Down Here

me.

“I just ignored it—I wasn’t going to fight over a place in line. Then she turned around and spoke to me. Not shouting, exactly, but loud enough for everyone nearby to hear. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘don’t say a word to me. Not one word. I know you’re not about talking. Just wanted you to know you got friends here. So, if anyone gets stupid with you, all you got to do is point them out. Not even with your finger. Just nod your head, and it’ll be taken care of.’ Wasn’t that nice of her?”

“Hortense is a righteous woman,” I said. “Always has been.”

“I appreciate what you . . . I appreciate what she did,” Wolfe said. “But it wasn’t me who told Pepper to—”

“Pepper did the right thing, and you know it,” I said. “And Davidson’s the right man for the job.”

“The job,” she repeated, bitterly.

“Look, I know you didn’t—”

“Didn’t what? Didn’t shoot that maggot? How do you know?”

“It’s not you.”

“What’s not me?” she challenged. “Maybe I read that letter he sent me, and went over to his house to tell him to step off. Maybe he got aggressive, and I panicked. Pulled out a gun and shot him. And then ran.”

“Right. As if you’d go to meet a freak like him without backup.”

“What if my backup helped me get away?”

“He was shot with a twenty-five.”

“Isn’t that a woman’s gun?” she said, unknowingly echoing Sands. “And three shots— sounds like panic, doesn’t it?”

“You don’t carry,” I said. “And if you did, it wouldn’t be a toy like that one.”

“You’re so sure?”

“Oh, I’m a lot surer than that,” I said. “A person can change their habits, but not their personality.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t walk around packing, although I suppose you could, if you thought you had to. But one thing I know you’d never do.”

“Shoot?”

“No. Panic.”

“Ah,” she said, smiling for real now.

“Besides, there’s one other thing that seals the deal,” I said, pointing at the Rottweiler. “Him. Maybe those little bullets didn’t have enough to get the job done, but no way Bruiser didn’t.”

“You’re right,” Wolfe said. “If I had sent him.”

“A situation like that, I don’t think he’d give a damn whether you sent him or not,” I told her. “He’s a dog, not a robot.”

“He’s also a big bully, aren’t you, Bruisey?” Wolfe said, scratching behind the dog’s ears. “He gained ten pounds in the few days Pepper had him.”

“Pepper probably stuffed him because she felt bad for him,” I said. “Besides, she’s an actress, so she appreciates a good performance, and he probably went around pretending he was starving.”

“Maybe . . .”

“I need to ask you some questions,” I said.

“And I need to ask you some,” she shot back.

“Go,” I told her.

“Why are you in this? Still in this, I mean. I know Pepper . . .”

“You want me to tell you a story about my religious conversion? How I’m going to devote the rest of my life to protecting the innocent? You know why. You’ve always known.

“If you had drilled the miserable little fuck, you think that would matter to me? If you didn’t have a dozen better ones, I’d be your alibi. And if I had known about him threatening you, this never would have happened at all.”

“You’re not my protector,” she said, eyes narrowed. “Self-appointed or otherwise.”

“I’m not anything to you,” I told her. “You think I don’t know that? But what I do, I’m good at, and you know that, too. Tell me you want me off this thing, and I’ll walk out of here right now, never say another word about it.”

Wolfe tapped a cigarette from her pack, lit it with a long-flamed butane lighter.

I just stood there, watching her.

The Rottweiler watched me.

Wolfe took a deep drag, blew a jet of smoke at the ceiling.

“You’re lying,” she said.

^“Sands, he’s for real?” I asked her, finally breaking the silence.

“Molly? He’s a piece of gold. When he first made detective, he was assigned to my squad. He loved the job. Loved making cases against the dirtbags that my bureau specialized in putting away.

“He didn’t come with any bullshit cop prejudices. Or, if he did, he left them at the door. He got it, right from the start. In my shop, we didn’t play the ‘good victim, bad victim’ game. If a hooker got raped, if a retarded girl got molested—same as if it were a nun, or a Mensa member. He was a real man on the DV stuff, too. And cold death on child molesters.”

Wolfe took a hit off her cigarette, gray gunfighter’s eyes watching me through the smoke. When I kept quiet, she picked up her own thread.

“Molly worked his cases. Double- and triple-checked everything. Turned over every rock. He never played TV detective on the stand, never tried to out-cute the defense. But there wasn’t one jury that didn’t believe him.

“And then the job broke his heart,” Wolfe said, her voice thick with sadness. “When they fired me, everything changed. All they wanted was stats.

“You know what that means. Some of the ‘shaky’ cases don’t get pursued, so you never get the chance to make them solid. The last thing they needed was a cop like Molly. He went from thinking he was a soldier in a holy war to feeling like a report-writing fake.”

“That’s when he started the heavy drinking?” I asked.

“When he went back to it, yeah,” she said, her eyes daring me to make judgments.

“You know he had copies of every single one of Wychek’s cases. Possible cases, I mean. Every case in which Wychek was a suspect.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I can’t even figure out where he got all that stuff from. There never was a ‘task force’ thing, right?”

“Right,” Wolfe said, disgustedly. “Wychek was a classic pattern-rapist, but he stayed so far off the screen that he never even got himself a press nickname. You know, a ‘Night Stalker’ kind of thing. No media pressure, no task force; simple as that. But we were working him, preparing for trial, and we grabbed every scrap we could get our hands on. After the trial, the whole package must have gone into dead storage.”

“Still, if they ever found out he was making copies—”

“They won’t,” she said, flatly.

“He got other stuff, too,” I said. “The most important thing of all, in fact. Davidson told you—?”

“That Wychek’s not in a coma anymore? And that he doesn’t want to leave the hospital? Yes.”

“So the DA knows it wasn’t you, no matter what bullshit ‘statement’ Wychek supposedly made, am I right?”

“How does that compute?”

“Come on. Wychek believes you’ve got a hit squad out looking for him? No way the DA buys that. There has to be another reason for them playing along. You got anything on them?”

“On City-Wide? Sure, there’s stuff they wouldn’t want to get out. Sexual harassment—not pressure to have sex; trading sex for promotion—stuff like that.”