this story end?” I asked. “Ever?”

  “I’m explaining so maybe you can make up your mind, dickwad! Rabbit had to skip classes to find him. Cai finally picks up his cell phone after forever, and Rabbit said that they’d work out a lock for his room. Because Rabbit felt guilty ‘cause the tab was his.”

  “That’s it? In his room? I need more than—”

  “My point, dickwad, was that Rabbit couldn’t get Joe to agree to a lock on his door. So he bought this crappy little safe where Cai could hide—well, whatever he was hiding.”

  How I went from prettyboy to dickwad in a week was a mystery. “Where?” I asked, leaving out the obvious question of why Peter would give a kid who was using drugs, a place to hide them.

  Darryl shrugged. “His room somewhere.”

  “Which is toast,” Luis pointed out. “Metal?”

  “Yeah. With one of those dial thingies.”

  “Not a lot to hang our hopes on, Glass.”

  I thought about fire and water damage. “If it’s a weapon in there, we’re good. I should have taken Cai up on the tour of his room so we’d know where to find this thing.”

  “Cai invited you to his room?” Darryl asked.

  “Yeah. He said he had some painting he wanted to show me.”

  “Weird.”

  “Second time you’ve used that today with regards to the kid. Not that I’m disagreeing. Weird doesn’t begin to describe him.”

  “Cai’s pretty shy. Plus, you’re a cop. It’s weird.”

  “Cai was not shy that day. I guarantee you. And this might be a shocker, but some people like me.”

  “Who?” Luis asked.

  “Cats, or mangy creatures formally known as cats.”

  “That’s about right,” Luis said, lifting his phone to his ear.

  Popularity is Overrated

  Luis and I both checked our guns while we waited near the burnt wreckage of Joe’s townhome. Waiting was always the hardest part of being a cop. Waiting for warrants. Waiting for information. Waiting for unobserved access. Waiting for fire marshals.

  “Hey, Luis?”

  “What?” He switched his badge to a neck chain and fitted it over his bulletproof vest.

  “I’ll take the bullet this time.”

  Luis sat back and put his elbow over the center of our seat, his finger pointing directly at me. “Remember a few months back, when we stopped at that bodega—”

  “Never mind. Forget I said anything.” I interrupted, quickly trying to fix my badge to my neck chain and tuck it into my shirt.

  “—and you bought the coffee—”

  “We should get going.”

  “—but the lid popped off and you spilled it?”

  “Have you called the captain again?”

  “You jumped around in the car and unbuckled your pants. “Screaming to get you to the emergency room.”

  “You were really reckless, by the way.”

  “Only it turned out they mistakenly gave you ice coffee.”

  “Ice can burn, Luis.”

  “Hey!” Darryl said. “Remember that time,” he kicked my seat, “two asshole cops sat in their car telling stories while more asshole cops tortured my—” he nearly knocked my seat out of its bucket with the next kick, “brother?”

  Luis and I both looked at Darryl then each other. My partner jerked his thumb at the back seat and pursed his lips. “I like him.”

  “More than me?”

  “I like everyone more than you.”

  “Why do people keep saying that to me?”

  “Want a list?” Darryl said.

  “Why is he still here?” Luis asked.

  “Because, Luis, if we don’t keep him in the car behind locked doors, he’ll do something stupid. Like wade through the wreckage of Joe’s house before the fire marshal has declared it safe. Then he’d probably do something even more stupid, like bargain with the kidnappers.”

  “Too damn right I will. It’s more than what you’re doing.”

  “What he doesn’t realize is that once they have the items, they have no use for witnesses. Plus, and this is why cops are better at kidnapping cases than, say, bartenders—cops realize that bad guys might be watching the house, waiting for an unprotected Tinkerbelle wearing a glow-in-the-dark, neon pink hoodie to lead them directly to what they want.”

  “Do you know what I did to the last guy that called me Tinkerbelle?”

  “Slept with him?”

  Darryl was silent for a second. “After that.”

  My lips pulled up in the first real smile since this day started. Because he was behind me, I wasn’t sure if Darryl’s did, too. I didn’t get a chance to look. Luis’s phone rang with the call we had been waiting for.

  I Love You, Man

  “Fire Inspector just finished. We’re a go,” Luis said. “CSU will be here in thirty.”

  “Can you see my vest?”

  “No.”

  “Luis?”

  He grunted a, “What?”

  “If I don’t have a job after this—”

  “You will.”

  “—I want you to know—”

  “I know, kid.” He shifted and stared out the window.

  “—that I masturbated to images of you in a thong and corset.”

  “Dios Mio, give me strength.”

  “I’m going to check it out,” I nodded to the townhome.

  “I’ll brief CSU. Inspe
ctor said to stay off the second floor.”

  I twisted to look at Darryl. “Cai’s room is on the first floor?”

  He jerked a nod. “I’ll go with you. You won’t recognize anything.”

  “No can do,” I said. “You’re a civilian, that’s a crime scene, and I’m in enough shit without having a beam fall on your head and the Department getting sued.”

  “You’re not going to know what to look for.”

  He was right. How was I going to recognize anything in Cai’s room if the safe wasn’t out in the open? Which it wouldn’t be, because Cai wasn’t an idiot. I tossed Darryl my cell phone. “I’ll video it. Sync our phones. That’s as close as you’re getting.” He rolled his eyes, typed into my phone, and threw it back at me. I smiled brightly at Luis as I tucked the phone into my pocket. “Kiss me goodbye?” He whacked me in the back of the head.

  “Get out, and don’t get dead.”

  “Ditto,” I replied, climbing out of the car and jerking a thumb to Darryl. “And give him to one of the uniforms when CSU gets here or he’ll follow you.” I remembered what Peter told me about Darryl. “Actually make it two uniforms. With Tasers.” I started to shut the door.

  “Austin,” Darryl said. I stuck my head back in, expecting to be told to get bent. “Don’t let a beam fall on your head or nothin’.”

  “Worried about your meal ticket?”

  “And that would top the list of reasons no one likes you.” He glared.

  “Sorry. Listen, if you promise not to double back and do something stupid, we can have someone drive you to the hospital.”

  “Nah. I’ll stay.”

  I nodded, then slammed the door.

  I understood Darryl wanting to stay. At the hospital he’d be climbing the walls, pestering nurses, taking care of Rosa and…the other one. I knew that was how I’d be. Focusing on work gave me a brief reprieve from my worry. Peter’s name alone brought the image of him looking at his bloody hand in confusion and Leila’s gun pressed against his head. Better to not think about him at all. Better to not wonder if later, when all was said and done, I might never again feel him lying against me.