Inheritance: A Novel Part 10

Paul followed his gaze and saw a pair of headlights coming at them way too fast. Mike scrambled towards a lady who had stopped her car at the flare line. She had cracked her window a little and was trying to ask him what she was supposed to do. Mike yelled at her to move out of the way. She stared up at him blankly, too startled by his urgency to do what he said.

"Go!" he yelled. "Go go go go!"

He pounded on her door as the headlights closed on them. Paul could see it was an SUV. The driver was going so fast he could barely hold the road, the SUV's engine whining at full throttle.

"Mike!" Paul said.

"Move your f.u.c.king car!" Mike yelled at the woman. He looked over his shoulder at the SUV barreling down on him. For a horrible moment Paul saw his partner lit up by the approaching headlights, and it seemed that every pa.s.sing second became elastic, stretched out in slow motion.

He saw Mike yell at the headlights, the SUV swerving blindly in response.

He saw the lady start to move her car, creeping, creeping.

d.a.m.n it, lady. Move!

He saw Mike jump on the hood of the lady's car. He heard the SUV's brakes lock. Saw it slide through the flare line, standing on its front wheels, pa.s.sing right through the spot where the lady's car had just been and within inches of Mike rolling across her hood.

And then Paul heard the loudest crash he'd ever heard.

When the smoke cleared, Paul was standing in the middle of the intersection with ash and hay and dust swirling all around him, the lone, continuous drone of a car horn playing the same, ear-splitting note without ceasing.

The SUV, a candy blue Cadillac Escalade, had crashed into and under the back of the fire truck. The Escalade was smashed beyond recognition, the front end compressed into ruin, the back end sticking up at an angle into the air. The back tires were a good eight inches off the ground, still spinning. The pa.s.senger cab of the fire truck was undamaged, but the back end was completely destroyed, and the nine hundred feet of hoses it carried were spilled out on the roadway like intestines.

"Holy s.h.i.+t," Paul muttered. "Holy, holy s.h.i.+t."

The driver of the Escalade stank of beer and was acting wild, like he was high on methamphetamines. He had a b.l.o.o.d.y nose from the airbag, but otherwise, miraculously, he was fine. They pulled him out of the vehicle, and when the firefighters tried to check him out, he just stared at them and said, "Get off me, fool. What the f.u.c.k you doing in my house?"

"He's fine," one of the firefighters said.

"Really?" Paul asked.

"Yeah," the firefighter said. "He's an a.s.shole, but he ain't injured."

When the firefighters were done with the guy, Paul cuffed him and put him in the back of their patrol car. He came back to the scene in time to witness a paramedic turn from the pa.s.senger side door and shake his head at Mike.

He and Mike made eye contact.

Mike said, "She's 10-60."

Dead, Paul thought. 10-60 is a D-O-A.

"Go ask that guy her name," Mike said.

Paul leaned into the car. The man was enormous, even compared to Paul. He was platinum blond and dressed in a skin tight blue silk s.h.i.+rt and white linen pants. His eyeb.a.l.l.s jerked in his sockets with a methamphetamine-induced nystagmus. He smelled like beer and cigars. The air around him was liquid with the stink of it.

Paul said, "That girl with you, what's her name?"

"Huh?"

"The girl you just killed. What's her name?"

"What f.u.c.king dead girl, man? I didn't kill no dead girl. You come in my house and hook me the f.u.c.k up? Bulls.h.i.+t's what that is, man." He leaned back into the seat and stared straight ahead. "Ain't no f.u.c.king dead girl in my house. Sheeet."

Paul slammed the door on him.

"He doesn't even know what planet he's on," Paul said when he rejoined Mike. "He thinks we just pulled him off his couch."

"Nice. Listen, I gotta go talk to that woman over there, the one I was trying to get out of the way. She's pretty shaken up, but we're gonna need her as a witness. Can you go check his car? See if you can find that girl's purse or something. Something with her name on it for the report."

"Okay," Paul said. He looked towards the wrecked Escalade and swallowed. He mentally steadied himself for what he knew he was about to see and said, "All right."

The inside of the Escalade smelled like ash from the exploded airbags. Everything that had been in the rear of the vehicle had s.h.i.+fted forward-seats, clothes, CDs, speakers, hundreds of red pills that Paul guessed were probably ecstasy, maybe something else, bottles of beer-everything.

The dead girl in the pa.s.senger seat looked to be around seventeen, her little white halter top soaked with blood. More blood had pooled in the bowl her skirt made of her lap. When the Escalade had folded forward into a V shape, the roof had pushed down on the back of her head, slicing part of it away. Her eyes were open. So was her mouth. Her body was wedged up under the dashboard, her bare arms and shoulders laced with a thousand cuts from all the broken gla.s.s. From the way she was twisted up, Paul guessed every bone in her body was broken.

His eyes kept returning the tips of her blonde hair. They were clumped together, saturated with blood. They looked like wet paint brushes.

The Escalade's horn droned on.

Paul swallowed again, forcing his eyes away from her broken body. There was a strap of something that might have been her purse wedged up by her feet. He glanced at the girl's face, feeling almost like he needed to ask her permission, and then reached inside, cringing as his hand groped between her ankles, touching her bare legs, her gummy skin.

He couldn't pull the purse loose and he quickly took his hand away. He felt corrupted, like touching her had made his hand dirty somehow. His lips curled up in disgust. He wanted to wash himself. Then go somewhere and throw up.

He closed his eyes to steady himself, and when he opened them, the dead girl was looking at him, her eyes white as a bed sheet. She was trying to speak to him.

Paul suddenly had a flash of recognition. He saw through the blood and the shattered body and the horror of it all. He saw down to the depths, where another presence was rising up towards him.

"Momma?" he said.

Her mouth moved. He thought he saw his name form on her lips.

She reached a hand out towards his cheek.

Paul.

He shook his head, gently at first, then harder. "No," he said. "No, go away."

"Paul."

He felt confused, not knowing where the voices were coming from. The girl's lips were moving, but the sound was a man's voice. Mike's voice, distant, a world away.

Paul.

"Please don't touch me," Paul muttered, staring into the dead girl's white eyes-the eyes that weren't just hers any longer. "Please don't."

"Hey, Paul!"

All at once, Paul's attention was pulled away from the dead girl's face. He glanced up at Mike, their eyes meeting over the wreckage. Red and blue lights licked across the twisted metal and the fluid on the pavement.

"You have any luck with her ID?"

Paul looked down at the girl. She was dead again, empty brown eyes staring up into nothing.

He looked back at Mike and shook his head.

Several hours later, after they had written page after page of reports and the driver had been booked for Intoxication Manslaughter and Possession with Intent to Deliver on the ecstasy, Paul and Mike were back in their district.

They sat in their car, watching a group of three black men who were standing near a pay phone in the parking lot of a convenience store on the edge of the Witherby Courts Housing Project. Mike had the car blacked out, no lights, the radio turned down low. He had backed it into an alleyway choked with mesquite shrubs and scraggly hackberry and straw colored alkali gra.s.s. From where they sat they had a clear view of the intersection of Wedding and Hall Streets, the entire parking lot and two sides of the store, and a good part of the Courts, which was basically a sprawling complex of battered white concrete buildings splashed with graffiti and riddled with cracks and pocked by bullet holes.

Mike had leaned the driver's seat back as far as the plexigla.s.s prisoner cage would let it go and was slouched down, his arms crossed over his chest, eyes nearly closed. Paul sat in the pa.s.senger seat, trying desperately to push the image of the dead girl in the Escalade from his mind while he fingered his badge and thought about what the Latin on the ribbon over his badge number meant.

I bet Rachel would know.

Mike coughed quietly to himself, but never took his eyes off the three men. So far, they hadn't seen the patrol car and Paul hadn't seen them do anything strange.

"What does this mean?" Paul said.

"What does what mean?"

"This ribbon Sarge gave me." He tried to p.r.o.nounce the words, but couldn't get the last one out.

Mike glanced at him out of the corner of his eye and said, "It means, 'n.o.body provokes me with impunity.'" Then he went back to watching the three men.

Paul thought about that, wondering why the translation made even less sense to him than the original Latin did.

"Why are you so interested in those guys?" he said.

"Garwin told us to shake down the junkies in our district for information. Those guys are junkies."

"Those guys?"

"Yeah."

At the Academy, one of Paul's instructors, a former Narcotics detective, told his cla.s.s that while there was no place for racial stereotyping in police work, there was some truth to it when it came to racial preferences for certain kinds of drugs. Everybody smokes pot, he'd said. But beyond that, blacks usually go for cocaine. Mexican guys like heroin, and the white guys are the s.l.u.ts of the drug world. They'll do just about anything they can get their hands on.

Paul studied the three black guys and felt like he was missing something. Why would they be messing around with heroin? If he'd been by himself, he'd have driven right by them and not given them a second thought.

Unable to figure it out, he said "How do you know they're junkies?"

"Because this is the Witherby Courts, the flea market of heroin sales."

Paul laughed, but Mike didn't even smile. Evidently, he was serious. And, evidently, he thought that was explanation enough.

Paul watched the men. He saw three dirty looking guys drinking oversized beers, but nothing like what he'd expected a heroin junkie to look like. Weren't junkies supposed to be famine refugee skinny with stringy hair and tattoos all over the place? He had expected to see a listless, comfortably numb sort of haze in their eyes. That was his picture of a heroin addict. But these guys, none of them were skinny, and one of the guys looked to be pus.h.i.+ng three hundred pounds easy. They laughed and joked with each other and seemed fairly animated. All three watched the streets and the buildings around them carefully, constantly scanning every vehicle in the spa.r.s.e parade of beat up cars that rolled by.

He was about to ask Mike what he was missing when Mike suddenly spoke up. "That guy in the green s.h.i.+rt-the fat one-I've hooked him up before. It was about eight months ago, on the other side of the Courts. The other two I don't know, but I doubt seriously they're hanging around with fat boy there for the pleasure of his company."

"Are they selling or trying to score?"

"Selling."

"Oh."

They had the windows down. It was hot, the air dusty. The alleyway smelled liked scorched vegetation. Paul could hear cicadas close by.

Mike said, "You see them with those beers, right?"

"Yeah."

"Have you seen them drink any since we've been here?"

Paul thought about that. "No," he said slowly.

"Most of the time they package heroin in little colored balloons. They keep the balloons in their mouths. The beers are in case we show up. If we get too close, they swig the beer and swallow the dope."

"Oh," Paul said. After a moment, he said, "Then what?"

"What do you think? They wait for us to leave, then they go behind the store there and get their dope back."

"They..."

Mike smiled. "It comes out one end or the other."

"Oh G.o.d."

"Heroin's a nasty business," Mike said, and shrugged.

"You ain't kidding."

"I'm waiting for them to make a sale. When they do, we'll take them down."

"We're gonna arrest them? Didn't Garwin say-"

"Paul, we're not gonna waste time talking to these clowns without anything to hold over their heads. Collins was right about that. Look at those guys. Do you really believe they'd tell us all about life as a heroin dealer if we just walked up there and started shooting the s.h.i.+t?"

"No, I guess not."

"You're d.a.m.n right. These guys, they're not gonna talk to you unless they think they can get something out of the deal. As it is, we've got nothing to bargain with. But if we've got them in handcuffs, well, that changes things, doesn't it?"

Paul thought about that. "Yeah," he said, "I guess it does."

Out on the street, a dark blue Chevy Monte Carlo rolled up to the three heroin dealers. One of the dealers walked up to the pa.s.senger window and leaned in. A few seconds later, the man walked back to the other two men and the car drove off.

"That's it," Mike said.