He turns his head away. More than anything, he hates the way she seems intent on taunting him. On humiliating him. It can’t be personal, because she couldn’t have known in advance that he’d be assigned to her for the afternoon. Unless it’s because of the way he acted toward her during the shift…
“I went out of my way to be nice to you,” he says. Even to his own ears, his voice sounds bitter and petulant.
“Yes, you did,” she says. “You were very sweet.”
Her phone rings again. She looks around the alley. After a car passes, she says, “All clear.” A moment later, her accomplices emerge from the rear of the store. They stay in the shadows, so he never gets a good look at them other than to note that one is about five-six, a hundred fifty pounds, and the other is closer to six feet, two hundred pounds. Caucasian, he thinks, but can’t be sure. He files these details away for later, but he knows he couldn’t pick them out of a lineup or from mug shots.
The black pouch the taller man tosses to Meredith seems absurdly small. It has golden tie cords at the neck. From the way she presses her face against it, he figures it’s made of velvet or satin. She tugs the neck open and sticks her hand inside, allowing the contents to filter through her fingers. Then she reseals the bag and tosses it back to the tall man.
After resetting the dispatch timer one last time, Meredith kneels on the ground beside Brett. “If we had a little longer, I’d show you,” she says. “So you’d understand.”
He doesn’t want to look at her, but he knows this is probably the last time he’ll see her, and he wants to remember her this way, framed in the amber light of a nearby streetlight, her features distorted by shadows.
“And you would,” she continues. “One glance, and they’d steal your heart away.”
He shakes his head, but he wonders if what she says is true. Look how easily she stole his heart.
She plucks the keys to his handcuffs from his front pants pocket. The brief contact is shockingly intimate and unexpectedly arousing. She grins. He knows that she sensed his reaction, but she says nothing.
“I’ll leave these over here,” she says, placing the keys on the ground in front of the trash bins. “Your gun and everything else are on the front seat. We have no need for them where we’re going, and I know how much paperwork you’d have to fill out if you lost your gun.” She winks at him. “You see, I’ve done my research. Maybe I will write a novel someday.”
The two men take the front seat of their car. After Meredith opens the rear door, she watches him for a moment. He strains his neck to look up at her, to meet her gaze.
“Tonight you’ll go home in the same condition as when you arrived at work. Maybe even a little better. It’s up to you.”
With that, she slides into the car and closes the door. A moment later, they’re gone, blending into the Saturday night traffic on Westheimer.
Better? he wonders. What did she mean by that? He struggles to his feet, lurches toward the trash cans on numb legs, kneels, and picks up the handcuff key. Fumbling blindly behind his back, he finally manages to insert the key into the lock, and his hands are free. The next step is obvious but degrading. In succinct, professional language, he describes his location and the vehicle and its occupants to his dispatcher. He even has the license number to give them.
A few minutes later, the first cruiser arrives on the scene. The Investigative Division isn’t far behind. They seal off the alley with crime-scene tape and make their way inside the jewelry store. Brett tells his story to one detective and again a few minutes later to another. His vehicle is part of the crime scene, so he can’t touch it. He rocks his weight from foot to foot and pulls out his cell phone but can’t think who to call. Which friend to share his humiliation with.
He puts the phone away and thrusts his hands into his pockets. Something sharp digs into the back of his right hand. It doesn’t feel like his handcuff key. He gets up and strolls to the end of the alley, which is cordoned off with a yellow ribbon of crime-scene tape.
After ascertaining that no one is paying attention to him, he pulls the item from his pocket. It gleams in the yellow streetlight, a little piece of carbon as cold as fire and as hard as the heart of the woman who placed it there.
What a Wonderful World by Paul Guyot
In jazz I listen for her.
In rain.
Her laughter sends me to sleep at night and is the sound that wakes me in the morning.
Her name is Kayla Lightfoot. I say is because even though she’s dead, her name hasn’t changed.
THREE DAYS INTO a New Year, I was working the dark – the shift from six p.m. to six a.m. The golfers, Trevino and Woods, had caught a bunny in an apartment building at Broadway and Dickson. Some hopper caught the hiv – the HIV virus – and decided to hang himself instead of waiting for the disease to take him. Don’t hear much about the virus anymore, the celebrities who schooled the country on it have long moved on to their next cause, but it’s still out there, killing people by the thousands, mostly hoppers – heroin addicts – sharing needles, exchanging sex for dope, etc.
A bunny was what we called a TGC, for TV Guide Crossword, and before that, a slam dunk. I can’t remember how or why we started calling them bunnies, but for the past year or two, any homicide that could be solved at the scene – a frozen homeless guy, a hopper hanging himself – was a bunny. Maybe the TV Guide Crosswords had gotten tougher.
So with the golfers out, I was next up. I say I instead of we because my partner at the time, Roland Park, was out with the flu. Every year, Roland gets a flu shot sometime in November, and within a month or so, he’s in bed with the flu. I’ve never had a flu shot in my life and can count on one hand the times I’ve had the bug.
The call came in at just after one a.m. I was finishing up some pork fried rice from Mr. Lu’s I’d found in the Homicide fridge – probably about the worst Chinese food in town, maybe even the Midwest. But it was the middle of the night, it was cold, and I was hungry.
Female DB. Delmar and Jefferson.
Usually it’s an address. This simply said Delmar and Jefferson. A corner I knew well.
A couple of months before, just before Thanksgiving, I had been at an insurance place on Jefferson getting one of those umbrella policies for my home and car. Roland had dropped me off – I was going to walk to the office. I stepped outside the State Farm doors and found it had started to rain while I was signing papers and staring at fake wood paneling. I glanced around, hoping Roland had seen the rain and doubled back. Nope. It had been my idea to walk, and he was going to let me walk.
I pulled up the collar of my London Fog coat, started to cross Jefferson, heading for Clark, when something – to this day I don’t know what – made me look north up Jefferson. There was a hot-dog cart on the corner of Jefferson and Delmar, the escaping steam mixed with the rain giving the image a surreal glow. And there, in the center of this gray, rainy, ethereal scene, was a girl.
Spinning.
Her arms were outstretched, her head was back, looking up into the rain, and she was spinning.
I’d been a cop for sixteen years, a Homicide detective for nine. I’d seen my share of craziness, and it would usually take a helluva lot more than spinning in the rain to blip my radar. But I suddenly found myself turning ninety degrees and walking up Jefferson through the rain.
As I neared the cart and the smell of bratwurst and onions, I realized that the girl – a rain-soaked blond bob, high cheeks, soft lips with a slight overbite – was not a customer but the proprietor of this cart.