Strange Robby (4 page)

Laura rubbed at his tired shoulders. "You're so tense," and added in soothing tones, "Relax, Baby. Relax."

Easier said than done. Tommy closed his eyes, took a deep breath, found his center and let his breath out slowly. He did it again, and was finally able to relax a little.

"I don't know what's with her lately. She's like a friggin' hair trigger—a twitch and she goes off. It scares me. She shot that guy three times in the chest."

"It sounds like she did what she had to," Laura said, trying to work the kinks out of his shoulders.

It felt good. It felt better because he knew that she cared about him and that she cared about how he felt. It didn't hurt that he thought his wife was the most beautiful woman in the world. He loved her long blond hair and fine regal features. Her figure was perfect. Spider had once suggested that Laura's breasts were too large for her five foot four inch frame. Tommy had explained that a woman's breasts could never be too big. His first wife's breasts had been really small; she'd hated Spider, and she had been a cold, uncaring bitch. Laura was her exact opposite and in a lot of ways his, too.

"You don't understand, Laura. Spider Webb is a decorated war veteran. Decorated for sharp shooting among other things. I've seen her knock a penny off a fence post at a hundred feet without nicking the post. She could have shot him in his arm with enough accuracy to snap his arm in two. She could have placed a shot to the ball socket of the shoulder. She could have shot him once and incapacitated him. But she wanted to make sure the man was dead. Three times in the chest in a triangular pattern—that wasn't an accident; it's her training.

"True, he was scum, and he deserved to die. If we had taken him in, they probably would have found some way to cut him loose. At best, they would have given him a life sentence. He would have served a few years in jail and walked for good behavior. The justice system sucks. I don't like what it's doing to us. I especially don't like what it's doing to Spider. I looked at her tonight, and I could see her teeth shining. She was smiling. When I realized that she was standing there grinning over blowing a softball sized hole in a man where his heart should have been, I was actually glad that something could make her happy."

Laura rubbed at his shoulders harder, obviously trying to think of something helpful to say. Laura would not be giving him a long emotion-filled speech all geared at getting him to quit. She herself had been a cop until her routine physical showed that she was diabetic. They had put her on a desk job, and she had stayed there just long enough to work her way through college. Now she worked as a legal secretary in the prosecuting attorney's office. She didn't like it any better than he did when a crook walked. Laura understood Tommy in a way that no one else ever had.

"It's enough to wear anyone down, Baby. We work our asses off to get scum off the street, and some greedy lawyer sets them free again." She sighed. "Spider's breaking faster than the rest of us, because, face it, what the hell else does she have?"

"What do you mean?"

"What does Spider do? Does she have somebody in her life? Something besides work? Does she have family or friends, besides you?"

It was a good question. He'd known Spider Web from academy days. He'd spent more time with her than any other person he'd ever known. Not just from work, but hours spent fishing and bar hopping and sitting around in her apartment or his house staring at the tube. But while he often spilled his guts to her, she rarely did the same with him. Tommy thought for a moment. They joked about it all the time, but there had to be something in Spider's life.

"Her mother died when she was like—three. Her father was an alcoholic, so she was raised mostly by an older brother. She went into the service right out of high school. While she was in the service her brother died. She's never said how, but she must have blamed her old man because she hasn't seen him since her brother's funeral. As far as I know, there's no other family that she's close to. As for friends," Tommy shrugged and could feel that his shoulders were loosening up, "the only people she ever talks about are the guys we work with. So I don't know. If she's got friends outside of work she doesn't talk about them. She writes to a couple of her old army buddies, but that's about it."

"Does she have a girl friend?"

"I don't know. Like I've told you before, I'm not even a hundred percent sure she's gay. I
think
she is, but she's never really said one way or the other . . . "

"And of course you'd never think to ask. You're such a guy. Take my word for it; she's gay." Laura quit rubbing his back then and sat down across from him. "As you know, our new assistant DA, my new boss, is a lesbian. Carrie's worked in the DA's office for the last two years, and I always thought she was really cool, but now that I'm working with her . . . She's just a really nice person. She's in her late twenties, sharp looking, very intelligent, great sense of humor, and . . . Well, she would really like to meet Spider away from work . . . "

"No! Absolutely not!" Tommy screamed, laughing. He swung his hands in front of his face, stood up, and headed for the bathroom. "We are not fixing my partner up with one of your friends from work. It's just too creepy."

Laura followed him into the bathroom. "Why not? Spider needs . . . well, I don't know, something. And Carrie . . . well, she's like totally obsessed with Spider. She keeps wanting me to introduce them."

"No," Tommy said emphatically.

"Ah, come on, Tommy. What could it hurt? Carrie's my friend. Spider's your partner. It might be fun."

"Yeah, like fucking heart burn," Tommy said. "We don't even know for certain that Spider is gay. How stupid are we going to look if it turns out that she's straight, and we fix her up with a woman?" He looked from her to the toilet and back. "Now, do you mind?"

"Not at all." Laura crossed her arms across her chest, smiled and just stared at him.

Tommy laughed, shook his head, pushed her out of the room and shut the door.

Spider looked down at him. "I know it's late, Henry, but I had to talk to somebody. I couldn't just go home."

She fixed his pillows, sat beside him and took his hand. "I got wired tonight. I do that a lot lately. It's like my brain is on fire." She paused a moment, then continued in a whisper. "I killed the perp on purpose. I'll get off because it was a righteous shoot, but I didn't have to kill him. I did it because I wanted to, and I enjoyed it. It gave me a rush . . . Yeah, I know it's sick. But whoever said you could do the right thing and keep your hands clean? I am tired . . . and lonely."

She brushed the tears from her eyes and took a deep breath. "Look at me, would you? It must be PMS . . . In those trenches in Baghdad . . . the guys I was killing . . . they were just like me. They thought they were right . . . on the right side, you know? That was their only crime, and I killed them for it. But here on the streets . . . the scum out there. Their crimes aren't just that they're on the wrong side; their crimes are against mankind. But them I'm expected to let go . . . to just let them slip between the cracks. Sometimes I just can't.

"It's crazy, Henry. I'm damn near forty, and I haven't done a damn thing with my life. No partner, no kids. Hell, I don't even have dishes, and I can't remember the last time I used my fucking cook stove. I live on cold cereal, Ramen soup, and salad. What the hell for? I can't remember the last time I felt any joy, the last time I even really felt alive . . . Henry, you're lying here unable to move, to talk, and I'm the one who doesn't know how to live. Something's got to change, but I'm damned if I know what—or how to find out."

She'd driven around for an hour and finally wound up at a bar looking to pick someone up. But it was early in the morning, the pickings were slim, and when it came time to put up or shut up, she went home alone. She should have been exhausted, but she wasn't. She lay in her recliner and stared at the ceiling. The TV was on, but she wasn't watching it.

Her apartment was small. A tiny bathroom, a kitchenette, and the combined living/bedroom—that was it. She had it fixed up nice and kept it clean. Which was more than you could say for the hallways and the other apartments. The landlord wouldn't fix anything. But for the rent she was paying she didn't mind fixing things when they broke, or replacing the steam heater with electric baseboard heaters when the steam became erratic, or buying new appliances when the old ones died.

Usually just being at home, a place that was hers alone, made her more relaxed. Not tonight—or morning, rather. It just felt empty, as empty as her life. She looked at the clock hanging on the wall. It was five o'clock in the morning. She wished she was tired. She looked at the wall of shelves full of books, but couldn't make herself get up to go get one. She stared back at the TV. Mindless drivel. Eventually it succeeded in numbing her brain, and she went to sleep in the recliner.

She dreamt about
her
again, the woman without a face. About noon she woke up with a crick in her neck, feeling more frustrated and empty than she had the night before. She wished she had to go to work, but she didn't.
Two whole days off, two days with nothing to do.
If she had a life, that would have been great. Since she didn't, it was a living hell. At three o'clock she got a call from IAD asking her to come in so that they could run over the incident report one more time, and she was more than happy to go. Even though the whole thing was in the computer, and she knew damn good and well that all they wanted to do was get her to say that she killed the guy on purpose. Which she wasn't crazy enough to do—yet.

 
"Two are better than one; because they have a good
reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift
up his fellow. But woe to him that is alone; for he has not
another to help him up."
Ecclesiastes 4:9&10

 

Robby went in the bar to see if the manager had a pick-up for him, to return the barstool he had repaired, and to pick up the money owed him.

The manager looked the stool over, nodded in appreciation and paid Robby. Then he told him where the trash was, and Robby turned to leave.

Just then the man walked into the bar, a big black hole sucking in the energy from all those around him. A great big evil. Robby's flesh crawled, and then he was filled with righteous anger. He saw the man beating women, making them do things they didn't want to do with him and with other men. He saw him hooking them on smack so that he could keep them in line. Robby all but ran out of the bar. He picked up the load and then he waited in the shadows. The guy had to come out sooner or later, and when he did Robby would be waiting.

The "crime" scene was like all the others. This time it was Houston Jenkins, a big time pimp with a history of assault charges. None of his "girls" seemed to be too terribly upset. Their only concern seemed to be that they weren't sure who was going to get them their horse now. The man was sitting in the big middle of his own bed with his eyes cooked and bulging out and slime running out his ears.

Spider covered the corpse back up then looked at Tommy and smiled. "It's shake and bake, and I he'ped."

Tommy sighed and shook his head. Having a weekend off had done nothing for Spider's attitude. Neither had a one-hour meeting with IAD, which while it hadn't caused her any real trouble, was a drag under the best of circumstances.

Tommy pulled her to one side. "Could you maybe try to at least act repulsed?" Tommy hissed.

Spider shrugged. "There's a reason I ain't an actress. This bastard was a hell of a lot more repulsive alive than he is with his cooked eyeballs bulging."

"What's up with you?" Tommy asked, momentarily losing his cool.

Spider shrugged. How could she explain to him what she really didn't understand herself? "I'm not getting much sleep. For some reason I keep looking at my life. Since it mostly sucks, always has sucked, and is always going to suck, I'm kindah in a blue funk."

She was talking in her best idiot voice and making faces, and that could mean only one thing—that she wasn't comfortable with the subject matter and was making a joke about something that really wasn't a joke at all.

Tommy's brow creased in thought. "You really think your life sucks?"

"Yep. Shit just keeps raining on my head," Spider said with a smile. She walked away and started checking out the crime scene. Houston had been a big man, and unlike all the other victims he had apparently had a chance to thrash around a bit. Before he died he fell back onto the bed, and the impact had broken two legs off of it. She pointed it out to the photographer who took pictures of the broken things in the room and the bed.

Tommy joined her.

"The weapon must take longer when there is more mass," Tommy said. Spider shrugged noncommittally.

"OK, Spider . . . What do you think it is?"

She smiled at him. "If I told you my theory, you'd be calling the men in the white coats to come and take me away to the Ha Ha Hilton."