Last Call (16 page)

“I’m okay,” he breathes as Frank runs to him.

“Good.” Frank grins. “Might take a while for the ambo to get through traffic.”

“Especially if the natives hear a cop’s down.”

Frank would rather have Munoz lie down and stay quiet until the EMTs arrive, but that doesn’t seem like the safest policy after having just shot a man in the Courts. Now that the firing has stopped the residents are emerging from their apartments, their voices building to a familiar wail about rights and police brutality.

“Think you can get up?” she asks Munoz.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Frank steadies him under his good shoulder and helps him to the backseat of his car.

“I haven’t sat in back of one of these in a long time,” he jokes.

Angry faces press closer to the squad cars and Frank is ecstatic to see the yellow paramedic truck racing toward her. She turns Munoz over to one EMT and follows his partner to Floyd. At least who she thinks is Floyd. She wants to ask him, but he’s unconscious.

A sultry dusk has settled over L.A. by the time Frank and Garcia are cut loose from the Glass House. They have spent the day at headquarters, taking drug tests, filling out reports and talking into tape recorders. They are the only ones riding the elevator and Garcia yawns. “I can’t remember where I parked my car.”

“I’m close,” Frank says. “We can drive around until we find it.”

“Thanks. I don’t want to spend my night here too.”

“Ever been up to the sixth floor?” Frank asks as the doors open.

Garcia shakes her head. “Not for anything like this.” They circle down two levels until they find her car. Stopping behind it, Frank tells the cop, “You did good today.”

Garcia ducks her head at the praise. “I just hope Moonie’s okay.”

“Old Moon.” Frank flips a hand on the steering wheel. “He probably stepped into the round just to get some time off.”

They’d gotten word that Munoz had a through-and-through that missed his lungs and neatly exited a centimeter left of his shoulder blade. Tore up some muscle but he’d be fine. Floyd was okay too— minor nerve damage that had left him temporarily incapacitated. Frank had been relieved to hear that, too, hoping a healthy Floyd would be less likely to instigate a tort suit against the department.

Garcia smiles. Despite her obvious exhaustion, she seems reluctant to leave Frank’s car.

“Do what they say,” Frank advises. “Talk to the shrink. Even if he’s an idiot, it’s good to spill your guts to someone you’re never gonna see again. Spill it at BSU and leave it there, or it’ll come back and bite you in the ass. It’s gonna bite you anyway but it’ll go down easier if you get it out.”

Listen to me,
Frank thinks,
the poster girl for the vocally challenged.

Garcia’s nodding. “Yeah, okay.” She still doesn’t make to leave.

“You okay?” Frank asks.

“Yeah.” ‘

“I’ll give you a ride home. It’s no big.”

“No, I’m okay.” Seeming to marshal her strength, the young woman adds, “It’s just been a hell of a day.”

“Yeah, it has. Go home, take a shower, get some sleep. Try to.”

“I keep seeing his face, like a picture, you know, all framed in broken glass. I just keep seeing it.”

“Yeah. You will for a while.”

“After I cuffed him and Haystack got there I had to throw up. It kinda hit me then, you know?”

Frank nods, leaving silence for Garcia to fill.

She does, flashing a weak smile. “I guess we were lucky, huh?”

“Lucky, plus you did some damn good shooting. You were like Jane-fucking-Wayne out there. I see you doing that again, I’ll get you busted back down to probation.”

Garcia opens the door, thanking Frank for the ride. Frank waits until Garcia pulls out of her space then follows her from under the building.

The Alibi is only of couple blocks away and Frank gets there on
autopilot. The soft evening riffles her hair and she smirks. “I should get a fucking Oscar.”

When she was dispensing advice and letting Garcia talk, she felt like she was outside herself looking in. She was two Franks—one compassionate and supportive, the other detached and mechanical. She can dispense “atta girls” and sage counsel to her staff but she can’t muster it for herself. Bottom line is, she’s an awful hypocrite. She should be doing exactly what she’d told Garcia to do, but instead of talking the day out, she will ooze into a shot glass and clamp her mouth shut. Keep it all in. Stoic the Magnificent rides again. She knows today is going to kick her ass farther down the line, but right now it’s hard to give a fuck. She’ll worry about farther down the line when she gets there.

Tuesday morning Frank has the shakes so bad she can’t hold her coffee during the drive to work. When she walks into the station Romanowski slams the desk phone down and yells her name. Everything is too loud.

“This is a citizen with good timing,” the sergeant booms, waving a slip of paper. “Got a cold one for ya.”

Frank snatches the paper and heads upstairs. She used to get to work half an hour, an hour early. Now she slides in at 0558 like the rest of the squad. Jill’s late, as usual, so Frank hands Lewis the paper. She’s paired Jill and Lewis during Johnnie’s absence, and after a five-minute briefing the detectives head to the address Romanowski gave down. Frank follows in her Honda, hoping the drive will clear her head. The chain of events from a couple drinks at the Alibi to a fullblown drunk is unclear. She doesn’t remember getting home but must have driven herself, since the Honda was parked safely in the driveway this morning. The thought that she might kill herself while under the influence doesn’t scare Frank, but the thought of taking someone else out with her makes her stomach roll over.

The nine-three detectives pull up to another broken body on the pavement. Hispanic male. No ID. He looks like a wino. When the coroner tech turns the body, Frank, Lewis and Jill spot the drag marks. It’s a dump job. Jill and Lewis moan at the same time.

Frank tells Lewis, “It’s a religious case,” and Jill rolls her eyes.

“Huh?” Lewis screws up her face.

“Gonna take an act of God to clear this one.”

“Shee-it,” Lewis complains.

There is no evidence to collect, no witnesses to question, and Frank is soon headed back to the office. She stops at Shabazz for bean pie and a large coffee. The food eases the worst of her hangover and she drives south toward Freeman Medical Center. She still has questions for Floyd.

She finds him in a room with a large Asian family crowded around an old woman. The television blares news. Floyd is on his back, eyes closed.

“Hey.”

When he sees Frank, he closes them again. She waits, reading his mood. He seems resigned, as he should be. After the hospital he’s going straight into lockup, probably until he’s walking with a cane.

He looks at her again and she asks, “Why’d you shoot?”

“Didn’t want to go back in.”

“I wasn’t gonna bring you in. I just wanted to talk.”

“‘Bout what?”

Holding up the well-worn pictures of Trevor and Ladeenia, she scours Floyd’s face. It’s blank, then changes to puzzlement.

“That’s those two kids got murdered. I already been asked about that.”

“Not by me. I want to hear your story.”

“Man.” He sighs like a tire losing air. “Ain’t nothin’ to it.”

“Humor me,” Frank tells him. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

He sighs again, bringing a forearm over his eyes. “What do you wanna know?”

Frank tries tripping him up, like she did Noah’s other suspects. Like McNabb’s, Floyd’s story is consistent straight down the line. She’s done with her questioning when she spies a tear gliding down his temple.

“What did you do that you thought I was gonna bring you in for?”

She watches his throat work as he swallows tears. He shrugs and winces at the motion. “Coulda been anything. I ain’t no choirboy.”

She nods and moves to the door.

Emotion makes his voice shaky, but the words are compelling enough when he calls after her, “But I ain’t killed no children.”

After putting in her time at the office, Frank bolts at two sharp. She’s going home to work out. No stops at the Alibi. No stops at the liquor store. Frank’s answering machine indicates she has two messages. One is a solicitation. The other is Gail. She tells Frank she has packed her things in a box and left it in the hall.

“Please come by and get it and leave my key on the table. If you don’t want the box, please leave my key anyway.”

Frank has tried not to think about Gail. She’s hoped this will somehow pass. That maybe time can reconcile them. Frank knows she’s wrong and Gail’s right. She’s willing to make a few concessions and hasn’t expected the finality
of
this message. She plays it back. Gail sounds cool and determined.

Frank thinks about calling to offer contrition, but Gail’s tone doesn’t brook reconciliation. And Frank won’t beg. She made her choice when she walked out and Gail made hers when she’d said don’t come back. Apparently, she was serious. Frank respects Gail’s resolve, wishes her own were as solid. Dropping hard rock CDs into the player, she sweats in the gym for hours, afraid of what will happen if she stops. The exercise and one tumbler of Scotch get her to sleep. But they don’t keep her there.

She wakes up at three and prowls around the Pryce binders,
refusing to let Gail into her thoughts. She goes in early and a neglected desk keeps her occupied. Finishing the day out she leaves around three. On the freeway, she dials Gail’s number. When the machine picks up, Frank disconnects. She drives to the apartment and lets herself in. The box is in the hall, but Frank looks around anyway.

Newspapers and medical journals are strewn on every available surface alongside folders and loose papers. Coffee cups and half-finished water bottles perch where Gail left them. Neatness was never her specialty. A wan smile crosses Frank’s face, like sun trying to come out in the face of a hurricane. As quickly as she thinks of it, Frank dismisses the idea of leaving a note. What would she say?

Gail’s cats rub against her legs, pleased to have company in the middle of the day.

“Fucked up, didn’t I?” she says, squatting to stroke them. She resists a wild urge to go into the bedroom and lay her head on Gail’s pillow. “Take good care of your mommy,” she tells the cats.

Frank takes the box and leaves the key.

It’s a big horn night. Frank loads Houston Person and Terence Blanchard into the player tray. She adds Phil Woods and early Joshua Redman. Blanchard starts off on a track with Diana Krall, who begs Frank to get lost with her. Frank is happy to comply. She raises the glass that has become an extension of her hand.

Arranging her length along the den sofa, she borrows a line from the chief.

“We’ve made some mistakes, but this is the opportunity for rebuilding ourselves in the desired image.”

Frank reviews the two things she knows for sure about police work. The first rule is that everybody lies, which in turn leads to the second rule. A good cop doesn’t let shit get to her. These are the golden rules that all the academies in the world can’t teach. These lessons have to be learned through on-the-job training.

Frank’s been a good cop because she can maintain emotional dis
tances. With one parent dead and the other insane, detachment was a skill Frank developed as a child. Police work honed her innate abilities, demanding that she be emotionally objective, hypervigilant, and in control at all times. Being a cop was the perfect occupation for Frank. Shit dripped off her like rain off a fresh wax job.

At least it used to. Frank swirls the rusty liquid at the bottom of her glass, descrying the crystal to track when she started slipping. Probably with the Delamore case. Rule number two kind of took a backseat when she began discovering one dead girl after another. She lost it a little on that case, and then let her guard down even more with Kennedy.

Frank wags her head. Seeing the company shrink seemed to help, but Frank should have known better. Indulging a weak moment, she’d created hairline fractures in her armature. By the time Placa Estrella was killed Frank’s armor had considerable chinks in it. She and Noah, and a lot of Figueroa cops, had known Placa since she was an infant. She was a kid with a lot of promise and her murder had been hard to detach from. Frank lost any remnant of objectivity when it turned out one of her own detectives had killed the girl.

That, Frank concludes, was the pivotal moment. Instead of shoring up her reserves and sealing the cracks in her armor, she had only widened them by turning to Gail. They were starting to date around that time and Frank couldn’t resist the doc. Gail was warm and funny, quick to laugh and quick to anger. Blowing into Frank’s stale environment, the doc was as fresh and honest as an ocean breeze. She completely stripped Frank’s defenses.

Sinking her head back into the couch, Frank pronounces, “That’s where I lost it. Bought into those pretty green eyes and Betty Grable legs. What a stunner. Bitch had me tore up from the floor up.”

Even though she’s killing another fifth, Frank nods soberly.

“Hella mistake.”

Time has shown Frank over and over that she isn’t built for love. Love is for other people. Normal people. Frank is hard-wired for two purposes and two only. One is to work. To solve homicides. This is what she does. It’s what she’s good at.

The second is to drink. This is also what she does, and what she’s good at. Raising her glass into the air, she adds, “And getting better every minute.”

She knows she’s drinking too much again, but this time she has planned it. Yes, she’ll pay in the morning, but Fubar’s on call and that’s too good an opportunity to waste on sobriety. She wants to drink quickly, to get to the click, but paces herself in order to minimize the inevitable hangover.

“Should eat,” she says, and gets up to peer into her desolate refrigerator. She makes peanut butter and jelly on stale bread, wondering how Johnnie’s doing. He should be back soon and she realizes she’s been glad he was gone. Having him around is like looking in a mirror.