'Who is it you're trying to help?' she asked. 'The woman who just got murdered? Did you see something, Mr. Fluck?'
'Oh my God!' Bubba was shocked. 'A lady was just murdered, right here! When?'
'While you were parked here, Mr. Fluck.'
Bubba's bowels were irritably gathering again, like dark clouds about to release another lashing, violent storm. He thought of his sweaty tee shirt, covered with blood and on its way to the police labs.
'You sure you didn't see anything?' The chief continued to press.
'My Anaconda was hung,' he answered.
She just stared at him.
'I couldn't get it off,' he said.
Still, she said nothing.
'So I got down and started tugging on it, you know, manipulating it as best I could. See, I was afraid it might go off. Then I got a nosebleed.'
'This was when?' Hammer asked.
'I guess when the lady got killed. I swear. I was on the floor ever since Officer Budget left me. That's all I was doing until he was knocking on my window. I couldn't have seen anything, because I was on the floor, is what I'm saying, ma'am.'
He couldn't tell if she believed him. There was nothing cruel or disrespectful about her demeanor, but she was shrewd and very smart. Bubba was in awe of her. For a moment he forgot his plight until Channel 8's cameraman trotted toward them, heading straight for the chief, then getting a disgusted look on his face. He stared at Bubba's camouflage pants and changed course.
'It appears the victim was robbed right here at the money stop,' Hammer spoke to Bubba. 'I'm not telling you anything confidential. I'm sure you'll be hearing all about it on the news. You were parked less than fifty feet from the money stop, Mr. Fluck. Are you absolutely certain you didn't hear anything? Maybe voices, arguing, a car or cars?'
Bubba thought hard. Channel 6 headed toward them and quickly went the other way. Bubba would have done anything to help this brave woman, and it broke his heart that the one time he had a chance, he could do nothing but stink.
'Shit,' muttered a WRVA reporter as he stopped and backed up. 'Wouldn't go over there if I was you,' he said to a crew from Channel 12.
'What's going on?' Style Magazine called out to Richmond Magazine. 'A sewer line break?'
'Hell if I know. Shit, man.'
Bubba went on red alert.
'"Shit man" is right.' A Times-Dispatch reporter waved his hand in front of his face.
Bubba's blood heated up. He didn't hear a word Chief Hammer was saying to him. Bubba was completely focused on the knot of reporters, cameramen, photographers and technicians gathered by his Jeep. They were restless and angry, talking and bitching loudly amongst themselves and calling him Shit Man.
'Anybody seen what's going on back there behind the building?'
'They won't let anybody close.'
'You can forget it. The minute you get to the garden center, the cops push you back.'
'Yeah, one asshole put his hand over my lens.'
'Shit, man.'
Bubba's mind whited out the way it always did when he heard the voices and the laughter shrieking from dangerous, painful convolutions in his brain. He saw a legion of little faces distorted by taunts and cruel grins.
'My editor's gonna kill me. Shit, man!'
'Stop It!' Bubba screamed at the press.
His eyes suddenly focused. Hammer was staring at him, rather startled. The media wasn't interested.
'Maybe the body's decomposing,' one of them was saying.
'It's back behind the store.'
'Could've been here first. Maybe they moved it for some reason.'
'That wouldn't make sense.'
'Well, they wouldn't want to leave it here right in front of the bank.'
'No way it could have been here long enough to decompose without someone spotting it before this morning.'
'Oh, so now you're a medical examiner.'
'Maybe it was dumped. You know, the victim's been dead for a while, is getting ripe and the killer dumps her.'
'It's a her?" 'Maybe.'
'Dumps her here?'
'I'm just throwing things out.'
'Yeah, asshole, 'cause you want the rest of us to write them down and make fools out of ourselves.'
Then what stinks so bad?'
'Chief Hammer?' A reporter raised his voice without getting any closer. 'Can I get a statement?'
'Don't talk to them!' Bubba said to her in a panic. 'Don't let them do this to me! Please!" 'Truth is, I think our source is him,' a reporter broke the news. 'Look at his pants. Not all of that's camouflage.'
'Shit, man.'
'See!' Bubba hissed.
'How can she stand there like that? It's bad enough way back here.'
'I've heard she's tough.'
'I'm interested in your vanity plate,' Hammer said to Bubba.
Officer Horace Cutchins wasn't interested in anything except his pocket Game Boy Tetris Plus as he drove the detention wagon at a good clip along Leigh Street.
He'd been on duty only three hours and had already transported two subjects to lockup, both of them gypsies caught burglarizing a Tudor-style home in Windsor Farms. Cutchins didn't understand why people didn't learn.
Gypsies passed through the city twice a year on their migrations north and south. Everyone knew it. The press ran frequent stories and columns. Sergeant Rink of Crime Stoppers offered impassioned warnings and prevention and self-defense tips on all local television networks and radio stations. 'Gypsies Are Back' signs were prominently posted as usual.
Yet wealthy Windsor Farmers, as Cutchins jealously called them, still went out to get the newspaper or worked in their gardens and yards or sat by their pools or chatted with neighbors or frapped around the house with alarm systems off and doors unlocked. So what did they expect?
Cutchins was just turning into Engine Company #5's back parking lot, where he was looking forward to resuming his puzzle game, when the radio raised him.
'Ten-25 unit 112 on Tenth Street to 10-31 a prisoner,' the communications officer told him.
'Ten-4,' he answered. 'Fuck,' he said to himself.
He'd heard the mayday earlier and knew that Rhoad Hog was involved in an altercation with a disorderly female. But when it appeared that an arrest had been made, Cutchins just assumed the subject would be transported in a screen unit.
After all, it wasn't likely that a female could kick out the Plexiglas, and even if the partition didn't fit right because the numb nuts with General Services had taken one from a Caprice, for example, and retrofitted it for a Crown Vic, it didn't matter in this case. A female prisoner was not equipped to pee on the officer through gaps and spaces caused by improper installment.
Cutchins made a U turn. He shot back out on Leigh Street, stepping on it, wanting to get the call over with so he could take a break. He swung over to 10th and rolled up on the problem as Detective Gloria De Souza climbed out of her unmarked car.
Rhoad Hog and three other uniformed guys were waiting for Cutchins, their prisoner an ugly fat woman who looked vaguely familiar. She was sitting on the curb, wrists cuffed behind her back, hair wild. She was breathing hard and looked like she might do something unexpected any minute.
'Okay, Miss Passman, I'm going to have to search you,' said Detective De Souza. 'I need you to stand up.'
Miss Passman didn't budge.
'Cooperate, Patty,' one of the officers urged her.
She wouldn't.
'Ma'am, you're going to need to stand up. Now don't make this harder than it has to be.'
Passman wasn't trying to make things harder. She simply could not rise to the occasion on her own, not with her hands shackled behind her.
'Get up,' De Souza said sternly.
'I can't,' Passman replied.
'Then we'll have to help you, ma'am.'
'Go ahead,' Passman said.
De Souza and another officer got Passman under each arm and hoisted her up while Rhoad hung back at a safe distance. Cutchins hopped out of his white Dodge van and went around to the back to open the tailgate. De Souza bent over and briskly slid her hands up Passman's stout legs, over sagging pantyhose with runs, feeling her way up into areas where no woman, other than Passman's gynecologist, had ever gone before. Passman tried to kick De Souza and almost fell.