After booking Jim Monday, writing the report and dealing with the motor pool about the damaged car, Washington and Walker were forty-five minutes over shift. Walker wanted to go home and Washington, after lighting his third cigarette for the day, wanted to go to work.
He wanted the Askew case. He wouldn’t get it, because he wasn’t a homicide detective anymore and there probably wasn’t going to be a case. Hit and run-open and shut. That’s what they were calling it. But it didn’t feel right. People didn’t speed around corners in Belmont Shore during the middle of the day. Too many cars, too many people. It felt wrong.
Whoever was driving that Buick wasn’t out for the Southern California sun or the specialty shops. He was out for murder. That car came out of nowhere, struck Askew, made a quick right on a residential street and was gone in a flash. It wasn’t accidental and Washington wanted the case.
“ There is no case, so you can stop worrying about it,” Walker said.
“ I wasn’t worrying about it.”
“ You were worrying about it.”
Walker was amazing, Washington thought, he’d only been his partner for six months and he could read him better than his wife, better than his daughter, better than any partner he’d ever had. Maybe it was because they were a lot alike, both from poor backgrounds, both overeducated and they both loved police work better than life.
“ Fess up, you think it was murder and you want the case. Admit it,” Walker chided.
“ Yeah, I think it was murder and if I didn’t at first, the bullet through the back window would have changed my mind. Hell, it would have changed anybody’s. And the Buick-that had to be a set up. That SOB was waiting. He saw his target, stepped on the gas, got him and vanished. Yeah, it feels like murder to me and I’ll bet it feels like murder to you.”
“ Easy counselor, I went to law school, too. You don’t have to convince me. Use your logic on somebody who can do something about it.”
“ Nobody wants to hear.”
“ Then it’s over.”
“ If I was still in Homicide, we could work it in.”
“ What do you mean we, kimosabe? This Injun has a wife and two little girls at home, who don’t see enough of him as it is.”
“ Maybe you should have stayed a lawyer.”
“ Least I tried it, you didn’t even take the bar.”
Silently Washington agreed. He’d gone into the academy five days after he’d graduated from law school. Jane was pregnant. He had to get married. He had to provide a home. He told himself he’d take the bar next year, when they got a little ahead, but next year just never seemed to roll around.
“ How come you gave it up?” Washington knew Walker had quit a prestigious Century City law firm.
“ I didn’t like getting rich, white collar crooks off the hook. What I really wanted to do was put them behind bars. So I quit and became a cop. Now I do what I like. I was lucky, the money helped.”
Walker was an enigma to Washington. His parents had been killed in a small plane crash when he was sixteen. He was an only child, with grandparents in California. He came west to live with them and inherited twenty-one million dollars on his twenty-first birthday, a million for each year he’d been alive. He didn’t have to work, he could live comfortably off the interest.
“ The guy in the Buick is guilty,” Washington said.
“ That he is,” Walker agreed.
“ He should be put away.”
“ That he should.”
“ We could do it.”
“ The suits will get mad,” Walker said.
“ Are you with me on this?”
“ They’ll get real mad.”
“ Are you with me, or what?”
“ I’m with you.”
“ Because you’re right, they’ll get real mad.”
“ I’m with you.”
“ And if we do make a case, they’ll take it away from us and give it to Homicide.”
“ I’m with you.”
“ I won’t want to stop, even if they take it away. It’s the way I am.”
“ I said, I’m with you. I’m with you till we, not some dick in Homicide, we, us, you and me, masked man, the two of us, find the son of a bitch in the Buick and put him away.”
“ Spoken like a true rebel. Now let’s get out of here and get to work.”
They went to the locker room and changed into street clothes without saying a word. Washington was lost in thought. He was back on the trail of a murderer. He wondered about Walker-because bucking the system would be like swimming out into unknown waters for him. Walker had always been a by-the-book cop, but Washington knew he wanted to make the bust. He wanted to move up to where Washington had been. He wanted to be where the action was. He wanted Homicide.
After changing, they headed for the street.
“ Your car or mine?” Walker asked.
“ Yours I think. Mine is a little under the weather.”
“ Noooo,” Walker said, stretching out the word, “say it isn’t so.”
“ You’re not making fun of Power Glide?” Washington said. It was no secret in the department that Washington held a rather juvenile attachment to Power Glide, his 1959 Chevy Impala.
“ Never,” Walker said.
“ Come on, it’s a great car.” Washington reached to his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. He started to lift them out, then stopped himself and let the pack slide back into its nest.
“ It never runs,” Walker said through a wide grin.
“ Yes it does,” Washington said.
“ We’ll take my car.” Walker laughed, closing off that part of the conversation as he lead Washington to a new white Mercedes.
“ One ten El Jardin Drive,” Washington said.
“ And that is?”
“ Jim Monday’s address.”
“ How’d you get that?”
“ Off his driver’s license. I have a great memory.”
“ Too bad it spends most of its time in the fifties.”
“ I just wish I could have lived back then. The cars were simple. The music was better. You didn’t have to lock your doors. What can I say? They were better times.”
“ Before or after Mrs. Brown’s little girl was allowed to go to that white school, or Rosa Parks rode that bus?”
“ Yeah, there was a bad side to those times. I guess I tend to forget.”
“ Why are we going to Monday’s?” Walker started the car.
“ Because we have to start somewhere.” Washington’s voice trailed off as he let his head sink back into the plush leather headrest. He closed his eyes.
“ But if Monday was the intended victim and not Askew, aren’t we looking in the wrong place?”
“ We only have Monday’s word. For all we know, he set up the whole thing.” Washington kept his eyes closed.
“ But the shot in the alley?” Walker said.
“ We don’t know for sure that was related. We think it was, but we don’t know for sure.”
“ So we’re going to treat Monday like a suspect?”
“ We’re going to treat everybody like a suspect.” Washington opened his eyes. “The trail to our killer starts at Monday’s. I feel it and I’m usually right about these things.”
“ Okay, boss, if you say the trail starts at Monday’s, it starts at Monday’s.”
Washington smiled. Before his trouble his comrades regarded him as nothing short of brilliant. They called him the department’s Canadian Mountie, a nickname he loved, because like the mythical mountie, he always got his man.
Ten minutes later they turned off of Anaheim onto El Jardin.
“ Wow, nice area.” Washington whistled and seconds later he whistled again. “And a nice house. You know, Walker, you could afford a place like this if you wanted.”
“ Actually I live about two blocks from here.”
“ Really? Nice house? Like this?”
“ Yeah.”
“ Sometimes I forget about all your money.”
“ I try not to let it get in the way.”
“ I’ll try to keep it out of the way too.” Washington laughed.
“ How you want to do this?”
“ Pull up in the driveway like we belong,” Washington said and Walker obeyed, turning his car into the circular driveway, bringing it to a stop by the front door.
“ Now what?”
“ We go inside and have a look.” Washington fished into his jacket pocket, withdrew a set of keys. He turned to Walker, raised them above his head with his left hand and jiggled them.
“ You stole his keys?
“ A good scout is always prepared.”
“ You don’t mean we’re going to enter the premises?”
“ I do.”
“ Without a warrant?”
“ I thought you wanted to move up and get out of the uniform, maybe even make Homicide?”
“ I’m not going to this way. Christ, we could wind up in jail if we get caught.”
“ Highly unlikely.”
“ That we’ll get caught?”
“ That we would wind up in jail. A slap on the wrists, maybe, but jail? I don’t think so.”
“ I don’t feel right about this.”
“ You want to wait in the car?”
“ No, I’m with you.”
“ 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.”
“ I didn’t know.”
“ Nobody does,” Washington said. “That was the start of everything going wrong. Jane blamed me for what happened. She thought if I would have been closer to Glenna, she wouldn’t have lied to us that day. It was just the way she had to deal with it. And I blamed her. I thought if she wouldn’t have been working, it wouldn’t have happened. She moved out six months later.”
“ That’s too bad,” Walker said.
“ Yeah. Things starting going downhill after the separation. I couldn’t concentrate on my work. I was pissing off the people around me, coming in late, leaving early, drinking, then came the baby-raper.
“ I was off duty at the time, at the Cerritos Mall. A couple of years had passed and I was just starting to get things back together. I went to the mall to get a pair of running shoes. I was going to get back in shape, quit the drinking. It was time to get my life straight again.
“ I had just pulled into a parking place when I see this man grab a little girl and throw her into his van. I threw old Power Glide into reverse and backed down the aisle till I was behind the van. I jumped out of the car and tried to open the van door. Naturally the perp wasn’t interested in opening up, so I yell, ‘Police, I’m gonna count to three and then I start shooting.’
“ That did it, he opened the door pronto and I could see that the little girl was crying. In just that few seconds the bastard had got the girl’s dress off and his pants down. I mean he was one jackrabbit-fast motherfucker and he really pissed me off, so I pulled him out of the van and pistol whipped him so bad that his face will never be the same. Then I started kicking him in the nuts till I was damn sure they were fucked up beyond repair.
“ I was about to shoot him, when some guy jumped out of the crowd that had gathered and ripped the gun from my hand. I guess if it wouldn’t have been for that good Samaritan, I’d have done a second degree murder. Anyway there were enough witnesses to make sure it could never be hushed up. They busted me back to sergeant and put me back on the street again. It could have been worse.”
“ We’re here.” Walker pulled up the driveway to Washington’s small apartment.
“ Call you in the morning.” Washington got out of the car.
He watched Walker’s taillights as he reached for, then rejected, a cigarette. He shook his head and stumbled into his apartment, more asleep than awake. He fell into bed without taking his clothes off.
He didn’t see the small green gecko scurry between his feet, then dash under the bed.