The Good Boy (20 page)

After, Joel takes Butchie back to the Jacuzzi, moves the lattice aside and urges the dog underneath. Butch resists; he doesn’t want to be pushed into a dark hole.

“Well, it’s not the Ritz,” Joel says, because it’s something his mom says. Then he goes in first and Butch follows.

When they’re both inside it’s pretty tight, but they’re hidden, and the banana-shaped space offers an all-around view of the yard. Overhead, faint moonlight shines in through the deck’s wood slats, a night-light.

Joel settles in front of Butchie, his pack for a pillow. He tries to get Butchie to stretch out on the poolside but the dog is antsy for a while, getting up and lying down and sitting up again. Joel is too exhausted to stop him until he realizes the soft clickity-clicking of his tags.

“Come here, Mr. O’Hare,” Joel says, taking him by the collar. He turns the police tag around in his fingers. For Butchie’s protection, it’s plastic and doesn’t advertise his name, but the giant CPD symbol along with his dad’s name and ID sure make his job obvious. Joel detaches the tags and tucks them into his pack and says, “From now on, you’re just a plain old dog, okay? Until we get to the courthouse?”

He scratches the top of Butchie’s head and lies back. The dog yawns and eventually settles in, his snout on Joel’s shoulder.

“Good boy,” Joel says, and pets him in long, smooth strokes. He’s not sure who falls asleep first.

13

Pete parks in the northeast section of Area Three’s lot, tucking the squad behind an unmarked that looks like it belongs on blocks. He hopes the spot is far enough out to keep any guys he might know from asking after Butch.

Especially if the reason he’s here
is
Butch.

He hangs his badge on a lanyard and walks a good fifty yards to the station, the peal of cars climbing the bridge behind him on Western Avenue giving way to the ongoing bumble of the entrance’s security lights.

Inside, the waiting room is nowhere people want to wait. The top-down fluorescents, the asylum-green walls, the armless chairs: none of it is designed for comfort. There’s one Hispanic guy who’s got the whole row of chairs to himself and still he sits upright, neck bent unnaturally, given in to a doze.

“Morning,” the female officer at the front desk says to Pete, a statement more than a greeting.

He supposes it’s as close to morning as it is night, but the shift clock is always disorienting—particularly when he breaks for lunch at three
A.M.
“Morning,” he says anyway, approaching the desk.

Her nameplate reads
CREASY
—unfortunately also a description. It’s terrible, what first watch does to a person. Shrinks the bones. Beads the eyes. Cloaks the mood.

“Where you headed?” she asks and yawns, a mouth full of fillings.

“McHugh’s shooting in Twenty,” Pete says. “They transported here.”

Creasy checks her online files.
“Mi-cue mi-cue mi-cue,”
she mutters, scratching at discolored skin on her face. She doesn’t exactly make Pete want to wait around this place, either.

“They’re upstairs,” she says, indicating the door to Pete’s right. She leans over, remotely buzzes its lock.

“Thanks,” he says, dropping his badge into his shirt pocket.

“Enjoy the show.” Her smile is the kind you only master after forgetting why you smile at all.

Upstairs, the main floor is chaos, a dozen or so guys doing theatrics, the stage set for Jake Brogan. Behind them, a conference room with pulled blinds is an ominous backdrop. Pete recognizes a couple of uniforms from the scene but he doesn’t see McHugh. Just as well; he isn’t here for the official story.

An empty office is the usual place to store a witness, so Pete walks the perimeter checking for lit-up transom windows and open doors. He looks in on a room where a pair of young dicks have taken over its couch, a little downtime during overtime. One cop’s throwing magnetic push pins at an area map stuck to a whiteboard, which wouldn’t be weird if he were wearing pants in addition to his boxers and boots. The other is twiddling his thumbs. Literally. Pete saw them at the scene, but he can’t place either of them anywhere else, so he figures the chances of them jamming him up on this are slim as jim.

“Hey,” Pete says, “either of you care to wager on the Brogan game?”

“You kidding?” the pantless one says. “It’s over.”

“The kid copped,” the other says. His badge says
FINCH
.

Pete eases into the room, steers clear of the whiteboard. “I heard. I also heard there was a witness.”

“Brogan doesn’t need her,” says Finch. “Fowler’s attorney already agreed to a deal.”

“Why so easy?”

“You heard of Curtis Fowler?”

“No. Is he clout?”

“I suppose, if you’re his kid and he’s got your fingers in a vise.” Finch links his thumbs, brings his arms around his head and leans back, elbows out.

The pantless cop throws a red pin that clings to the map smack in the middle of Pete’s neighborhood. “What Finchie means is, Fowler’s old man’s got a reputation—”

“And a record—”

“For handling family issues with sensibility and discretion.”

“His wife was missing for a week before they found her in the trunk of his car.”

“At the tow yard.”

“She cracked up his car,” Finch says, “he cracked up her face.”

“Imagine what the old man’ll do when he finds out his kid was at his house selling dope and shooting at people while he was pulling a double shift at the Amoco.” He picks up a pin off the floor.

“You got Zack on a drug charge, too?”

“Nah. Brogan doesn’t need that, either.”

Still, the dope explains Butch’s interest: if he alerted, and Joel didn’t understand, he might have gone wild enough to jump the fence, try to make the bust on his own.

“Where is Zack now?” Pete asks Finch.

“Sitting tight in one of the interview rooms while the grown-ups talk it over. Counsel figures young Zachary is better off back in the system. Let the joint do discipline instead of dad.”

The other cop stands up, adjusts the waistband of his boxers. “No doubt this means Brogan’s got a steak dinner and at least one lap dance coming to him.”

Pete looks down at the cop’s unlaced boots and asks, “Your pants part of the deal, too?”

“Funny.”

Finch says, “The witness puked on him.”

“Is she still here?”

“McHugh said to let her sleep it off in his office.”

“I’m going to go talk to her,” Pete says. “Somebody’s got to be wondering where she is.”

*   *   *

He stops by the vending machine for a sports drink, then taps on McHugh’s cracked-open door. The lights are out.

“Miss Lee?”

No answer, so he taps again, a little more knuckle this time. “Miss Lee?”

“I’m right here,” she says from behind him, one knee-high leather boot propped against the men’s bathroom door across the hall. Her hair is black and runs straight out from under a huge cowboy hat. The fucking party hat.

“Will you stand out here so nobody comes in?” she asks. “There’s no toilet paper in the ladies’ room.”

“Sure.”

She slips inside and when she’s done she throws open the door and asks, “Are you the one I’m supposed to be waiting for?”

“That depends. Are you thirsty?”

“I’m fucking parched.” She comes straight for him, hand out, not a bashful bone.

Pete hands her the bottle and backs toward McHugh’s door. “Mind if we sit?”

“Might as well.” She pushes past him into the office, tossing the cowboy hat onto the desk. She sits in the sole wooden chair and kicks one long, skinny leg over the other. Her thighs are bone white and her denim skirt is too short but there’s not an ounce of
shouldn
’t on her. Her face is angular, drawn up at the eyes. Pete can’t believe she’s McKenna’s age. She seems so certain. So ready.

“I’m Officer Pete,” he says, easing his way into this room too. He doesn’t want to come on too strong or be too specific.

“That’s nice, Pete,” she says. She twists the cap off the drink, takes a long sip.

“Are you feeling better?” he asks, real nice as he walks around the desk. He’ll be the schlub, if that’s what it’ll take for her to talk.

“I’m fine. I get drunk fast but I also get sober fast. I don’t know what you all are waiting for.”

“We want to be sure you remember clearly.”

“Yeah, well I’m going to tell you the same thing I told them before I got sick. You won’t believe me.”

“You haven’t told
me
anything yet. How do you know I won’t believe you?”

“Because you’re all the same.”

Pete isn’t going to run that downhill route so he gets right to the point: “Tell me about the dog.”

She takes a drink, says, “Fucking thing came out of nowhere. Zee and his boys were outside talking and all of a sudden the dog was there and everybody ran off. A kid got bit.”

“Who got bit?”

“I don’t know him. Some kid from the west side. He showed up with a bunch of guys. One Zack knows from his old school.”

“There was no dog-bite victim at the scene,” Pete says, flustering.

“Come on,” she says, “I wasn’t the only one waiting for the Thirty-six bus when my conscience caught up with me.”

Pete walks back around the desk, gets into her periphery so he doesn’t have to look at her directly. “Can you describe the bite victim?”

“Don’t you want me to describe the fucking dog?”

“The dog’s not going to have much of an explanation. The victim might.”

She sips again, says, “All I know is that he pimp-limped in and got carried out. Dude doing the carrying was tall. Black. He wore a hood with a solid on it.”

“A solid what?”

“The word
solid.
Actually the
s
was a dollar sign.”

“Solid.” Pete steps back toward the door so Linda Lee can’t see him completely knocked off-balance.

Solidarity,
in Hustler vernacular. Hustler, as in Four Corner.

He’s seen the catchword worn on clothes, spray-painted in gang territory—hell, it’s tattooed on Ja’Kobe White’s forearm. He hasn’t seen it in this neighborhood. He’d have noticed.

He asks, “Where did Zack used to go to school?”

“Beats me.”

“Do you know if this person in the
solid
sweatshirt is part of a street gang?”
Person
because if he is a Hustler, he is not a victim or a kid. He is a threat.

Linda Lee recrosses her legs. “What, just because he’s black you think he’s in a gang? I guess you think I paint fucking fingernails after school.”

“Did you see this person leave?”

“His boys carried him out. I didn’t see after that. And really, I don’t see what any of this has to do with Zack.”

“Every detail helps, whether you see or not.”

“Why doesn’t it help when I tell you what happened? I said it already but I’ll say it again: if Zack shot Aaron—which I don’t think he did—it was because he was trying to shoot the dog, and that’s because the dog was attacking his friend. It was an accident.”

“What makes you think Zack didn’t do it?”

“He doesn’t carry a gun. Aaron will tell you the same thing.”

“If Aaron makes it.”

“You
are
an asshole.”

Pete walks around the desk again and kicks the high-backed leather chair out of the way. He leans in on his hands, nice-guy strategy revised. “Maybe you’re right, and I am like the rest of them. Maybe I think you’re the type of girl who loves attention, and you’ll say anything to get it. Or—here’s a good one—maybe you’ve got a thing for Zack Fowler, and you think you’re helping him.”

She sits up and looks at him directly—her eyes blown out like McKenna’s. She asks, “Why’d you ask me anything if you think I’m bullshitting?”

“I don’t think you’re bullshitting.”

He feels awful, being this way just to try to get her to cooperate.

“Actually,” he says, “I believe you. But I don’t matter. Zack already pled to the charges. He’s done. That means the only thing you can do for him now is quit remembering. Apparently, he doesn’t want your help.”

“You’re lying,” she says, certain as ever.

Pete doesn’t know what to say so he doesn’t say anything, just gets up, makes for the door.

“Where are you going?” she asks.

“To find some other asshole to take you home.”

Out on the main floor, most of the cops have vacated, probably spending the rest of the shift on the street. The clock above the head desk reads ten after four, the start of the wooden hour, the only time silence over the radios feels at all natural. If silence ever feels natural.

In the conference room, the lights are still on, blinds still drawn. McHugh and company must be hammering out one hell of a bargain.

Pete cuts through the maze of desks back to the office where Finch and his partner were hanging out; he figures he can put the onus back on them to make sure Linda Lee gets a ride. He wishes she’d been able to tell him more.

The media-room door is open just off the perimeter, and a flickering monitor catches Pete’s eye. The picture is both blurred and grainy, the closed-system camera’s resolution akin to videotape, but he can see well enough: it’s interview room 6. There, a teenage boy sits alone at a table, a grease-bottomed brown bag, a full paper plate of tacos, and a large, sweating Coke the untouched meal in front of him.

Zack Fowler.

He hasn’t had a haircut in a while, the top layer hanging bleached and dry over darker roots. His face is pocked with untreated acne. His tan work shirt is rumpled and stained down the front. He looks like he’d fit in at a warehouse sooner than a classroom.

He places his hands on the table and looks up at the camera—at Pete—open-eyed, as though he is the observer. He looks exhausted, but nowhere near sleep, and he seems to blink in slow motion, distinct, like an insect.

After a while Zack turns back to the table and picks over the tacos like he’s thinking about eating, but instead he slides the food off the plate and into the bag and shoves the bag off the table. He leaves the empty plate next to the Coke, and seems aware of the camera as he does this, but he does not look up.