by DL Barbur
There was a collective hiss from the crowd in the living room and I all but dragged a giggling Alex out the front door. She leaned against me and put an arm around my waist as we went down the stairs. It was probably forty degrees out and she wasn't wearing a coat. I debated giving her mine or going back for hers and decided just to keep walking her to the car. It wasn't far and the cold might help sober her up. Besides, I was acutely aware of the heat of her body, even through the layers of my shirt and coat.
Edward, Bolle's bodyguard and driver, regarded us impassively. He might have tilted an eyebrow up the barest millimeter, but that might have been my imagination.
Chapter Fourteen
Getting a giggling, uncoordinated Alex into the passenger seat of my car turned out to be an adventure. I learned something in the process: Alex had very definite tan lines. Once she finally got in the seat, she settled her dress back down to her knees. She either didn’t notice that I'd noticed, or didn’t care. I shut the door gently and looked out at the lights of the city for a few seconds, trying to concentrate on the view and not what I'd just seen in the dome light of my car.
"This is Al's daughter," I reminded myself under my breath. "And she is very drunk."
I took a deep breath and got in. The ride, mercifully, was short. Alex only lived a few miles away, out Skyline Road. She sat snuggled up against me the whole way, her head on my shoulder and her hand on my thigh. I was very conscious of her breast brushing my upper arm.
I was treated to a long, rambling monologue on the evils of her stepmother. I heard how Gina had snookered poor innocent Al into marrying her while Al had still been mourning the death of Alex's mother. I heard how Gina only wanted Al for his money, and would probably dump him as soon as she had her hooks into him deep enough to take him for all he was worth.
I had a slightly different take on things. I remembered Al going after Gina with gusto, and I really doubted Gina was after Al's money, considering she had more than he did. But I'd learned a long time ago not to argue with drunk people.
What shone through all this was how much Alex idolized her father, probably more than he deserved. Alex had been a teenager when I'd first met her, all those years ago, and even then her life had revolved around making her dad happy.
We rolled up to Alex's little bungalow. She futzed around trying to get her car door open and I realized that bracing night air or not, she wasn't going to make it to the door unassisted. I got out and walked with her.
She bumped her hip into mine and said, "So tell me, Dent, what do you like for breakfast?"
"Huh? Why" I was concentrating very much on putting one foot in front of the other, and not on the sway of her hip against mine. Promise.
"So I can go look in my fridge and see if I can feed you in the morning, or see if I have to make a grocery run."
We stopped in front of the door. "I just need to get you inside, Alex, then I'll be on my way. I don't think you should do a grocery run."
I was digging through her purse, trying to sort through the odds and ends for her house key by feel when she leaned over and licked me on the ear. I dropped the purse.
"Alex!"
She giggled as I bent over, wincing at the pain from my busted ribs. I gathered up everything I could find and stood up.
"Alex. Knock it off." This was getting ridiculous. It was also getting harder to find her keys.
She giggled again. "Oh, come on."
I finally found her key ring. I slid it in the lock and the door popped open.
She headed in past me, pulling on my arm. "Come on inside."
"Alex. No. I need to go."
"Why?"
"You're very drunk."
"I'm not going to puke and make you hold my hair or anything. I'm not THAT drunk."
"That's not what I mean. I…"
She leaned forward and kissed me, full on the mouth this time. Her tongue darted between my lips and I realized I was kissing her back. My hands just sort of fell naturally to her hips and I stopped thinking, just enjoyed the pure animal sensation of her lips on mine. She started backing farther into the house and I followed.
She ran a hand down my belly and with a deftness that belied her earlier clumsiness, unzipped my pants. She slid a finger inside and stroked me. I jumped at the electric touch.
Somehow that brought me to my senses. I stepped back away from her, almost moaning as the connection between her finger and my skin was broken. I fumbled with my zipper.
"Alex. I'm sorry. I can't."
"You can't? What do you mean you can't? I finally have you in my house. I just had my hand in your pants, and you're telling me you can't? Why the hell not?"
For a second my brain locked up on that one. Why not, indeed? Everything had felt pretty good so far. Why not? Oh yeah.
"Audrey," I managed to choke out. "I'm with Audrey. It wouldn't be right."
Plus there was Al. Al had sent his drunk daughter home in my car because he trusted me.
"Oh yeah. Audrey," Alex said. "I forgot about her."
I almost said "me too" but managed to choke it off in time.
“Look, Alex. I really have to go. I'm sorry…"
Sorry for what? Not sleeping with her when she was drunk? That didn't sound right.
"Anyway," I continued. "Get some sleep."
"Ok," she said. And started crying.
I can handle gunfire. I can't handle tears. I needed to get out. Besides, the memory of that kiss, and the touch wouldn’t go away. The animal part of my brain was telling me I was stupid to walk out that door.
I fled. There was no other word for it. I fled into the night, got in my car and went home, where I faced a sleepless night.
Chapter Fifteen
I was late for work the next morning, but for the safety of myself and others, I stopped for coffee. My only concession to Portland coffee culture was I usually bought from Starbucks, mainly because you couldn't go more than a couple of blocks without tripping over one. None of that foamed milk, cinnamon, chocolate stuff for me though. I just drank coffee, plain black coffee, preferably so strong that there was a nice oily sheen floating on the top.
I juggled my coffee, the steering wheel, and my phone so I could call Mandy.
Mandy didn't answer. Usually, she'd pick the phone up during the first or second ring like she was waiting for somebody to call her up with details of where to find Jimmy Hoffa or something. Maybe she was sleeping in too.
Traffic didn't get any better as I entered downtown. People were blocking the street, protesting some damn thing or another. That happened so much in downtown Portland that nobody even bothered to find out what the protest was about. We just tuned in the news to find out how much it snarled traffic.
I parked in the garage next to Central precinct, keeping an eye out for Mandy's work car as I went. I finally found it and parked next to it. Good, she was here, maybe she had just forgotten to turn her phone on.
I wound my way up the back stairs and into the lobby. I felt grateful for the caffeine molecules soaking into my brain. Planning my day and getting through it now seemed like a real possibility, as opposed to just sitting around like a lump.
I popped out of the stairwell on my floor, right next to the bank of elevators, and stopped in my tracks. There was a guy standing there, waiting for an elevator, tall, shaved head, maybe my height, maybe a little taller. Under the expensive-looking charcoal suit he was wearing, I could tell he had the long lean build of a runner. He was one of those people who looked perfectly poised and centered when they stood like they were rooted to the ground and immovable.
I was looking at him in profile. The face tickled something in the back of my mind, some memory.
He turned his head and our eyes locked. I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time: real fear. It shocked me. After a while, my fear had been replaced by a kind of anticipation, almost a longing for a good adrenaline rush. But this was different. I literally felt a tingle run down my spine, like somebody
had hooked me up to a low current battery. It was like I'd come around a corner on a jungle trail and locked eyes with the biggest snake in the jungle. His face was flat, expressionless. I saw his eyes measure me up and down like a butcher who was thinking about how to best carve up a side of beef.
The elevator dinged and the door opened. He gave me the slightest of smiles, or did I imagine it? Then the doors slid shut behind him and he was gone. My paralysis broke and I stepped forward out of the stairwell.
I stopped again, replaying what had just happened. I chased murderers for a living. Why was I rooted to the spot like a kid at a haunted house over a bald guy in a business suit?
I started moving again, striding deliberately towards my office. This was ridiculous. I really did need a vacation.
The detective office was quiet. I didn't see Mandy anywhere, or that many other people for that matter. Since Lubbock took over, most of the guys stayed out of the office as much as they could, preferring to do their work from coffee shops or an empty office at one of the other precincts.
I didn't see Lubbock, a good sign, but I did see his flunky Dan Winter. Winter was standing outside my cube, a very bad sign.
"Sergeant Winter." I nodded, hoping the fact that he was standing in the doorway to my cubicle was just a coincidence, but feeling a sinking feeling that it probably wasn't.
Winter put on his serious, authoritative face. He tried to play mentor to all the guys under him, despite the fact that he really wasn't much older than most of us, and had skated his way from one make-work assignment to another in the bureau. Mostly he had followed Lubbock around, acting as his Aide De Camp and toady in whatever assignment Lubbock happened to be working.
"Dent, I need you to come with me." Without another word he turned and started walking towards the conference room. I shrugged and followed him. This should be interesting.
He led me to the conference room and shut the door behind us. Lubbock sat on one side of the table, with a guy I vaguely recognized as a civilian employee from Human Resources. Lubbock was nervous. I could tell from the way his eyes kept darting around the room.
"Have a seat Miller." Lubbock attempted a commanding voice and failed miserably. His voice broke on my name, heading upwards an octave.
I thought about saying I preferred to stand, just to be a jerk, but decided against it. I pulled a chair out well away from the table and sat down across from Lubbock with my legs crossed. I tried to relax. Winter remained standing, his hands hooked together under his paunch, guarding the door I guess.
Lubbock opened his mouth to speak and I cut him off, timing it perfectly. "What can I do for you, Steve?" Sometimes I couldn't resist being just a little bit of an asshole.
He frowned in irritation and it took him a couple of seconds to get back on track. "We are here to discuss a very serious matter."
We didn't usually meet in a conference room with one of the toads from Human Resources to talk about the weather. Lubbock paused, staring at me. I sat there keeping my face neutral, staring back. I wasn't going to make this easy.
He swallowed. "You're being suspended, pending an investigation into the arrest of Ian Wendt. Mr. Wendt has made some very serious allegations of excessive force against you and Detective Williams. These are allegations I have a duty to take seriously."
Every time a suspect got banged around by the cops, he would make an excessive force complaint. We had to investigate them, but unless somebody died, or the allegations were substantiated by another cop, nobody ever got suspended while the investigation was taking place.
"What's this really about, Steve?" I tried to lock eyes with Lubbock, but he refused. His eyes would settle down for a fraction of a second, then slide away. The HR guy wrote my question down on a pad.
Lubbock blushed. "This is about doing the best thing for the City of Portland. Wendt has a broken knee and a broken elbow. This is a very serious situation. I have to act."
It was like a speech he'd memorized by rote. I felt a vein begin to throb in my temple. I almost started arguing with him, almost started to tell him Wendt was a violent psychopath, that I'd saved Wendt's life by taking him down the way I had, saved some other cop the trouble of shooting him. But the HR geek was sitting there with his pen poised over his legal pad, waiting for me to say something. It occurred to me that I should have my union representative here.
“Also, it has come to my attention you failed in your duty as a police officer last night. You witnessed an episode of domestic violence, and instead of making a mandatory arrest, you drove the perpetrator home.”
I blinked, for a moment not understanding what he was talking about. Then I realized he was talking about Alex. Most people thought of domestic violence as a husband beating up his wife. But strictly speaking, the law covered “family or household members,” which technically included Gina and Alex. The law made it mandatory for police to arrest the primary aggressor in a case of domestic violence, so strictly speaking, I should have arrested Alex last night, or called somebody else to do it.
I realized Lubbock had spoken only in generalities, hoping to get me to blurt out my account of what happened. It was an old investigator’s trick.
So I kept my mouth shut, playing an old investigator's trick of my own, letting the silence build. Lubbock broke first.
"We'll need your badge, your bureau-issued weapon, and your bureau car. You are to take no police action while you are suspended. You will call and check in with Sergeant Winter twice a day and make yourself available for interviews."
"What about the Marshall investigation?" I asked. The HR guy wrote that down. The initial hot flush of anger was receding, replaced by a cold fury that I hadn't felt in a long time, since the last time I'd left my father's trailer up that hollow in Tennessee.
"Sergeant Winter will take over the Marshall investigation. I also have some concerns about that case. I feel like there was a rush to judgment in making that arrest. You exposed the Bureau to some real risk with that."
I suppressed a snort. Now I knew what this was about. Now I knew how Marshall had gotten out of all those other deals: because of people like Lubbock.
I dug into my valise, pulled out my notes on the Marshall case. It struck me as funny right then, we had been calling it the "Marshall case," but it wasn't really. We should have been calling it the "Heather Swanson" case.
Heather was the one who was dead. I wondered if her family had claimed her body, or if she was still sitting in a meat locker out at the ME's office. I slapped the notepad down on the table. The HR guy jumped at the sound.
"There you go, Sarge. I'm sure your superior detection skills will do the victim justice." HR Guy recovered quickly and started scribbling away.
Lubbock pulled a face. "You are to have no contact with Detective Williams. I'm going to remind you that collusion between two members of the Bureau who are under investigation is an offense that is punishable by termination."
That pissed me off even more. If they wanted to mess with me, that was one thing. But Mandy was a good kid, a great cop. This wasn't right.
I pulled my badge from around my neck and put it on the table, followed by the car keys. I reached down and popped the magazine out of the Glock on my hip and added it to the pile. I stood, made a half turn and drew the gun, pointing it away from everybody at the wall.
The HR guy squeaked when he saw the gun. He didn't scream, didn't yell, didn't exclaim. He squeaked. Like a mouse.
"Relax," I said, standing there with my gun in my hand. "I just need to unload it." I stood there staring at him. He stared back.
"Well," I said. "Go ahead. Aren't you going to write that down? I said 'relax. I just need to unload it.' You've written everything else down, you should write down that too."
He hesitated for a second, then started scribbling again.
I jerked the slide back and the round popped out of the chamber. It rolled under the table and I didn't even bother to pick it up. I just put the gun down on the tab
le. I brushed past Winters and was on my way out the door. Winter followed at a discrete distance but didn't try to talk to me, which was a good thing. I wasn't exactly in a conversational mood.
I walked down the stairs on autopilot, hearing Winters huffing along behind me. I felt like I was in some kind of a daze. I managed to make it out of the building without seeing anybody I knew. I was glad for that.
I stepped out of the building. The city was loud today. Car horns echoed up and down the canyons formed by the buildings. People bustled by, ignoring me standing there on the sidewalk. It was like watching some kind of movie going by in front of me. I felt like I was in my own little bubble, insulated from what was going on.
I realized I had no way home. My bureau car was now suddenly off limits. My pickup was parked at home. I didn't really feel like taking the bus. The last thing I wanted was to be around people. I sat down on a park bench, suddenly exhausted, unable to move.
I saw a homeless guy across the street, picking through a trash can, and I wondered how easy it would be to just sit there on that bench, letting the world pass by until I became like him. Living life second by second seemed incredibly attractive to me just then.
My phone rang, jolting me out of my reverie. My hand grabbed it by instinct, but I couldn’t make my mouth work. I just sat there, mute, holding the phone to my ear.
"Dent?" For a second I thought it was Alex. Then I realized it was Audrey. I hadn't realized how similar their voices were.
"Hey," I mumbled. On top of everything else, I now felt a hot flash of guilt over the vivid memory of the image of Alex's skirt riding up over her hips, over the feeling of her breast pressed against my arm.
"You ok? You sound weird."
I looked at the bum across the street. He'd finished digging through one can and was moving on.
"I'm fine." I lied reflexively, without thinking about it, pathologically unable to admit something might be bothering me.
"You don't sound fine. What are you doing? I'm downtown and I wondered if by some miracle you might have time for lunch."
