by A. J. Thomas
“You’re right,” Ray whispered, his stomach sinking all the way to the floorboards with those words. “It is pathetic. Thanks for the ride, Belkamp.”
Ray climbed out of the car and headed for the elevator, not looking back even when the purring engine behind him died. “Ray, wait a second!”
When the elevator opened, Ray stepped in and pushed the button for the sixth floor. Elliot, jogging to catch up with him, slipped through the doors just before they slid closed.
“I’m not really in the mood to cook anymore.” Ray didn’t look at him.
Elliot held out Ray’s cell phone. It was still turned off. Ray shoved it back into his pocket without a word.
“Look, I’m sorry. That was a cheap shot. I didn’t mean it.”
“Yes you did. It’s true.”
Beside him, Elliot sighed. “So what if it’s true? I still shouldn’t have said it.”
“Why not? I would have.”
Elliot shook his head, his mouth open. “You’re fucking impossible, you know that?”
“No, you said it yourself, I’m just pathetic. And you’re right. The really pathetic part,” Ray laughed miserably, “is that it’s not even about the sex. I mean, I like sex, but that’s not it.”
“What is it about, then?”
“I do it to sleep.”
“Huh?”
“When I was a kid, my dad was always on duty or deployed. My mom worked all the time, and when she didn’t work, she partied. So my grandmother raised me. She raised all of us—me, my sister, my cousins. I shared a bedroom with anywhere from two to four other cousins on any given night. Alejandro, Martin, and I were always there. We were more like brothers than cousins. When we got older and could take care of ourselves, we were still inseparable. But when I decided to walk away from my family, when I broke with them, I never regretted it. Not once in my life have I ever wished I had stayed. Even though my mother pretends she never had a son, and my sister can’t keep pictures of me with her kids around the house because she doesn’t want our entire family to cut her and her kids off, too, I have never regretted it. Hell, I’m lucky they’ve just decided that I’m dead to them. Martin’s kids are growing up without a father or a grandfather because I helped send them both to prison. And even though they hate me, I don’t regret it because I know those kids are better off.”
“You can’t sleep alone?”
Ray shrugged. “I sleep best if there’s someone else in the room. I wake up, and if I hear someone else breathing, if I can reach out and feel someone else there, I sleep better. I don’t like to get involved with people because that’s just inviting Alejandro to try and ruin their lives to fuck with me. And Martin’s kids are growing up, and they’re not going to be as subtle or as nice about it as Alejandro. They’ll just kill people. But I like sex, and I like to sleep through the night, so I pick up strangers. I honestly try not to remember their names, but I make sure they get off, and I make them breakfast in the morning. Is that really so bad?”
When Ray looked up at Elliot, he wanted to punch the other man. The anger that had made his expression hard and cold in the car was gone. Now, his dark eyebrows drooped and deep wrinkles crossed his forehead. His pale green eyes looked sad and full of pity. “No,” he said at last. “It’s not so bad. But it’s not what I want.”
Ray saw the clutter spilling out from his apartment door the moment the elevator opened. He shoved Elliot to the wall and ducked low while he drew his Glock. “Stay there!” He took off down the hall.
“Like hell.” Elliot moved forward along the opposite wall, crouched low. He had a small pistol, no larger than the Ruger Ray carried, in his hands. Ray got to the apartment door first, paused to listen, and then risked a quick glance inside. Elliot took up a position across from the door, his pistol held in a low ready position. Ray watched his eyes scan the room beyond the open door. When Ray saw him nod, he moved into his living room, shifting across the doorframe so he could keep his back to the wall. What he could see of the living room was an extreme mess. His books were strewn about the floor, shelves were pulled down, and broken glass and shattered bits of electronics were everywhere. He kicked the open door hard, just in case someone was waiting behind it. The door bounced off a shredded couch cushion.
He kept his pistol pointed between the hallway to the bedroom and the entrance to his kitchen, then gestured out the door. Elliot moved in fast, crossing the room and checking down the hallway before creeping toward the kitchen. When he stopped before rounding the blind corner, Ray moved ahead of him, trusting Elliot would provide cover fire if Ray needed it.
The kitchen was empty, too. They swept through the rest of the apartment quietly, checking rooms, then closets, and finally under Ray’s shredded bed. Even his pillows were scattered, and the Glock he kept under his pillow was gone. Everything in his apartment was trashed, but they were alone.
Elliot tucked the small pistol into the waistband of his workout pants and found his cell phone. “What’s missing?” He was already dialing 911.
“That I’ve noticed… One semiautomatic nine millimeter and two laptop computers.”
“Anything else?”
“My TV and stereo were smashed instead of stolen….” Ray was thinking out loud. Whoever had broken in wasn’t looking for anything they could unload quickly. “Call it in. My phone’s still dead. And how fast can you find out what was on Sophie’s laptop?”
Elliot shook his head. “It’s Saturday night,” he said, covering the phone with his hand. “I’ve got no idea.”
“Lazy-ass, nine-to-five Feds….” Ray watched Elliot scoop up a tuft of pillow stuffing and fling it at him. It fell two feet short. “Really? That’s the best you can do?”
Elliot covered the phone again. “Would you shut the fuck up?”
Elliot reported the break-in, ended the call, and then picked up a book from the floor and flung it at Ray. “Calling me lazy when you couldn’t do one measly hour in a judo class?”
Ray stepped forward, out of the book’s trajectory. “And tampering with a crime scene!” Ray gasped and splayed his fingers over his heart. “Not winning the FBI many points for professionalism tonight, Agent Belkamp.”
“Okay, okay. Get your ass back out into the hall, I’ll find something out there I can throw at you.” He paused by the door. “Hey, is that a bullet hole?”
Ray groaned. “It was already there.”
“Rough neighborhood?”
“My cousin Alejandro came by three nights ago, to ask me to look for Sophie. I told you about it, didn’t I?”
“No, I think I’d remember you mentioning it. You tried to shoot him?”
Ray stared at him for a long moment, wondering if Elliot had been briefed about Alejandro Munoz at all. “Yeah.”
“What would you have done if you actually shot him?”
Ray tilted his head to the side. Elliot couldn’t be serious. Given all of the things Ray had seen Alejandro do, all the things that he’d heard rumors about, the only logical thing to do if he actually managed to hit the other man would be to empty the rest of his clip into Alejandro’s head. “I’d have shot him again.”
“Is he that bad?” Elliot laughed.
“Yes. On the streets, he’s known as Alejandro the Soup Maker, because his favorite method for getting rid of inconvenient bodies is to hack them to pieces and seal those pieces in a barrel of lye for a few months until all that’s left is a thick brown soup.”
“This is the cousin you talked about? Sophie’s brother?”
“Yeah.”
“Why did you miss?”
“He was using my date as a human shield, and I’m not going to shoot through a hot guy just to get to Alejandro.”
“He was what? Was he injured?”
“No, he was fine. Now do you see why I need to find Sophie before he does?”
Ray stalked out, trying to make sense of the mess, to see what else might be missing, and what was destroyed. He worked his way back o
ut to the living room to wait for an on-duty officer to respond. He was still hungry, but he didn’t dare touch anything in his kitchen now. He was also still angry, and admittedly still turned on, from his argument with Elliot, and he couldn’t do anything about that either.
He gritted his teeth, strolled out to the hallway, and smacked his forehead against the nearest wall. “This is going to be another very long night.”
“And then there was Kowalski’s wedding!” One of the older detectives slapped Elliot across the back. “Not the reception, but the rehearsal dinner. Kowalski’s fiancé was from this superconservative Baptist family, and he was pretty conservative too, right? So a week before, Delgado overheard Kowalski saying something… less than polite… to Delgado’s partner. They’d only been in the division for about a year, but Hayes tended to make more gay jokes than all of the straight guys did, so no one thought anything of it. Except Delgado, who was pissed. But Delgado doesn’t say anything when he’s really mad. The rehearsal dinner comes, Delgado says he can’t make it. He broke into the catering truck before the dinner and replaced all of the individual flan deserts with, I kid you not, Jell-O penises.”
“What?” Even Elliot didn’t believe that. The half-dozen homicide detectives sitting around him chuckled and nodded.
“I’m totally serious.” The detective fiddled with his phone for a moment and turned it toward Elliot.
On the phone was an old photo. The china was ornate, set at a table with formal silverware and white linen. In the center of the plate, standing straight up, was a light pink modeled Jell-O thing that did, in fact, look like an erect penis. “I don’t know how he managed making one, much less three hundred. I don’t know how much he had to pay the servers to get them to add those scoops of ice cream and the white chocolate drizzle, but it was a nice touch.”
“Are those sprinkles?” Elliot asked, trying not to laugh at the small brown specks decorating the ice cream. “The sprinkles are supposed to be pubic hair?”
“Yeah! Our Delgado’s got one hell of an eye for detail.”
“Kowalski’s fiancé and her family were mortified, but he didn’t want to piss them off more, so he actually sat there pretending nothing was weird about the dessert,” one of the few female officers in the room added.
Sanchez, Elliot recalled her name. She had definitely surprised Elliot. When the stories of Ray Delgado’s exploits had turned dirty, she had been the first one to break out pictures and begin telling jokes.
“Kowalski transferred over to the sheriff’s department after that.” Another detective nodded, smiling brightly.
“Dicks for dick, I say.” There was a chorus of agreement. “The sheriff’s department can keep him.”
“Yeah, Delgado might be a bit psycho, but he’s never been one of those guys who’ll sit there quietly and watch someone act like a prick. He’ll call you on it, and if you do something shitty enough to really piss him off, he’ll do it in the biggest, most public way he can think of.”
“But it’s not like he was mean about it,” said Sanchez. “He was doing what any of us would have done. What we all should have done. He was standing up for a member of the team. And sometimes when he’s over-the-top, he’s trying to be sweet. When I had my last baby, he made this gigantic thing out of origami paper cranes. It was like a giant bouquet, but shaped like balloons. It was a bit too big. It didn’t fit in the door of the hospital room. But he did it because he knows I’m allergic to everything from latex to daisies. It was really sweet.”
“That is actually pretty cool,” said Elliot. “So why does he have such a shitty reputation? The way we heard it, every partner he’s paired up with requests a new partner within a week.”
The detectives around him grew quiet, their smiles turned serious. “It’s not that he’s not a standup guy. He’s psycho, but he’s great. You couldn’t ask for a more loyal partner. It’s just that he’s such a perfectionist. No one notices it until they have to work with him, but if you’re paired up with him and fuck up once, even over some little detail, he doesn’t hesitate to rip you a new one. He and Hayes transferred over here together, so no one really had a problem with it before Hayes left. We had to put up with his practical jokes, but not his attitude.”
“I was paired up with him for about two weeks when Hayes left,” said Sanchez. “Everybody warned me that if he so much as smiled, I should file sexual-harassment charges.” She shook her head sadly. “I forgot to double-lock a subject’s cuffs one night. It had been six nights straight on duty, and we work twelve-hour shifts, so I was exhausted. He made a very quiet comment about me being an incompetent rookie who shouldn’t be writing parking tickets, then didn’t let me do anything the rest of the shift. It was a stupid mistake, and I was tired, but it’s not like I just made detective. The only time he even acknowledged my existence after that was when he left a hundred pages of reports about nerve damage from accidentally tightened handcuffs on my desk. Once we were on different assignments again, he went back to being him. Regardless of department policy, some people work better alone, and he’s one of them.”
“He was being nice because you’re a girl,” said the first detective. “I saw him spend twenty minutes screaming at some poor guy from traffic who was assisting at a scene. The kid fucked up his chain of custody on a cigarette butt or something, and he nearly put the kid’s head through a wall. If you get on his good side, he’ll have your back through anything, but if you don’t make a good first impression…. Ah, never mind, I take it back. He’s an ass even if you get on his good side.”
“Well, ass or not, I need him alive.” Elliot managed a resigned smile. He’d caught a few glimpses of Ray’s reactions to what he perceived to be incompetence, and he knew that Ray’s coworkers weren’t exaggerating. At the time, he’d thought it was just because his partner was in trouble, but when the fallout from that case began to settle, he had learned just how wrong he was. Ray’s reaction hadn’t been especially harsh because his partner was in trouble, it had been toned-down because he’d been distracted by the fact that the man he loved was in trouble. Ray was often insensitive and cold, and the fact that he was almost always right was infuriating.
Elliot was beginning to see that, behind his flirtatious smile and the scathing criticism, Ray Delgado’s life was defined by absolutes. Elliot doubted any officers except the people on his team knew how seriously Delgado took his job, and he’d bet none of them knew why he was so dedicated. Delgado’s decision to devote his life to working against his extended family left him in a position where any attachments he formed made him vulnerable, where any mistakes he made could prove deadly. He lived each day of his life with the very real fear that the next time he saw a member of his own family, he may have to kill or arrest them. Everyone he had grown up believing he could depend on had become an enemy. Anyone he became attached to would just become a liability. Becoming a detail-obsessed asshole was probably the reason Ray was still alive.
He glanced toward the small office door with a bronze nameplate that had nothing but the name Jenkins on it. Ray had been inside the office for over an hour now. Elliot had seen him pacing, gesturing wildly, and sitting down with his head cradled in his hands. The old man behind the desk had hardly moved. Elliot hadn’t seen his lips move either, and he was beginning to wonder if the captain had said anything at all.
“Think they’re going to be much longer?” he asked.
“That’s up to Delgado.” The detective who had been sharing stories of Ray’s many practical jokes over the years glanced through the window. “He talked himself into being suspended last time.”
“Huh?”
“Captain Jenkins knows how to deal with Delgado. He just lets Delgado rant about what happened, lets Delgado explain why he was wrong, what he thinks his punishment should be, and why he shouldn’t be fired. I think Delgado even typed his own write-up last time around.”
“Really?” Elliot hopped off Ray’s desk and studied the captain closely thr
ough the glass wall separating them. The old man occasionally narrowed his eyes, but he wasn’t saying anything. The more he stared at Ray, the more Ray filled in on his own. “That’s impressive.”
The detective nodded. The radio clipped to his collar buzzed to life and he turned away to respond. The charge room echoed with radio traffic, and all at once, the officers who had been chatting with him were racing out the door, leaving Elliot alone. Since it was a specialty division, there was no duty officer left behind to man the office. Inside the captain’s office, the old man behind the desk was up and moving, too. He was on his feet and talking quickly into the phone. For the first time in an hour, Ray was quiet and still.
The old captain hurried out a moment later, nodding to Elliot as he passed. Ray shuffled behind him, running his hands through his hair. “Can I get Hathaway’s cell number from you? Apparently I get to submit to the FBI’s short-term protection scheme or get transferred back to the patrol division.”
“Did your captain suggest that?” Elliot smirked. “Or did he wait for you to do it yourself?”
“Fuck you, man.”
Elliot shoved Ray toward the door. “Come on. Hanging out with me should work just as well as hanging out with Hathaway, and I’m less likely to kill you.”
“Uh, I don’t have anything. Not my phone charger, my car, or my clothes. Can we stop by a store on the way?”
Elliot shook his head slowly and shoved Ray toward the door. “No. It’s nearly midnight. There’s food at my place, and my clothes will fit you better than me.”
Ray kicked his own desk. The finish was scuffed where he kicked it, and Elliot guessed it was probably the usual target of Ray’s frustrations.
