Inheritance: A Novel Part 44

"No," she said. "Come on. No."

Her back hit the bathroom wall and her hand dropped to her side and the doork.n.o.b.

Right away she thought, Get inside. Now!

She slipped inside the bathroom, and right as she was about to slam the door saw Paul's Barber fifty cent piece and the cordless phone on the bedside table. She grabbed them both and closed and locked the door.

Rachel squeezed Paul's coin in her left hand and used the thumb of her right hand to punch in 911. She focused on the coin as the phone rang.

Please, Paul, help me. Oh Jesus, Paul. Please.

There was a crash on the other side of the door that made Rachel scream. The coin went flying out of her hand.

A woman's calm, almost bored voice came on the line. "9-1-1, do you need police, fire or EMS?"

Rachel screamed out something unintelligible about dead men tearing down the walls.

The dispatcher broke in and said, "Ma'am, I can't understand you. Ma'am, please. Ma'am, you need to-"

The bathroom door exploded open, and a moment later there were dead hands all over her.

Chapter 22.

Paul was so exhausted when he arrived at the Eastside Substation that he didn't even notice Mike coming in right behind him from his jog.

Mike called out to him.

Paul stopped, turned around.

Mike looked Paul up and down and said, "Dude, what the h.e.l.l happened to you? You sleep in that uniform?"

"Huh?"

Paul looked at himself. Only then did he realize he was still wearing his uniform pants and the black t-shirt with the worn-in sweat stain from where his body armor had been the night before. He was covered in dust and he smelled like rotted wood.

"What happened?" Mike asked. "Rachel kick you out?"

Paul didn't answer.

Mike laughed. "Holy s.h.i.t. She did. She kicked you out."

"I don't want to talk about it, Mike."

"Man, you don't have to. One look at you and anybody could see it. It's written all over your face. Either she kicked your a.s.s out, or you've been drinking for the last twelve hours."

"Mike, please..."

Mike threw up his hands. "Hey, it's cool, dude. You know what I always say-you're not a real policeman until you're on your third marriage."

Paul turned away, but Mike stopped him.

"Hey, Paul, come on. Wait. I'm just kidding." He said, "Look, you need to get changed out in a hurry. If Garwin sees you walking around in only part of the uniform like that, he'll write you up so fast you won't know if you're coming or going. And he won't care what kind of deal you got going at home. He isn't much on discipline, but the uniform is one of his pet peeves."

Paul just nodded and headed for the locker room. Mike followed him. He was still breathing hard from his run.

He said, "You've got an extra uniform, right?"

"Yeah," Paul answered. "All except the t-shirt. I guess I can just wear this one again."

"Like h.e.l.l. Dude, you are not riding in the same car with me in that thing. You smell like goat p.i.s.s. I got an extra you can borrow. I'm about as wide as you are tall, so it should fit you. What are you, a two XL?"

"Yeah," Paul said, then added, "Thanks."

"Still a man of few words, eh?"

Paul sighed. "It's been a bad day, Mike. You wouldn't understand."

"You'd be surprised," Mike said. "And we're gonna be spending the next eight hours together in the car. That's gonna feel like forever if you're gonna keep all this s.h.i.t bottled up. You can talk to me about it. I mean, don't get the wrong idea or nothing. I ain't Barbara Walters. Your a.s.s starts crying I'll throw you out on the pavement. But if you got some troubles, I don't mind listening."

Paul nodded.

"Seriously," Mike said. "No bulls.h.i.t. I know more about wrecking a marriage than just about any man alive. You can listen to me, do the opposite of whatever advice I give you, and you should be golden."

That got a chuckle out of Paul.

"There you go," Mike said. "At least you're not gonna mope on me all night." He looked at Paul and said, "You're not, right?"

"No."

"Good. Listen, after you get dressed, you should call her. Tell her something nice. I mean, even if she yells at you. Don't make her beg you to come back. And you don't have to beg either. Just say something nice and leave it on that. Don't get into it. If she screams or yells or calls you names or whatever, just say something nice and then get off the phone. She'll be thinking about what you said all night, and when you come home-" he made a skating motion of one palm gliding over the other "-you'll be in like Flynn."

He accented it with a wink.

"I'll think about it," Paul said.

"44-70."

Mike was driving. Paul was looking out the window at the ruined sh.e.l.l of an apartment building. Mike waited for Paul to acknowledge the call, but he just went right on staring out the window, oblivious.

Mike keyed up and said, "44-70, go ahead, ma'am."

"44-70, make 360 Jaffrey. Complainant states she's pregnant and her husband just hit her in the stomach and threw her down the stairs. Sorry, Mike, I got no cover available. I'll start the next available your way."

"10-4, ma'am," Mike said. "We're on the way."

Paul swiveled the laptop around to his side and started to run the history on the address.

"Don't bother," Mike said.

"You know the address?"

"Yeah. The guy's name is Jimmy Schultz. Date of birth is 12-12-86. Last time I ran him he was on probation for methamphetamines. He's a burglar, too. If we catch up with him, you can pretty much count on him being high. First he'll run, then he'll want to fight."

Paul ran the guy's name on the MDT and got a felony warrant hit.

"Look at that," he said to Mike, and swiveled the laptop towards Mike.

They were southbound on Loop 410, the freeway almost empty ahead of them. Mike had gunned the Crown Victoria and now they were doing over ninety miles an hour. As the car rolled up and down over the uneven road, Mike glanced at the screen.

"Blue warrant from the State Parole Board," Mike said. "Sweet. Looks like Jimmy came up dirty on his last drug test. Man, I'd love to get a hold of him. You're gonna love this guy. He's a major sack of s.h.i.t."

Paul closed the MDT's screen and leaned back in his seat, watching the freeway through the windshield.

"You're getting used to my driving, aren't you?" Mike said.

"Huh?"

"You don't look seasick."

"Yeah," Paul said, noticing that for himself now. "How about that?"

Paul's first thought when they entered the apartment was that somebody had been shot at close range with a shotgun. Everything in the room was white. From the carpet to the walls to the ceiling fan to the brand new leather furniture set, all of it was as white as a cloud on a summer day. Except now of course it was spattered all over with Louisiana Hot Sauce.

The smell was horrible. Paul picked up on it before he entered the room. It irritated his nose and his throat and his eyes with the same intensity that he had felt when Rachel tried to make homemade enchiladas and burned the sauce. It was the same peppery burn.

Their complainant was a skinny girl of nineteen with stringy black hair and tattoos down her right her arm and splotchy bruising all over her skin. Paul had come to recognize the look as one of the calling cards of the career junkie. The swell of pregnancy was just starting to show beneath the black tank top she wore.

She told them her boyfriend was high again on meth and that he had flipped out on her when a guy had called the apartment asking for her. He got so mad he took a giant one liter bottle of hot sauce and splashed it everywhere, all over her new furniture.

"All this furniture's brand new? How much did it cost?" Mike said.

"It cost me eighteen hundred dollars," she said. "That b.a.s.t.a.r.d ruined it. You see that? Look at that. That's felony criminal mischief right there. You gonna arrest him for that?"

She had her hands on her hips now, her lips pressed together so tightly they seemed to disappear entirely.

"Ma'am," Mike said, "when you called you said he hit you. You said he threw you down the stairs."

"s.h.i.t, he hits me all the time. You people don't do nothing about it."

"Have you ever filed charges on him?"

"No, that's your job."

Paul willed himself not to breathe in too deeply. He had become aware of an underlying stink in the place that not even the hot sauce could completely conceal. It was like set-in sweat and grime and rot. Meanwhile Mike was using as much patience as Paul had ever seen him use. He was trying to tell the girl that what she really needed was for EMS to take her to the hospital so that she and her unborn child could get checked out by a doctor.

"Bulls.h.i.t," she roared. "I ain't got no money. I ain't got no job. I ain't got no insurance to pay no doctor with. I just wanna know what you're gonna do about my furniture. You gonna arrest him or what?"

Mike's patience did have limits, though.

"So you ain't got no job, and you ain't looking for no job, but you got brand new eighteen hundred dollar white leather furniture. You got a big screen TV over there, too. I bet you get about a thousand channels on thing. You got money enough for all that, but you ain't got money to get your unborn child checked out?" He made an exaggerated show of looking around the apartment. "I don't see no kid stuff around here. No crib, no toys, no books on childcare. That little baby of yours is off to a great start, huh?"

"f.u.c.k you," she said.

Mike just shrugged. Then he called for EMS to check out the girl and an evidence technician to come out and take pictures of her injuries.

"I ain't gonna go with them," she said.

"Listen, girly. Personally, I don't give a s.h.i.t about you. I can take one look at you and tell your life is going nowhere. You're an oxygen thief as far as I'm concerned. But that baby inside you is something else. I don't know what he did in a past life, but unless he was Jeffrey Dahlmer I know he doesn't deserve a momma like you. So this is what I'm gonna do. You don't merit the paperwork it's gonna take me, but I'm gonna handle your situation right down to the letter of the law. And when we're done, we'll see if we can't talk you into going to a doctor to check that kid out."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"You gonna pay for that?"

"Nope. You sell enough drugs to buy this furniture and that TV over there, you should be able to divert some of your profits to your kid."

"f.u.c.k you."

Mike smiled. "Well, that's one way to look at it. Another way would be to say that your failure as a parent is my job security."

"a.s.shole."

She sat down on a corner of her couch that wasn't covered in hot sauce and wouldn't look at them, and that pretty much ended the conversation until EMS arrived.

Two hours later, as they were walking down the stairs and out to the street to their patrol car, Mike said, "You know, Paul, I f.u.c.king hate the public. I mean, I used to love this job. I used to have so much fun. Nowadays though, I'm beginning to feel more and more like Collins. I just dread it, everyday."

"Yeah," Paul said. "She was a piece of work."

"It's not just her. She was human trash, yeah, but it's not just her. Have I ever told you my idea for solving San Antonio's crime problem?"

"No," Paul said. "This ought to be good."

"This is the way I see it. We take the whole eastside of San Antonio, divide them up into two teams, and stick them on opposite sides of the Alamodome. It'd be like dodge ball in school when we were kids. Remember that? Except, instead of b.a.l.l.s, we put a whole pile of loaded weapons between the two teams. We let them shoot it out, and the last person left standing we file murder charges on. Problem solved."

But Paul had stopped listening midway through Mike's rant. They had made it down to the front lawn of the apartment building and he was watching the gap between two buildings across the street.