by Dale Mayer
“And now you know,” she said. “It was shit.”
Chapter 12
It all seemed too far-fetched for Minx. But then she knew if she tried to tell most people about her and Mouse’s childhood, it would seem too far-fetched for them too. She’d mentioned it to a couple friends in college, and they thought she’d been making it up. She’d learned quickly not tell anyone anything. But then she should have known that from her childhood. Mouse had told her all the time that “You can’t tell nobody nothing,” and “Everyone lies, cheats and steals.” He had also said, “You just got to lie better, faster and more often than the others. Keep everyone guessing.”
They were in Laszlo’s truck, heading toward the police station, something she was not really looking forward to. But there should have been a sense of satisfaction in knowing that the two assholes who had followed her home last night had been caught. She didn’t want to think or use the phrase the guy who strangled her because, of course, that was a little too graphic, too close to home.
Her neck was still sore. She’d seen the bruises in the bathroom mirror this morning and had deliberately put on a scarf. If the police asked, she’d show them how the bruises were starting to come up nicely. She didn’t know if they could get fingerprints or anything like that off her neck, and maybe she shouldn’t have had a shower, but it never occurred to her at the time, other than to don the cheap plastic gloves to protect any DNA under her nails.
They parked and walked into the station. As soon as they explained who they were and what they were waiting for, they were asked to take a seat, and they’d be called when it was their turn. Sitting on the hard and uncomfortable wooden benches wasn’t her favorite thing to do either.
“Have you ever been here before?” Laszlo asked, sitting beside her. “Outside of this issue?”
He sat close enough that they were almost touching, as if he’d done it on purpose. Protective. Letting everybody know she was his. And, if they wanted to cause trouble, they were welcome to, but they’d go through him. The possessiveness kind of went along with that protector syndrome.
She’d always been independent. … But she welcomed his actions given their early morning intruders.
But something personal was definitely blossoming between the two of them. She hadn’t seen it until she had turned around, and he was just suddenly there. He was fascinating. She’d always kept her relationships a little distant. Not quite giving 100 percent of herself. She knew all too well what people did when you trusted the wrong person. They took advantage. She’d spent way too much of her life watching others hurt and take advantage of people. Another of Mouse’s lessons. Don’t let anybody get too close.
She shook her head, getting back to Laszlo’s original questions. “Not in a long time. I came a couple times when Mouse got picked up for one reason or another.”
“He got charged?”
She frowned. “You know? I’m not sure. He was caught shoplifting once, and the store let him off. I don’t know why, but they did.”
The men just sat quietly.
“Sorry we couldn’t talk to Agnes this morning.”
“She did tell us to come back afterward, and she’d feed us lunch.”
Minx chuckled. “Are you ready for another burger?”
Laszlo grinned. “Bring it on. How they make money, I don’t know.”
“They’re not cheap,” she admitted. “But it’s such good food and large portions that nobody really seems to mind.”
“I imagine they mind, but they suck it up. I can’t see them arguing with Agnes very much. She’d probably pick them up by the back of the shirt and belt, then heave them out of the door,” Geir said with a smile.
From the tone of his voice, she couldn’t help but think he admired that attitude. “You know? She probably would. I’ve seen her toss more than a few guys out of there.”
The men looked at her.
She nodded with a big smile. “Once I was there with Mouse, and one of the guys wouldn’t leave me alone. Mouse wasn’t much for size back then. He was pretty skinny, had a bit of an attitude, but this guy wasn’t listening to Mouse telling him to back off. I’d already told him no half a dozen times, but he wasn’t taking anything the two of us said for an answer.” She stopped to laugh at the memory. “Agnes came up behind him, grabbed him by the back of his collar, literally, and by his belt, while Bart held the door open for her so she could toss him out into the parking lot.”
“Did he ever come back after her?”
She shook her head. “He had friends there at the time too. She told them quite clearly, if they didn’t want to get barred from her place, they’d make sure that asshole stayed away from Mouse and me.”
Geir’s smile went up a notch.
“I never saw him again.”
“Maybe he’s dead,” Geir said. “If you think about it, a toss like that could have busted the guy’s neck.”
“And then, honestly, Bart would have opened the Dumpster, and they would have tossed him in.” She felt the start from both men, and she shook her head. “You’ve got to understand how rough my life was. There were days I woke up grateful I was even alive. Most days I just woke up hungry and grateful I was still alone in the bedroom.”
Laszlo winced.
She nodded. “And the other days, I woke up grateful I wasn’t Mouse. Because his days were even worse.”
The men settled back.
“Hard to imagine,” Laszlo said. “I grew up in Norway with a brother and a loving father and a mother who looked after us, made breakfast and saw us off to school on time. Even though I hear about such events, it still shocks me that these things occur.”
“Homelessness isn’t a problem in Norway, is it?”
“Not for long. The winters are too harsh. They wouldn’t survive. The government is run quite differently though.”
“Yeah, it’s not the same in America. We might be a Western world, but we’re sure as hell not as advanced as we could be.”
“Understood,” Geir said.
“And what’s your story, Geir?”
“Don’t have one. Born in the Ukraine, family immigrated to the US when I was six. We went back to the Ukraine after my father died—my mother wanted to return to her roots but she followed my father soon after, from cancer. I stayed there for the last few years of my schooling, went to college, decided that wasn’t the life I wanted. I came back to America, and the rest is history.”
“Is that when you guys first met each other?”
The men nodded. “We were in basic training together,” Laszlo said. “Most of us were. Not all the same year, but it didn’t take long for us as a unit to bond and become very close friends.”
“Right. That whole togetherness thing.”
Just then her name was called. She stood, and Laszlo stood with her. She glanced at Geir, expecting him to be on the other side of her, but he was already gone. Startled, she turned around, looking for him.
Laszlo tucked her arm in his and said, “Don’t worry about it.”
She walked after the policeman who had called her. He led the way to a desk. She sat down, and he started talking.
“Okay, so you are sure you want to move forward?”
“Not only do I want to sign it, but somebody followed me home last night from a restaurant, and then I was attacked in the early morning.”
The cop’s eyes widened, and he reached for a new pad of paper. “I guess we need a whole new report then too, don’t we?”
“Talk to Officer Carson Everett,” Laszlo said. “He’s the one who came to her door this morning and took away the two men.” He checked his watch. “We’re supposed to meet him this morning as well.”
“Two men?” He wrote down Carson’s name. “I know the name, but I don’t know the man. So he’s handling one case, and I’m handling the other?”
“I’m pretty sure you’ll find they dovetail,” Laszlo said.
The cop sat back and looked at him, his gaze
hard. “What makes you say that?”
“The two men Carson picked up this morning were hired to take her out, to make sure she didn’t cause any trouble. No specifics were given in their methodology.”
The cop stared at him for a long moment. “Murder-for-hire?”
“Garbage disposal,” Laszlo said succinctly.
Hearing it like that was horrifying. But she could understand how it made it very clear exactly what was happening.
The cop looked at her. “Is that how it was?”
She nodded. “Definitely.”
“Stay here. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He got up to leave the room.
She turned to look at Laszlo. “Garbage disposal?”
“It’s one phrase for it. You were a problem. They wanted to get rid of you.”
She slumped back in her chair and said, “Do you think it’s over?”
“In what universe do you think this could possibly be over? The two guys who came after you, yeah, they’ve been caught. Does that stop the guy who hired them from hiring new ones? No, of course not. It depends on the depth of the order, how serious the actual man in the background is.”
“I can’t see Andrew doing something like that.”
“Are you sure he’s a nobody?”
“Didn’t your friends do a search on him, tearing apart his life?”
“They’re working on it, but I haven’t got a report back. It’s moved up the priority list, now that we’ve got hired killers on your case,” he admitted. “But it’s not exactly a five-minute process.”
“I’m sorry. I know it isn’t. I couldn’t get that information at all. My fate would be left in the hands of the cops. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be very good.”
“I think they do their best but have only so many man-hours. So many man-hours to handle and juggle multitudes of cases.”
When the officer returned, Officer Everett was beside him. She looked up at him and smiled. “Hi.”
He smiled, reached over and shook their hands. “Hi. Glad to see you’re looking better.”
“I don’t know how good I’m looking,” she said, deliberately taking the scarf off her neck.
Both men’s faces turned hard.
Laszlo made a strangled exclamation sound and turned her slightly so he could look at her. “I didn’t see those before,” he said, sounding pissed.
She held up the scarf. “I saw them when I had my shower. I put this on to stop anybody from feeling uncomfortable about them.”
“Now we need to have photographs of that. I don’t remember them from when I collected the men.” The officer frowned at her.
“I was under a blanket because I was so cold. I wasn’t thinking just how sore my throat was.”
“I wish you hadn’t showered. There might have been some DNA.”
She held up her fingertips. “In that case you probably want to check my nails.”
“But you said you had a shower.”
She nodded and then with a grim smile said, “I put on plastic gloves. Just in case. After I saw the marks, although I didn’t know if there was any DNA on my neck, I had tried hard to fight. I couldn’t take the chance of losing anything I had scraped off my strangler. So I opened a box of hair color, pulled out the plastic gloves from inside and shoved them on.”
With a nod Carson said, “Come on. Let’s get you to another room, and we’ll take care of that now.”
They were led into a small interview room where she sat down. Within ten minutes somebody came through with a tray, scissors and some baggies. They cleaned out her nails, then cut her nails.
“I can’t guarantee there is any DNA on them,” she said.
“If there is, we’ll find it.”
After that, her neck was photographed from several different angles. When they were finally done, there was a sense of not so much relief but almost invasiveness. As if the reality had set in that it had really happened to her. She’d blocked it out until then, not wanting to see or deal with the aftermath of the attack.
As she sat here in the interview room, she said, “If that had happened when I was a child, I wouldn’t have had the foresight to cover my hands during the shower. I also wouldn’t have talked to the police, and I would never have given them DNA to check out.”
“Not even the DNA?”
She shook her head. “Hell no. If anybody thought we had DNA on them, it wasn’t worth our lives. It was one thing to be assaulted, beaten or any other number of incredibly terrible things, but, if they thought we had proof and would turn it over to the cops, our lives would be forfeit. And, when you’re raised in fear, you know exactly what you have to do to stay alive. But honestly I seem to have been completely oblivious this time. I should have told Carson how I scratched him. I should have showed him my neck when he arrived.”
“And I should have checked you over myself. I asked you if you were okay. You said yes, and that was it.”
“And that’s true,” she said. “But, at the same time, I wasn’t. I think I was still in shock.” As a matter of fact, she wasn’t very impressed with herself. She shook her head. “If I was living that life once again, thrown back into it without all these years of preparation, I’d be dead now. I’ve lost my edge.”
Laszlo reached over and gently stroked her hand. “And maybe that’s a good thing. You don’t have to live in that environment anymore.”
“No, but it shows my instincts are blunted. I only woke up because I couldn’t breathe. If he’d put a pillow over my face, he would have killed me outright.”
So much pain was in her voice that he didn’t know what to say. And, to be honest, he wasn’t doing very well himself. “I didn’t know about the other exit. I was guarding one without realizing there was another.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said with a head shake.
“And yet it is,” he said. “Every place has to have two exits for fire safety. It never occurred to me.”
“Hey, our instincts have all dulled. Two years of recovery will do that, I’m sure.”
He gave her a grim look. “And yet, after the last couple weeks, I should have been back in tune with this type of work. No excuse for missing that point.”
She nodded and smiled. “And yet there’s only so much we can blame ourselves for.”
“True enough. And it’s a matter of doing better from here on in.”
But inside he realized just how much guilt he felt. Having seen her bruised and discolored throat and realizing she had protected her nails so they had been cut and trimmed away with her permission, preserving any foreign DNA, well, that was smart thinking on her part but not exactly much on his. He was feeling pretty shitty about not having found the second entrance earlier.
They sat there and waited until Carson returned. He said, “Both cases are mine now.”
She smiled. “Good. Maybe you’ll get to close both of them.”
“Hard to say. You seem pretty sure they’re connected, right?”
“Unless I just happen to have shitty-enough luck that I have two assholes after me.”
“Which isn’t likely.”
“Not in my world. I’ve been living relatively peacefully since I moved to my uncle’s house in Maine.”
“Before that?”
“I was raised by a drug-addict mother who had a rap sheet several pages long, but she’s gone now.”
“And did you go to juvie?”
“You’d think I would have,” she said with a smile. “And, if it not for an uncle in Maine, I probably would have ended up there. But, as soon as I could, I contacted him and moved. I got out.”
“And yet you came back?”
She shrugged irritably. “Yeah, that wasn’t my best decision. I came back for a friend, only I ended up moving out. For a while I was worried that moving here was a mistake, but then it took a turn for the better. At least until I met my current sleazy boss. I felt like part of the reason for being here was to put my past to rest. Now the only real
reason to stay is to make sure that same sleazy boss gets into trouble for what he’s done.”
He smiled at her sympathetically. “Hey, you did your part. Now let the cops do theirs. You don’t have to move on or move away. It should be your decision and because it feels right for you now.”
She smiled. “That’s exactly what Laszlo has been saying.”
Carson looked over at Laszlo. “And I checked on you some more.”
“That should have been interesting reading,” he said, his tone bland. He’d been listening to their conversation so far without contributing anything.
“It is. You have a very illustrious career.”
He shrugged. “It’s over. That’s all that matters.”
“So, are you doing some PI work now?”
“Something like that.”
“And related to Levi?”
“Not by blood but by passion.”
Carson seemed to understand. “He’s an interesting man.”
Both men dropped it. It wasn’t exactly a topic Laszlo wanted to linger on. Discussing all the work Levi did wouldn’t get them any further along in this case. But it did mean Carson knew Laszlo had resources. And people with skills.
“Did you check into my complaint about my boss?”
“Two men went to his office this morning. He was out. I’ll stop by this afternoon, especially now that I have all these related items together. I want to have a talk with him.”
“Right. What about the handler, Bill Fenders?” she asked with emphasis. “I guess you haven’t had a chance to run anything down yet, have you?”
He shook his head. “No, and I just got the other files, so I’ll need some time to digest what’s happened so far.”
“Nothing’s happened.” Her tone was wry. “That’s why I’m asking.”
“Give me at least twenty-four hours, and I’ll see if I can contact your assailant. We’ll go from there.” He shoved the statement across the desk. “Take a moment to read this, and, if you agree with it as is, sign it, and we’ll move forward.”
