Gideon looked out the window and stared at the reporters as they passed. Some were still shouting
questions, as if they, somehow expected an answer. Gideon felt a pit inside himself and whispered, "I didn't know it was this bad." He wasn't referring to just the reporters. The driver shrugged and blew the siren again.
The police car went to Dupont Circle and took P Street northwest, toward the fringes of Georgetown. To his father's house. The place Gideon lived was better than most detectives—especially D.C. detectives. When his father had died, he had left Gideon and Raphael the house and some money. He and Rafe had come to an agreement; Gideon had bought Rafe's share of the house with Gideon's share of the money.
As the police car rolled up to his house, Gideon realized that he felt guilty about that.
The scene outside his father's brownstone was no better than the one outside the hospital. He didn't know if the reporters from the hospital had beat them here, or if there had been a press encampment lying in wait for him to come home.
The driver got out first, to help him out of the car. As soon as the door opened, the questions started again.
He tried to ignore the questions, and the press of people close to him. The cop next to him said something, but he couldn't hear him over the din.
Gideon concentrated on climbing up the steps on his crutches, one, two. . .
On the top step he bumped one of the reporters and one of his crutches slipped out from under him. He tumbled forward and his escort managed to catch him by his broken arm. The impact jerked him up short, slamming his teeth shut firmly enough to make his jaw ache—
"Goddamn." He choked the curse out through clenched teeth.
He spun around on the reporters. The patrolman started to say something. "Detective Malcolm—" The uncertainty in his voice showed he suspected what was coming.
Gideon swayed a bit on his remaining crutch. And the patrolman held out a steadying hand. "You bastards won't be satisfied until you have another dead cop on your hands!"
The reporters didn't seem at all taken aback by the sudden confrontation. One shouted, louder than the rest, "Do you have a statement about what happened?"
The question was a fist slamming into his stomach, the shamelessness of these people made him gasp, wordless for a few moments as they shouted questions about his brother.
The patrolman tried to pull him back toward his doorway, away from the confrontation.
"You want a statement—" Gideon sucked in a breath, "Here's your statement—"
"Detective," the patrolman whispered into his ear, "we're not supposed to comment about—"
Gideon wasn't listening. "You're a collection of shameless parasites drooling over my dead brother, and you're going into rating orgasms because it might be someone's fuckup. I don't want anything to do with any of you. I might be on disability leave, but I'm still a cop, and anyone standing on my property after the next five seconds is going to be arrested for trespassing, harassment, and anything else I can think of."
The bastards didn't seem to miss a beat. Someone even called out, "What problems do you see in the coverage of your brother's death?"
Gideon turned around, shaking. The cop handed him his fallen crutch and helped him get his keys out of the fanny-pack the hospital had given him to carry his possessions.
The cop helped him into the house and they slammed the door on the reporters, whose only reaction to Gideon's statement was a slight retreat down the steps to the sidewalk.
"Was that a good idea?" the cop asked him.
"I don't really give a shit."
The cop tried to stay and help him out, but Gideon was in no mood for company. After a few minutes, the patrolman left.
Once he was alone, Gideon hobbled around the first floor, pulling shades, closing drapes, trying to complete some sense of privacy. The phone rang three times while he was wandering around. After each time proved to be a reporter, he took the phone off the hook.
He wanted to go upstairs to change, but he didn't feel up to it. He collapsed on a threadbare couch that had been in the same spot since he was six years old and closed his eyes. In ten minutes he had fallen into an exhausted sleep.
Franklin Alexander Jones, Davy to his friends, sat in his apartment sipping a beer and watching a woman named Amber Waves ride some lucky motherfucker to orgasm on his giant 29-inch television
screen. This was the tenth day of him feeling sorry for himself. A hundred grand up in smoke. Christ, what a life.
Davy kept telling himself that it was a damn good thing that the Doctor had called off his end of the job. Otherwise, he might be as dead as that FBI agent. But the whole thing left a bad taste in his mouth.
Davy thought of that phrase, looked at what Amber Waves was doing on the screen, and started giggling. His beer dropped empty next to seven others on the floor by his end of the couch. He didn't stop laughing until a sour belch gripped him and tore the laugh apart.
"Oh, fuck." Davy raised his palms to his eyes and rubbed. He felt a wave of vertigo telling him that he was far more drunk than he'd given himself credit for. He shook his head, felt the woozy sensation of blood sloshing from one side of his brain to the other, and decided he needed to get out another six-pack to take the edge off.
He got up and staggered to the kitchen.
He should have known it was too good to be true. A hundred grand just to move this Daedalus computer thing out of the office building, north. Of course, that meant hijacking a refrigerated semitrailer, but that was Davy's specialty—semis and heavy construction equipment. He'd boosted everything from backhoes to garbage trucks. He had already picked out his transportation when they called off the job.
If it hadn't been over the phone, he probably would have slit the throat of the guy who told him. He'd like to cap the bastard, even though it was now all over the news that the Daedalus pickup was some goddamn Fed ambush—one he could have ended up in.
Davy leaned against the side of the refrigerator and opened it.
The thing was completely empty except for a single Chinese takeout container laying on its side, leaking sauce that had turned black and smelled like a dead rat he'd found once in a prison John. He needed to go on a beer run.
He opened the freezer door. Inside, sitting on a six-inch-thick layer of ice, were two ice trays and an old frozen orange juice carton. Davy took out the cardboard cylinder, flipped off the metal lid with his thumb, and shook out a roll of bills on the counter in front of him.
He stared at the wad of twenties for a few minutes, trying to get his eyes to focus. Need to do a job soon. Running out of cash.
He decided that he probably should go turn his cell phone and his beeper back on. He'd been out of it a little too long. He needed his regular customers to be able to reach him, or he was going to have go back to boosting cars—which didn't pay nearly enough to support him.
Back in the living room, Amber was moaning to a rhythmic soundtrack as Davy made his way to the end table where he had tossed his phone and his beeper.
He turned the beeper's sound back on, and looked at it to see what messages he'd missed.
Fifteen times, someone had left the number for The Zodiac. He knew the number, he'd taken calls there himself. Somehow, he knew it was Lionel calling. The little shit was in some sort of trouble. He couldn't think of anyone else who'd be calling his beeper twice a day from a strip club.
Oh, fuck, Davy thought. What’s gotten up his ass?
He fumbled out the cell phone and walked back toward the center of the room. He swayed a little as he waited for someone to pick up. On the television, Amber Waves undulated under a scrolling list of computer-generated credits.