“ Because if you want to wait, I won’t mind. I’ll understand.”
“ I said, I’m with you.”
“ It’s okay, you know, if you don’t go in.”
“ I said I was with you and if we don’t do something pretty damn quick, someone is going to get the wrong idea about us. They have a neighborhood watch here.”
“ Bad guys don’t usually drive right up to the front door in a spanking new Mercedes.”
“ Some of these old gals got nothing better to do than to wait by the telephone with their gnarled fingers ready to dial 911. If we’re going to go in, let’s get it over with.”
“ Come on, Tonto.” Washington opened the passenger door, slid out of the car. “It’s starting to get dark and I’d like to be home in time for the evening news.”
Walker jumped out of the car, followed Washington to the porch. Washington rang the bell.
“ No answer. Looks like nobody’s home.” He tried one of the keys. It didn’t work. “Wrong key, must be to the condo in Huntington Beach.” He tried another. The locked turned. “Had to be the one, only two others and they’re car keys.” He opened the door and went in. Walker followed, closing the door after himself.
“ Oh lord, look at this place, it’s been trashed,” Walker said as they crossed a tile entry way and entered the living room. Directly across from the entry way, behind a plush living room suite, was a large television. It had loose wires sticking out from behind
“ They took the DVD player,” Washington said. “TV must have been too big.”
“ Yeah.”
“ Look at this.” Washington pointed to a surge protector plugged into the wall by the desk. “Got his computer.”
The two men quickly went through the house, careful not to leave any prints. Every book in the library was open, pages torn out and thrown on the floor. Every drawer in the house was open and rummaged through. Clothes were ripped and strewn on the floor. Kitchen drawers had been overturned onto the tile, then broken on top of their crushed and destroyed contents.
“ This was destruction for destruction’s sake, not a search, not a robbery,” Washington said.
“ They took the computer and the DVD,” Walker said.
“ But that’s not what this was about. Someone doesn’t like Monday. They came to destroy his home and his things. They took the DVD and the computer as an afterthought.”
“ Or maybe they wanted to see what he had on his hard drive,” Walker said.
“ There is that,” Washington said.
“ Do we call this in?” Walker said.
“ We were never here, so how can we call it in?”
“ Yeah, yeah, I wasn’t thinking,” Walker said.
“ Okay, let’s get out of here.”
“ Don’t need to say that twice.” Walker turned and headed for the door. By the time Washington was on the front porch, Walker was in the car with the engine running. He’d be a good man for a bank job, Washington thought.
Walker whipped it into drive.
“ Easy,” Washington said, “leave slow, like we belong.”
Walker clenched his teeth and Washington knew he was fighting the temptation to stomp on the accelerator as he eased the car round the driveway.
“ Where do we go from here?” Walker asked as they turned off of El Jardin and back onto Anaheim Street.
“ Home.”
“ That’s it?”
“ For tonight. Tomorrow I’m going to call in sick. I’ll visit Monday’s condo, then I’ll talk to some of his friends.”
“ What about me?”
“ You can go to work as usual. I wouldn’t expect you to get anymore involved in this than you have. You’ve got your career to think of.”
“ Yeah and what about your career?”
“ Mine is over. I’ll never get off the street. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it.”
“ I’ll call in sick tomorrow,” Walker said through pursed lips.
“ You don’t have to do that.”
“ I said I was with you and I meant it. I’m with you.”
“ Okay, then go home, rest, enjoy your wife and kids. Pick me up at eight.”
“ Want me to take you back to the station?”
“ No, home’s closer. I’ll leave the car at the station. You can give me a ride to pick it up when I need it.”
They rode in silence for a few minutes, then Walker said, “Tell me what happened to you.”
“ Why?”
“ I’m your partner. I want to know.”
“ It doesn’t concern you,” Washington said.
“ It sure does. Three years ago you were busted down from the suits. Since then you can’t keep a partner longer than six months. You’re moody, not very dependable and a lot of the time you’re just not any fun. If I’m going to stick my neck out with you, I’ve got a right to know.”
“ I said you didn’t have to come along.”
“ And I said I was with you, but I want to know. Why did you nearly kill that child molester?”
“ It wasn’t just the baby-raper,” Washington said, “that was just the end of a long, hard time for me.” He paused, “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“ Yeah.”
“ It started three years ago, the end of June, two weeks into my daughter’s summer vacation. She was fifteen. Did you know I was married?”
“ I heard you were separated.”
“ Yeah, we’re separated,” Washington said. Then he went on with his story. “It was one of those hot days, you know the kind, you sweat like there is no tomorrow, so I came home around noon to change. I’d been out in the field all morning and my clothes were wet as a rag.
“ Jane was at work and Glenna, that’s my daughter, was supposed to be spending the day with a girlfriend, but she wasn’t. She’d lied so she could spend the day with a boy. You know how girls can be.
“ I knew something was wrong as soon as I got to the door. It wasn’t locked and the stereo was blasting away. Jane always locked up. She was a stickler about it. And we never played the stereo that loud. So, I went into the house quiet like, but I coulda made all the noise in the world and nobody woulda heard over the Rolling Stones. It was Midnight Rambler and Mick was screaming through the speakers, ‘Rape her in anger,’ and his song about rape almost covered the sound of Glenna screaming from our bedroom.
“ I pulled my piece, ran down the hall and burst into the room. I found my daughter, my beautiful fifteen year old daughter, beat up and bleeding, on my bed, and this big, muscular punk was just climbing off her,”
“ Jesus,” Walker said.
“ I let him get as far as the floor before I emptied my piece into him. Then I untied Glenna and she dashed from the room and everything was quiet as it could be with the Rolling Stones tearing the house down and then Mick hit the chorus again, ‘Rape her in anger,’ he was singing and I went a little crazy. I reached into the nightstand, where I keep a loaded forty-five auto and I went out into the living room and shot the stereo. It was like I was killing the song.
“ Now the house is stone-cold-dead-silent, except I hear Glenna sobbing in her room. And, guess what? I hear this moan coming from my bedroom, so I go in to see what’s what and son of a bitch, if that bastard wasn’t still alive.”
“ You’re kidding?”
“ No, he was lying in a lake of his own blood, trying to hold on to his guts and whining like a dog hit by a car and that’s probably how he felt. I must have looked like a big black god to him, cuz he looked up at me and said out of his bloody mouth, ‘Help me.’
“ I blew his face off. Then I went out to the living room and called it in.”
“ Jesus,” Walker said again, “what did they do to you?”
“ I called it into Homicide. Fifteen minutes later, Jimmy Gordon, my partner and two other guys, Sammy Powers and Steve Hodges, show up. Jimmy tells me to pack some things for myself, Jane and Glenna. ‘Go to the school, pick up your wife, take a couple of weeks. Let us handle it,’ he says. And that’s what I did.”
“ What did they do?”
“ I never asked. However, I did see in the Press Telegram the next day that a white male in his early twenties had been found in a condemned house, beaten, tortured and killed. The result of a drug deal gone bad, the paper said.”