“Get outta my way,” he snarled. His words smelled like unwashed teeth. His breathing was shallow. Veins bulged on his forehead and he seemed dangerously close to unhinged.
“Get hold of yourself,” I said. “A man’s been killed here.”
“I don’t give a fuck if –”
“Baker!” Briscoe’s voice from behind me. “Git to the car and you git calm. Now!”
I stepped aside, made an effort to keep from massaging my forearm, aching from the deputy’s sledgehammer blow. The guy mouthed something at Bustamente, turned and walked to the cruiser like a programmed robot. Bustamente shook his head, knelt, commenced pouring compound into one of the footprints he’d spotted. Crisis averted. I returned to Briscoe. He was picking his teeth with a thumbnail.
“Your man always such a pain in the ass?” I asked.
Briscoe nodded toward Bustamente. “Seems lardass over there called Baker ignorant, a hick and a moron. You take that kind of talk yourself?”
“If I’m an ignorant hick moron,” Harry interrupted from a dozen feet distant. “But since I’m a professional, I don’t generally plant my shoes in the middle of evidence.”
Briscoe looked into the distance. I saw his jaw clench, his eyes tighten. He turned them to me.
“Looks like we got everything under control here. See you.”
I said, “You’re planning on checking ownership of this house, right, Sheriff? Track down whoever was inside?”
“Sure. Have a nice drive back to the city, Detective.” He winked. “Hope you get that lost pup returned to its kennel.”
Briscoe ambled away to talk to his deputy. The festivities seemingly over, Harry and I climbed back into our car and left the scene to the medical and forensics teams. We could drop the case back into the arms of Jimmy Gentry, since it was in Dauphin Island’s jurisdiction. Jimmy, unfortunately, would have to deal with Briscoe.
We drove a couple miles, Harry strangely silent. Usually he wanted to kick around details while a scene was still fresh in his head even if it wasn’t our jurisdiction or case.
“Can you believe Briscoe?” I shook my head. “A pity Jimmy’ll have to coordinate an investigation with that rube.”
“Besides the banter about monkey chatter and pups,” Harry said quietly, “what did you notice about Sheriff Briscoe?”
I ran the interaction through my head. “He was semi-literate, a heavy tobacco user and probably a heavy drinker…”
“Did you notice he never looked at me when I spoke?”
“What?”
“Just like I wasn’t there. The invisible man.”
“Briscoe did that?” I said, looking at Harry.
“During the introduction phase, he shook hands with everyone but me. He turned away, faked a sneeze and moved to the next guy.”
I recalled Briscoe’s big howling a-choo. Pretending to wipe his hands, moving to me with a big hand but a wet-rag shake. I replayed the scene and only in retrospect saw the slight.
“Shit,” I said. “It went by me.”
“Briscoe was having a great time fucking with me, him knowing it, me knowing it, the muscle-bound deputy knowing it. I got the impression Briscoe was showing off for his deputy.”
“I’m sorry, bro,” I said. “I didn’t see what was happening.”
“You weren’t meant to.”
We moved down the road another mile, me thinking about the small and ugly drama that had sullied the air at the crime scene, a display of racial condescension I’d missed totally.
“How much do they piss you off, Harry?” I finally asked. “People like Briscoe?”
Harry was silent for so long I thought he hadn’t heard my question. After a mile of farm fields, hawks and watermelons our only audience, Harry turned my way.
“Pull over.”
“You mean now? What are you –”
“Pull over, Carson. Right here.”
I braked to the sandy berm. Harry pushed open his door. By the time I got out, my partner was striding into the field. He appraised a head-sized sugar-baby melon, knelt, snapped it from the vine. He balanced the melon on a rotting fencepost and returned to the car.
“Harry?” I asked.
In one sweeping motion, Harry snatched his nine millimeter from the shoulder rig, pointed one-handed at the target, snapped off three shots. I saw a spray of pink from the rear of the melon, and it toppled to the ground, cracking open to reveal red innards.
Harry replaced his gun and got back in the car. I pulled back on to the road. He thumbed replacement rounds into his clip and returned the weapon to the holster, staring out the window at the cotton fields.
Chapter 7
Come Monday, the Homicide Division was its usual kick-off-the-week self, a dozen overworked dicks sucking caffeine and yapping on phones, checking what snitches might have dredged up over the weekend. Lieutenant Tom Mason, our hound-faced commander, was in his windowed office staring down at the weekend reports. He had his mouth open and was drumming his flues with his fingertips, making music inside his head.
Harry arrived at eight and sat across from me. We worked with desks butted together to converse face to face. Plus it gave us a bigger space to hold about twenty pounds of homicide files and paperwork, though overflow avalanched to the floor daily. Harry was wearing an orange blazer over lime-green pants, his polo shirt was plum, his shoes burgundy. If environmentalists figured how to convert the color wavelengths in Harry’s wardrobe into electricity, the polar bears would be safe forever.
I coughed and sniffed, the summer pollen counts high. Harry shot me the narrow eye. “You breathed down sea water, right? When you were racing the baby to shore?”
Aspirated sea water could lead to some hellacious infections. I shrugged it off, mumbling about something in the air.
Harry said, “You haven’t been looking real healthy the past couple of weeks, Carson. Maybe your resistance is down.”
“I’m fine.”
“The hospital’s a ten-minute drive. You can get a shot or whatever.”
“Earth to Harry: I feel fine.”
Harry sighed and pitched his pencil to the desk. “Come on. We’re going to the hospital. It’s closer and insurance pays, right? We can get you a shot and…” he paused as if having a sudden thought, “see how the kid’s doing, health-wise.”
Harry had segued from the first rationale to the second so smoothly I realized the whole conversation had been an excuse to visit the boat baby. I’d pretty much pushed the incident to the back of my mind, wanting nothing more to do with the kid. The case belonged to the DI police.
“Do you really want to know how it’s doing?” I challenged. “The kid could be terminally ill. Or brain-dead.”
Harry closed his eyes, conflict tightening his face. He sighed.
“I have to know, Carson. I held the kid. I breathed into her.”
Minutes later we were at the hospital. An emergency room resident I knew shot me up with a syringe full of antibiotic and wrote script for some pills. Rolling my sleeve down, I looked for Harry, didn’t see him. I found him on the fourth floor in paediatric intensive care, peering through the window separating the sterile unit from the hall and waiting area.
I walked tentatively to Harry and peeked in the window. Machines and monitors owned the real estate inside the unit. Our rescue was third in a line of five babies in Plexiglas boxes. Two kids were squalling, two were twitching or stretching. Ours was as still as clay. I felt myself staring. But it seemed as if I was watching from a vast distance, like the child was an image on a screen.
I felt my body take a step backward and I bumped into Harry.
“She looks terrible,” Harry groaned, stepping past me to press his hands against the window. “Just terrible.”
“You’re responding to the tubes and wires,” said a cheery voice at our backs. “She’s doing far better than we expected.”
Harry and I turned to see the blonde doc who’d sprinted from the helicopter. A brass badge on her breast said Angela Norlin, MD.