by Edward Lee
The cold shower felt lukewarm in the ninety-degree heat. By the time he dried off, he was sweating again. He still had several hours before he needed to get ready for work, but he had no idea what he was going to do. What? Hang out at the fire station? Go for a leisurely spin through beautiful downtown Crick City? Christ… He knew he needed to divert himself, or else he’d start thinking about the dream again, or he’d starting thinking about the business with Vicki Steele. He needed to get his mind off all of that, but how could he, now that he was back in the same town, with all the old familiar sights and people? Start by shaving. He lathered up with Edge Gel, then nearly dropped his razor when someone knocked on the door.
Who the—my rent’s not due, is it? I’ve only been living here three days. Maybe it’s Reader’s Digest bringing me my fifteen mil. Shave cream jiggled on his chin as he wrapped a towel around his waist and answered the door.
“I gave at the office,” he said when he saw who it was.
The pretty face offered a snide smile. The blond icebitch, he recognized all too fast. Susan, our amiable, upbeat dispatcher.
“Nice towel,” she said.
“If I’d known you would be knocking on my door, I’d have dressed black tie. Okay, so how much are the Girl Scout cookies?”
“You really are horribly sarcastic,” Susan Ryder said.
Phil could imagine how silly he looked: green Edge Gel fizzing on his face, and a towel as the only thing keeping him from being stark naked. “All right, let me rephrase. What the hell do you want?”
“Well, I think I’m already regretting this, but I thought I’d offer to buy you dinner.”
Dinner, Phil thought nebulously. This woman hates me. She thinks I kill ghetto kids. Now she wants to buy me dinner.
“Or I should say,” she corrected, “whatever it is we night-shifters call the first meal of the day. I guess it’s our breakfast.” She seemed shaky suddenly, or even nervous. “Sort of a, you know, peace offering.”
“Peace offering,” Phil stated dumbly.
“Is your head made of bricks?” she suddenly snapped. “I’m trying to apologize! Jesus!”
“Apologize,” Phil stated dumbly. The shave cream continued to fizz. “Uh…apologize for what?”
Exasperation, or rage, thinned her pretty blue eyes. “For treating you shitty this morning. But if you’re going to be an asshole about it, then forget it.”
“Oh. Uh,” Phil brilliantly replied. This whole scene caught him off guard. “Well, in that case, your apology, and your invitation, are accepted. Can I finish changing, or do you want me to go like this?”
“You can go like that if you want,” she said, smiling. “But if that towel falls off, you’ll have to arrest yourself for indecent exposure.”
“Or unlawful display of shaving cream in public,” he said. “Come on in, I’ll just be a minute. It’s the maid’s day off, so you’ll have to forgive the current disarray of my estate.”
Susan Ryder walked in, and immediately went to peruse the bookshelf in his broom-closet-sized den, mostly law enforcement, judicial, and criminology texts from his Master’s courses. “All my Aquinas and Jung are still packed up,” he said, “but I do have every Jack Ketchum novel ever printed.” He quickly grabbed some clothes and slipped into the bathroom. He shaved haphazardly, realizing his own nervousness when he nearly sprayed Glade Air Freshener under his arms. What do I have to be nervous about? he joked. I have beautiful blondes in my room all the time. She was certainly attractive; perhaps he hadn’t fully noticed that when they’d met, considering the circumstances. He left the bathroom door cracked an inch, and in the mirror he could see her stooped over his put-it-together-yourself fiberboard bookshelf: simply dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a faded lime blouse. Yeah, she’s pretty, all right, he acknowledged as he began to brush his teeth with one hand and haul on his jeans with the other. Unfancified white-blond hair shimmered at her shoulders. Nice behind, too, you sexist pig, he noted of the way her pose accentuated her rear end. He knew what it was, though—not her good looks but the whole apology business. Apologies didn’t seem like her style at all, but—
He didn’t really know her, did he? So how could he make a judgment like that, when only this morning he’d ranted on her for prejudging him about the Metro fiasco. Who’s prejudging who? he admitted with a mouthful of Crest.
“Oh,” she commented from the den. “Did you know you talk in your sleep?”
Phil instantly spat toothpaste into the sink. “What?
“You talk in your sleep,” she repeated, still leaning over his books. “You’re a bigtime ratchetjaw.”
Phil stared into the mirror, toothpaste smeared on his lips like a drunken clown’s whiteface. Of course he knew he talked in his sleep on occasion—the women in his past had always pointed that out—but how on earth could Susan know that?
“Either you’re psychic, or you’ve got a microphone hidden in my room.”
“Neither,” she said. Now, in the mirror, she was flipping through his stack of LEAA journals in a box on the couch. “I rent the room right above yours.”
Phil almost spat his toothpaste out again. “You live here?”
“Yeah. Isn’t Mrs. Crane great? Anyway, eventually you’ll discover that the heating ducts make for a very effective in-house intercom. So you better gag yourself whenever you go to bed, unless you want me to know all your secrets.”
That’s just great, Phil thought, pulling on a Highpoint College T-shirt. He tried to think of a funny comeback.
“The heating ducts, huh? So that explains the loud vibrating sound I hear everyday from upstairs,” which he immediately regretted. He didn’t know her well at all, and certainly not well enough to be making jokes like that.
“If you must know,” she came back just as fast, “I use imported ben-wa balls, not vibrators.”
Jesus. He guessed she was joking, or hoped she was. He came back out then, was about to speak as she turned in the den, but hesitated. Though his pause lasted only a second, it seemed like full minutes to him. God, she really is beautiful. No makeup, just a simple, pretty farm-girlish face, a slender yet curvy body, and high B-cup breasts that looked firm as apples. For a moment her face seemed brightly alight in the frame of pure-blond hair. Her eyes, a beautiful sea-blue, sparkled like chips of gems.
“You can take me out to dinner now, or breakfast, or whatever it is that us night-shifters call the first meal of the day,” he said. “I’ll put on my best sports jacket if you’re taking me someplace expensive.”
“Is Chuck’s Diner expensive enough for you?”
Phil held the door open for her, then followed her out. “Chuck’s Diner? I guess I should put on my tux.”
««—»»
They went in her car, a nice Mazda two-door, for which Phil was very grateful. It wasn’t that he was embarrassed by his dented, rusted, clay-red ‘76 Malibu, it was…well, something probably worse than embarrassment. Immaturity notwithstanding, no real man wanted to drive an attractive woman anywhere in such a vehicle. Susan’s car was clean and unadorned, like her, attractive in its lack of frills. He watched her bright-blond hair spin in the breeze from the open window. “No valet parking?” he joked when she pulled into Chuck’s.
“Only on weekends,” she said. Inside they took a booth in the back. Another blast from the past, Phil considered. It had been over a decade since he’d last set foot in here. Chuck’s Diner was your typical greasy spoon, though cleaner than most. A middle-aged waitress in an apron and bonnet took their orders.
“So what are you packing?” Susan asked.
“Packing?” Phil queried.
Susan, frowning, rephrased, “What kind of weapon do you carry off-duty?”
“Oh, that kind of packing.” But what a strange question. “A Beretta .25.”
“That’s a peashooter!” she exclaimed. The waitress set their orders down, then Susan continued, “What are you gonna shoot with a .25? Gnats?”
Phil appraised
his hash and eggs. “Well, actually I’m not planning to shoot anything, except maybe the waitress if she doesn’t bring me some salt and pepper.”
“Cops are supposed to be prepared for trouble round the clock. What if some coked-up scumbags try to take you down?”
“In Chuck’s Diner? Look, if they want my hash and eggs, they can have it.”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead with anything less than a hot-loaded 9mm,” she told him, then nonchalantly bit into her cheeseburger sub. “Right now I carry a SIG .45.”
“You carry a gun?” Phil asked.
“Of course. Mullins got me a carry permit, told him it was the only way I’d dispatch for him. It’s a crazy world, there’s a nut around every corner.”
Phil nodded. “Two on every corner is more like it.” And he’d seen them all on Metro. He felt inclined to tell some stories, but before he could, Susan said, “Take a look,” then abruptly opened her purse and withdrew a large, clunky automatic.
“Put that away!” Phil said. “This is a diner, not an armory.”
She shrugged and put the gun back. “I’m thinking about buying one of those H&K squeeze-cockers, or maybe a used Bren-10.”
How do you like that? Phil mused. Dirty Harry’s got a sister. “If you want my opinion, stick to simple pieces.”
She glanced across the table as if slighted. “Oh, because I’m a woman? Women can’t handle sophisticated handguns?”
Phil sighed in frustration. “Simmer down, Annie Oakley. Wait till you’re neck-deep in a shootout one night and your fancy auto stovepipes a round. You’ll sell your soul for a Colt revolver.”
Again she shrugged, almost as if she couldn’t decide whether or not to agree. “How’s it feel to be back?”
“Okay, I guess. A job’s a job.”
She fidgeted with a French fry, glancing down. “And, again, I really apologize for the way I treated you this morning. I had no right to say things like that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Phil passed it off. Actually, it was kind of funny now. A few hours ago she was practically accusing me of murder, and now she’s buying me hash. “I guess we all have a bad day every now and then.” But he thought it best to change the subject quick, “So what are all the books I see you reading at the station? You in college?”
“Yeah, slow but sure. I’m majoring in criminology, minor’s in history. This is my last semester, thank God. Evening classes a couple nights a week.”
“That’s great,” Phil acknowledged. “What are you going to do when you get your degree? Work for Mullins?”
“Not on your life. I’ll shoot for DEA or maybe Customs. And there’re always the county departments up north. Last thing I want to be is a Crick City cop—” Then she caught herself, brought a hand to her mouth. “Sorry. No offense.”
“None taken,” Phil laughed. “It’s the last thing I want to be, too, but I don’t have much of a choice at the moment.”
Her gaze moved absently to the window. “It’s the town, you know? It’s so slow and desperate and backwards. It’s depressing. The minute I get a decent job, I’m out of here.”
“I know just what you’re talking about, believe me,” Phil related, but at once he felt dried up. He’d said the same thing to Vicki, hadn’t he? No way he was going to work in a nowhere town like this. He was too good for Crick City. And now Vicki was a prostitute and Phil was—
The thought didn’t even need finishing.
“How long have you been working for Mullins?”
“A little under a year,” she said. “He’s a decent man, if a bit ornery, and he offered me the dispatch job when he heard I was looking for something to help me through school. He knew my parents when they were alive.”
Better not ask about that, Phil told himself, though he did note their commonality. “So you grew up here, too?”
“Yeah,” she said despondently. “My father was on disability; he got shot up in Viet Nam. My mother worked lots of odd jobs to get us by, but it just seems the harder she worked, the harder things got.”
There seemed to be a similar variation of the same story for just about everyone around here: poor people struggling just to make it, and never quite succeeding. Phil had been too young to really even remember his own parents—but the tale was the same. He could tell the coversation was draining Susan; her luster was gone, her bright-blue eyes not quite so bright now. He struggled for something more upbeat to talk about, but nothing came to him until he remembered that she seemed enthused about guns and cop talk in general.
“What do you know about Cody Natter?” he asked.
She pushed her plate aside, leaving the fries. “Not a lot. About the only place he’s ever seen with any regularity is Sallee’s. He owns the place now, you know.”
“Yeah, Mullins mentioned that. Don’t you think that’s weird?”
“Sure it’s weird. A guy like Natter? No visible income, no bank account. I don’t guess that Sallee’s sold for much, but still, you have to wonder where he got the cash to buy the place.”
“I’m even more curious as to why?”
“I have to agree with Mullins,” Susan said. “An out-of-the-way strip joint like that is the perfect contact point if you’re networking dope. Last year Mullins had the Comptroller’s Office audit him, but the guy’s books were picture perfect. No way we can nail him on taxes. I don’t know how he did it.”
Phil didn’t care. “I don’t want to get him on tax fraud or ill-gotten gains; I want to bust him for manufacturing and distribution.”
“Then you’re going to have to have solid evidence linking him to his lab, which’ll be tough,” Susan reminded him, “and finding the lab itself will be plain impossible.”
“Why?”
“Natter’s a Creeker; his lab’s got to be up in the hills. You ever been back there? It’s a mess. You’re talking about three or four thousand acres of uncharted woodlands. There are roads back there that aren’t even on the county map grid. Finding Natter’s lab will be like looking for the needle in the haystack, or try ten haystacks.”
She had a point, and Phil was no trailblazer. “Yeah, but maybe one of his people will spin.”
“Don’t hold your breath. Natter’s people are all Creekers, too; they’re never gonna talk, first, because they’re all terrified of Natter—he’s like their god—and another reason they’ll never talk is simply because most of them can’t. Let’s just say you catch one of them dealing dust; no judge in the world will accept their testimony. Why? Because technically they’re all retardates—they’re legally mentally impaired.”
Phil frowned. She was right again. “But what about Natter himself?” he raised the issue. “You ever talked to the guy? He’s sharp as a tack. He’s smart, he’s well-read, he’s articulate. I wouldn’t call him mentally impaired at all.”
“Phil, be real. The guy’s a Creeker, he makes Frankenstein’s monster look like Tom Cruise. You get him into court on shaky testimony, all the guy’s gotta do is play dumb and the judge throws the whole thing out. The only way you’re gonna get Natter is to bust a bunch of his point people or bag men—people who aren’t Creekers—and get them to testify. You’re gonna have to make a positive link between Natter and known PCP dealers. At least Mullins has you on the right track. Staking out Sallee’s over a period of time, getting a line on Natter’s out-of-town contacts—that’s the only way you’ll be able to get Cody Natter on a distro bust that’ll stick.”
Phil saw no point in telling her that the whole idea was his, not Mullins’. But she was right on all counts. This would probably wind up being as complicated as any of his PCP cases in the city, if not more so since the circumstances were so atypical. “I still want to find that lab, though,” he muttered, more to himself. “No judge will argue with hard photographic evidence.”
Susan’s expression turned bemused. “What, you think you’re gonna get a picture of Natter at the lab?”
“Why not? It’d be an open-and-shut case.”
“Never happen, Phil. Natter’s way too smart for anything even close to that. He’s probably never set foot in the lab, you can bank on that.”
Phil grumbled. Again, he knew she was right. Yeah, this sure ain’t the city, he thought. On Metro, he’d been one of the best narc cops on the force, but his expertise felt like a white elephant now. Everything was different here; things worked different ways. This was another world
“Phil!” Susan was suddenly whispering. “Look!”
He glanced up from the remnants of his hash and eggs. Susan was gazing fixedly out the window. Along the shoulder of the Route, a teenage boy and girl were walking, both dressed in little more than rags. Both had shaggy heads of dirty black hair, and they ambled along unsteadily, even crookedly. The boy wore rotted workboots, while the girl was barefoot, oblivious to the shoulder’s sharp gravel. In the bright, hot afternoon sun, they looked like bizarre ghosts.
“Creekers,” Phil uttered under his breath.
“God, I feel sorry for them,” Susan remarked, still staring out. “Talk about getting a bum deal from life.”
Phil gulped. Her observation made him at once feel selfish; in all his reflection upon his own problems, here were two kids with real problems. They walked at such a distance that he could discern little of their physical features, but even that was more than enough. The boy’s neck appeared twice as long as it should, which caused his enlarged head to droop to one side, while the girl didn’t seem to have any jaw at all, and though her left arm looked normal, her right was grievously shortened, the hand sprouting from the elbow.
