Marrying Mike...Again (6 page)

His mother was still injured about the reception menu, he remembered that vaguely. She’d wanted to bring her special potato salad and Mrs. Aikens hadn’t taken that well. The event was being catered. Caterers didn’t need help. What were they thinking? Then his mom had offered Sandy her wedding headpiece, passed down for three generations, and that had also been refused. Instead Sandra had had some designer dress and veil custom-made for her on Newbury Street.

Mike hadn’t paid much attention to those things, either, though maybe he should have. At the time, none of it had mattered to him. Not Rusty’s dire predictions, nor his mother’s stiff stance, or his future in-laws’ condescending stares. So their parents didn’t get along, so they came from different worlds. Sandy drove herself hard. He lived life easy. She believed in fine dining, he loved a good barbecue. She played bridge with her family, he played coed tackle football with his.

Diversity was the spice of life. Love would get you through. If there was a platitude, he must have believed it back then. Because mostly, he’d believed so badly that he’d wanted Sandy.

And then, there she was. Standing at the head of the aisle. Framed by white roses with golden light from the stained-glass window pouring in behind her. He’d stopped breathing. His chest had gone so tight it hurt.
Mon Dieu,
she was lovely.
Mon Dieu,
she was his
wife.

The rest of the world had ended for him then. If he hadn’t already fallen in love with her that first day, he fell twice as hard for her at that moment. He loved the strong, proud line of her shoulders. He loved the way she walked down the aisle, looking him right in the eye and never missing a step. He loved the way she clung to him after their first man-and-wife kiss and he loved the way a single tear had trickled down her cheek.
“I love you, Mike Rawlins. And I’m so happy to be your wife.”

Later, much later, finally alone in their honeymoon suite, they’d both been curiously shy. Sandy had a confession to make. She’d been reading magazines on the subject. Lots of brides and grooms end up too exhausted by the end of the big day to have a traditional “wedding night.” So, if he was tired…they didn’t have to…she meant, if he didn’t want to…

Hell, there was nothing Mike had ever wanted more.

But it was funny, he’d taken it slow. He’d made love to a dozen women in his life. He’d made love to this woman over a dozen times. Sweet Lord, for the first month they hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other. Still, this was their wedding night. She was his wife. It did something to him, made him feel the moment way down deep. He’d never spent so much time carefully slipping little pearl buttons free as he did that night. He’d never lingered for so long over each piece of clothing, peeling away satin and silk and froths of lace to reveal smooth, creamy skin and firm, ripe curves.

He hadn’t made love to Sandra that night; he’d devoured her. Slowly, carefully, exquisitely. Until he felt her soft, urgent sighs burn across his skin. Until her perfectly manicured nails dug into his back. Until the sweat was a fresh sheen across their bodies and she was wild beneath him.

And even then, some part of him didn’t want it to end. Some part of him would have dragged it out forever if only he’d known how. Maybe even back then, some part of him had known it could never last. She hadn’t even taken his name. How long before she decided she didn’t need the rest of him, either?

Still he had tried. Still he remembered those first days of marriage, when fierce, haughty Sandra Aikens had loved him and said she was proud to be his wife.

“What are you thinking about?” Koontz asked from the driver’s seat.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” Koontz observed, “doesn’t wear hundred-dollar perfume.”

They struck out at the bus station. The city bus passed the newspaper office every half hour, making it hard to narrow down the time the letter was delivered, let alone by whom.

The station manager fetched the bus driver of the route for them, but when Koontz asked him if he’d carried a thirteen-year-old black kid lately, the man burst out laughing. He ran the east-west metro. About all he had on his buses were teenage black kids.

Next they tried the newspaper office. Surely they had people in all night, finishing stories, running presses. Newspapers never sleep, right?

Well, maybe in big cities. Alexandria’s
Citizen’s Post,
on the other hand, went to bed at eight each night. The presses ran all night long but, thanks to automation, took only six people to run. When the delivery crews arrived at five in the morning, they pulled up to the back, so no one noticed a letter in the front mail drop until offices opened at eight o’clock.

“Come on, don’t you guys at least have a janitor?” Koontz wanted to know.

“You mean Hank?”

“Sure, Hank. Let’s all go talk to Hank.”

They all went and talked to Hank. He was seventy-five years old and deaf as a doornail. Mike wasn’t sure, but he believed they finally established that Hank hadn’t seen anything. The security guard was worse. Mike and Rusty knew him from his former days as a cop. He’d been a drunkard then and apparently hadn’t done a thing to clean up his act. The editor-in-chief was sorry, but what more could he say? If they did learn anything, they’d pass it along, right? After all,
Citizen’s Post
had cooperated with them….

Koontz said, “Sure,” without blinking an eye, but Mike knew his partner was lying. Koontz held reporters in even greater contempt than defense attorneys.

Three-thirty in the afternoon, they descended the steps of the newspaper building.

“These kids are like ghosts,” Koontz muttered. “Who really pays attention to a lone thirteen-year-old anyway? Maybe we are safer when they’re traveling in packs.”

“Vee’s gotta be a new alias.”

“I don’t like it.” Koontz shook his head. He had a good instinct about these things, so if he was troubled, Mike was troubled.

He glanced at his watch again. “Three-thirty,” he commented.

“Afternoon patrol is probably in the east side….”

“And now school’s out.”

“Wonderful. Freakin’ wonderful.”

They headed for their car.

“What now?” Koontz asked a few minutes later. Mike gave it some thought. He’d told Sandra they’d have an ID by the end of the day. There had to be something more they could do.

“We got a copy of the letter. Let’s take it to the junior high and see if a teacher recognizes the writing style. Maybe some word or phrase will ring some bells.”

“Oh, so now
we
head into the east side?”

“Great plan, isn’t it? Body armor’s in the back. I’ll fasten yours, you fasten mine.”

Koontz grudgingly got out of the car and popped the trunk. “We are not being paid enough for this,” he said as he fetched two Kevlar vests.

Mike was more philosophical. “Yeah, but think of how much the city will spend on our funerals.”

The ride from Alexandria’s city center to the east side took less than fifteen minutes, and was as dramatic as crossing from one country into the next. From wide, tree-lined streets, to narrow, cracking asphalt. From quaint brick storefronts and grand stone facades to boarded-up row houses and crumbling old mills. The streets were darker here and it wasn’t just in Mike’s head—as fast as the city installed new street lamps, the dealers sent their runners to shoot them out. Light was bad for business.

Deeper in, old textile mills, once the lifeblood of the town, sagged on their foundations, condemned, but still inhabited by vagrants sporting crack pipes. A group of teens loitered on one corner, smoking cigarettes and giving Mike and Koontz’s unmarked car a baleful stare. More kids on the next block and now some working girls. The east side was never empty.

Koontz turned the corner and they were on Main Street, where a few family businesses did their best to survive. There was the local convenience store, known for its hot coffee and good conversation. Smithy Jones ran it with his wife, Bess, and was on good terms with the police. Smithy had been a decorated marine in Vietnam, and the last dope-head stupid enough to stick him up had gone straight from the store to the morgue. Nothing happened on Main Street during Smithy’s watch. In addition to Smithy, the Santiagos maintained a liquor store guarded by reinforced steel bars, while the Chen family ran a small café-grocery. Mrs. Chen had been held up twice, but still persevered.

Koontz turned off Main street and graffiti promptly exploded over the landscape. The artwork, Mike knew, was not random, but represented markers dividing the area into four distinct gang turfs—the Hispanic Latin Kings; the Black Guerrilla Family; another black gang, the Crips; and the Brotherhood, white trash or white supremacists, depending on who you asked. The gangs ruled the streets and the rule of the gangs was simple and carved in stone.

Sometime between the age of five and eight, you got jumped into a gang. You didn’t choose it, it chose you. That gang became your family. They were your protection, your buddies, and your employers. They came first in your life and if that meant stealing your mama’s car, you stole your mama’s car. If that meant killing your boyhood friend because he got jumped in by a rival gang or a rival sect of the same gang, then that was just business.

Here, survival mattered, and the difference between life and death could be as simple as being caught on the wrong city block at the wrong time of day. Five years ago, Mike and Koontz had gotten called in to investigate the death of a twelve-year-old black male. He’d been found with his hands tied behind his back, mauled to death by some sort of animal later identified as a pit bull. Further investigation revealed the kid belonged to the Black Guerrilla Family, a relatively new gang to Massachusetts. Unfortunately for him, the BGF didn’t own much turf yet, so the boy had to cross four blocks of rival territory to make it to school each day. Apparently, the kid got to be a really good sprinter. One day, however, he didn’t run fast enough.

The Crips caught him. They were angry at the BGF. Someone had stolen someone’s car and stripped it down for parts, the ultimate insult. So this boy got to pay. They tied him up. They stuck him in a backyard. They brought out a full-grown pit bull one of the Crips’s Original Ghetto Blood used as a breeding stud. They worked the hard-muscled dog into a frenzy, then turned it loose. They had left the twelve-year-old’s legs untied, and he did run very fast, so things took a while.

Mike and Koontz learned this story from an informant named 3-Trey, picked up by Vice for dealing crack cocaine and now wanting to skip a trip to juvie. Three-Trey was fourteen. He had witnessed the murder firsthand. More than the details, Mike remembered the way the boy told the story, his eyes flat and his voice emotionless. Just another day in the hood.

Koontz had shrugged it off. Three-Trey named names, they picked the boys up, identified the crime scene and put together the case. Open and shut as far as Koontz was concerned. The only thing that kept Rusty awake at nights was an unclosed case, which he always took as a personal insult.

For Mike, however, it had been one of those days when he’d gone home unable to talk about his job. He’d needed to hold Sandy close, inhaling the scent of her perfume and concentrating on the feel of her skin. He’d wanted to bury his face in the crook of her neck until the picture of the mauled kid finally faded from his mind. Sometimes he couldn’t get the job to roll off his back. Sometimes, in spite of his family’s preaching, life leeched into his head, left him feeling weary. Those times he
needed
his wife to be soft and feminine and removed from the job. He needed her to be a reminder of the good things in life.

Most likely though, they had wound up in a fight. Because, as Mike had learned the hard way, love did not conquer all. It demanded your all. And somehow, he and Sandra had not been equal to the task.

Koontz pulled up to the junior high and they got out of their sedan. Dusk was starting to settle over the small, shrunken building and Koontz was looking over his shoulder. Mike felt it, too. The parking lot was exposed. The shadows had eyes. A lot of them.

“Kid’s just a punk,” Koontz muttered. “Can’t believe we’re letting a thirteen-year-old spook us.”

But he unsnapped his shoulder holster as they both moved inside quickly.

“I honestly don’t know if I can help you,” Mrs. Kennedy was saying five minutes later as she started erasing the huge blackboard. “I have a hundred and twenty students. It’s hard to get to know each of them personally.”

“But you gotta give them homework, right?” Koontz countered reasonably. “Essays, reports, whatever the hell they’re doing in English these days. Maybe you don’t know each kid, but you gotta have a sense of their writing.”

Mrs. Kennedy stopped erasing long enough to give Koontz a wry expression. She was a pretty black woman, younger than Mike would have expected, and speaking in a refined accent that didn’t come from living in Massachusetts. He was guessing she came from affluence and now saw teaching underprivileged children as her mission. He also noticed she carried pepper spray in her desk drawer. A woman of experience.

“You’re assuming they turn in their homework assignments, Detective. Frankly, most of my seventh graders don’t. What makes you think he’s in seventh grade, anyway?”

“In the letter. Kid says he’s thirteen.”

“Around here, that means he could be in any grade from third on up. The school district likes to run a tight ship. Miss so many days and you automatically get to repeat the grade. We were hoping it would encourage attendance. Unfortunately, it’s mostly made our kids permanent students.”

“But if this Vee kid has been making an effort…”

“Sure, he’d be in seventh grade. I haven’t heard of anyone named Vee, though. Do you have a real name?”

“No ma’am, that’s what we came to you for.”

“I saw the letter, but show it to me again.” She took the photocopy from Mike and glanced at it a second time, lines deepening in her brow. “So he’s a thirteen-year-old who lost an older brother. Sorry, that doesn’t narrow it down much.”