“A few minutes of your time.”
“Is this about the other night?”
“Not quite….”
“The Indian?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Let me in.”
“Fine, you fucking …”
“Now lose the bat.”
I turned and threw the bat back into the house. It landed on the couch, bounced, then rolled across the floor. I turned back to the cop.
“Happy, asshole?”
“Yes,” he said.
He looked like he was about a hundred and sixty pounds. A lightweight. Grandmothers would describe him as “slight.” If I’d ever seen him on the street, I’d have dismissed him as a twerp.
In the blink of an eye, this little bastard bum-rushed me, right in my own home, and I let him do it by ditching that damn bat. One of his hands came up quick and locked around my face. The other hand pressed into my sternum, and he ran into me and pushed me all the way back into the house. We fell into the recliner, and the recliner tipped back and over. When the dust cleared, the cop was still on top of me, and he’d somehow slipped a pair of meat hooks on me.
“You fucker,” I hissed. “Get these fucking things off of me. Now.”
“I told you I’d make you lose the bat,” he said, smiling. “Idiots like you always think the same. They expect violence because that’s all they know. How to be a goddamn brute. It’s that limitation that makes you all so fucking stupid.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s why criminals get caught.”
“Get these cuffs off me.”
“And that’s why scumbags like you always make a mistake.”
“I’m going to have your fucking shield for this, man. What the fuck is this about? What are you talking about?”
He got up, put his foot on my chest as if I were a big game trophy and someone was about to take a picture. “Pearce was my partner, Higgins.”
“Good for you!” I yelled. “What do you want? A medal?”
“We worked together for a long time.”
“This is police brutality, man.”
“That’s what this is about,” he said. “About Pearce.”
I forced myself to calm down a little, then said, “Fine.”
“Good,” he said.
“Good. Can I get off the fucking floor now?”
“No.”
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“No.”
“Well, fuck you, cop. You come in here, you wake me up, you attack me, you break into my home and take me fucking hostage. And now I can’t even smoke in my own home. That’s it, man. It’s on.”
He came down fast and wrapped a hand around my throat. “Shut up, you fucking worm,” he grumbled. “This isn’t your home no more, you hear me? Now shut up. You say one more word, I’ll bury that bat in your butt.”
I couldn’t answer him because he was strangling me. It was probably for the best.
“Pearce was my partner, but more than that, he was my friend.
He was my little kid’s godfather. Why? Because he was a good man. The best man in this goddamn town. I know that. Everyone that ever met him knew that. In another day and age, he would’ve been the one to nail Capone or some shit like that. He was a good man and a good cop. And now he’s dead. So I have to ask myself, if he was such a great guy, what was he doing spending time with a piece of trash like you?”
He eased up on my throat long enough for me to hack out, “Baking cookies.”
A slap across the left side of my face stunned me.
“Marlowe Higgins. I pulled your record, you know. You’re not an upstanding citizen, but there have been worse. But scumbags like you are sneaky, like worms.” He got up off me and set up the recliner. Took a seat in it. “It alarms me that there are so many gaps in your activity. So many years without paying your taxes and whatnot, without having a residence, a paper trail. What were you doing?”
“I was going door to door for the Mormons.”
“I always wondered what Pearce was doing, wasting his time with a piece of trash like you. When he told me, uh, quite a while back that you and he were acquaintances, I honestly thought he was full of shit, because, hey, everyone on the force had heard of you. You’re the guy with the mean right hook, right?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” I said.
“I followed him one night. Again, no time recently, but quite a while ago. I couldn’t even tell you when. And when I followed him, he drove right to that shitty little diner you got fired from …”
“It ain’t a fucking diner, man….”
“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up already, Higgins. You’ll have your time to talk, and with any luck, it’ll be from behind bars or over a fucking hole dug for you. He drove to that shitty diner, and, hell, he actually ordered a cup of that muck you people call coffee, and he talked to you. I could not believe what I was seeing. I have to admit, it got me worried, my partner socializing with a connie like you. Goddamn, I was worried he was taking drugs out of evidence for you, but guess what’s missing from your rap sheet?”
“Rhymes?”
“Drug charges.”
“That too.”
“Seeing that made me happy, and I thought nothing of it, this weird association of his, that is, until this Rose Killer came to town.”
Hearing that made my skin crawl. “Now listen up, cop, if you think …”
He moved like a cat, and before I knew it his foot was pressed into the side of my face. “What part of ‘shut up’ are you having a hard time with?”
I groaned from the pain. After a few seconds he got off me and sat back down.
“From a crime scene like the one up at the Crowley property, you’d think a guy might call his wife, or his special lady, just to tell her he may not be home for a while. That’s what any man would do, especially when you have federal agents crawling in and out of your asshole, and that’s what Pearce had done a million times at crime scenes. But what did he do when they found that poor woman up there? He called you. Why is that?”
“Oh, you mean I can talk now?”
“Briefly, yes.”
“Well, it seems that our good buddy Pearce liked bouncing his cases off me. I think he felt better talking to me than you because I had a better relationship with your wife than you did.”
Detective Van Buren turned red, which made me happy on the inside.
“Maybe you should have tried following
He jumped up again, toward me, and this time he reached inside his jacket. Out came the police-issued handgun. He grabbed a fistful of my long, flowing hair with one hand and pressed the barrel of the gun into the side of my nose.
“Do it,” I said. “Do it.”
“It’s not over, you piece of trash. They may have put my friend in the ground. We may be in the middle of nowhere, with all kinds of creatures doing God knows what out in those woods, but you mark my words. I will not rest until you’re the one in a cage. I don’t trust you. And I don’t know what Pearce was involved with you for, but I will not allow his memory to be tarnished by whatever the fuck you two had going on. I don’t know why he called you from the crime scene, but if you had anything to do with that murder, I’m going to find out about it. Why?
