'Not quite ‘make my day,’ ” Olivia said, “But not bad, Sergeant.”
I’ll be a sonofabitch, she’s laughing at me!
Another flashlight beam appeared, and a moment later, another. One was held by a uniform, the other by a Highway Patrol sergeant. The latter flickered across Matt’s face.
“Payne! What the hell happened to you?”
“What the hell does it look like?” Matt snapped. He pointed to the uniform. “Put this gentleman in a car,” he ordered. “He has not been Mirandized.”
“What did he do?” the Highway sergeant said as he stepped closer to Matt as if he thought he was going to need some help.
Then, when his back was to the uniform and he could not be seen, he put something into Matt’s hand.
Matt saw what it was. Three round pellets of a very strong brand of English mints.
“Chew those slowly and try not to breathe on anybody. I already gave some to your friend.”
“Thanks,” Matt said. “I owe you.”
“So what did this critter do?”
“For openers, first running a red light and then leaving the scene of an accident,” Matt said. “Give me thirty seconds and I can think of a lot more. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Grand Am is hot.”
“You sure you’re all right? You look like hell,” the Highway sergeant said.
There were four city vehicles on Knight’s Road: a Highway car, a patrol car, a sergeant’s car from the Eighth District, and a Fire Department Fire Rescue vehicle.
Two paramedics were loading the passengers of the Caravan into the Fire Rescue truck.
“I think the little boy’s got a broken arm,” the Eighth District sergeant said. “You’re Detective Lassiter?”
“She’s Lassiter. My name is Payne.”
“You’re on the job?”
No, you stupid fuck, I’m a concerned citizen who gets his rocks off chasing tall, young, white males through people’s backyards.
“Sergeant, Homicide,” Matt said.
“You want to go in with them? Or in your own car?”
“Go where?”
“You look pretty beat up, Sergeant,” the Eighth District sergeant said. “You better have a doctor look at your face.”
“I’m all right,” Matt said. “I scraped it, that’s all.”
“No, you’re not,” Detective Lassiter said. “Let the medics look at it.”
It was the paramedic’s professional judgment that while he had really done a job on his cheek, there wasn’t much that could be done for it except clean it up and get some antiseptic on it.
“I live right around the corner,” Detective Lassiter said. “And I’ve got alcohol and hydrogen peroxide.”
“That’ll do it,” the paramedic said.
Matt met Olivia’s eyes for a long moment.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
“Can we find out if the Grand Am is hot?” Matt asked.
“He’s running it now,” the Eighth District sergeant said, nodding toward a uniform in a patrol car.
Less than a minute later, the uniform got out of the car and announced that the Grand Am had been reported stolen.
“Can you take him and hold him on that?” Matt asked. “I’ll come by later and do the paper.”
The District sergeant shook his head, “no.”
“You know better than that, Sergeant. You’re the arresting officer and you need to make the statement to the detective at Northeast.”
The Highway sergeant stepped between them. “I’ll get all of Sergeant Payne’s necessary information and make sure the detective has it, Sergeant. Besides, we helped him to make the pinch back there, and I want to make sure Highway gets in on the paperwork. You know how it is.”
The Eighth District sergeant looked at him for a moment, then walked away.
The Highway sergeant turned to Matt.
“Let me have your badge and payroll numbers. And I better have hers, too. Tell me what happened and how you hurt yourself so the Northeast Detective can document it if you need to go out IOD, ^2 and make sure you touch base with the assigned detective so you agree with the statement before he puts it on the ’49.”
“Thanks a lot,” Matt said. “I owe you two now.”
“You better let me drive,” Olivia said.
“Why?”
“It looks like you scratched your hand, too. You’ll get blood all over your pretty leather gear shifter.”
He walked around the rear and got in the passenger seat of the Porsche.
Detective Lassiter opened the door of her second-floor apartment, reached inside, flicked on the lights, and then motioned Sergeant Payne inside ahead of her.
“The first aid stuff’s in the bathroom,” she said. “The bedroom’s just the other side of the living room.”
He walked across the living room to the bedroom, noticing as he passed through it to the bathroom that it was not messy, and that a white comforter covered her bed.
Intimate feminine apparel was hanging from the shower curtain rod. When she came into the bathroom, she snatched it off and threw it behind the shower curtain.
She took bandages, swabs, Mercurochrome, and bottles of hydrogen peroxide and alcohol from a cabinet and then turned to him and started cleaning his face.
“That’s pretty nasty,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to go to the emergency room?”
“I’m sure,” he said.
Three minutes later, his scraped face had been cleaned with both hydrogen peroxide and alcohol. He had manfully tried, and failed, not to wince when the alcohol stung painfully.
“Let’s look at the leg,” she said.
“What’s wrong with the leg?”
“The fence got that, too, I guess. In the car, I saw it. It’s all bloody.”
Three minutes after that, his leg had been treated with alcohol and hydrogen peroxide and painted with Mercurochrome, but not bandaged.
“Your trousers are ruined,” Olivia said.
“I noticed.”
“And let me see what you did to your hand.”
“I guess I scratched it the same place I tore my pants, going over the fence.”
She took his left hand in both of hers.
“That’s a puncture wound,” she said.
He didn’t reply.
“You just can’t leave it like that,” she said.
He didn’t reply.
She looked up at him. Their eyes met.
“What?” she asked.
“You know goddamn well what, Mother.”
“I’m not your goddamn Mother.”
“I know,” he said, softly. “Your move.”
She had not taken her eyes from his. She took her left hand from his and raised it to his unmarked cheek.
“Oh, God!” she said.
Ninety seconds later, atop the white comforter on her bed, while still partially clothed, Detective Lassiter and Sergeant Payne came to know each other, in the biblical sense of the term.
And in the next half hour, now completely devoid of clothing, and between the sheets, Detective Lassiter and Sergeant Payne twice came to know each other even better.
