Shattered Glass (6 page)

“Something seriously wrong with you,” he whispered as my fingers slid from his chin to the dip in his throat.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m coming to that conclusion, too.” As much as he pretended to feel nothing, when my hand pressed against his smooth chest, his heart hammered against it. I was absolutely enraptured by the way he trembled, the goose bumps popping up beneath my delicate exploration of his stomach.

His skin was warm, and softer than I’d imagined, though the muscles were tight just beneath the surface. Each place my fingers trailed a muscle twitched. I licked my lips and brushed them against his shoulder. He tasted of sweat, and a grain of sugar caught on my tongue. “Beautiful.” His body tensed, only to tremble again like a plucked bow string. When I pulled my head back, his eyes were focused on my hand grazing his hip; his lips parted, his skin flushed, and his breath grew sharper with each tiny exhale.

This was too intimate. Maybe more intimate than sex. I drew my hand back and pushed it through my hair.

What are you doing? This is insane. Truly insane.

I had no idea who he was. I wasn’t even sure if he had been lying about his age or name. My job, my life, my everything could be torn away thanks to this one little indiscretion. The whole situation just seemed more and more fucked up Yet, I couldn't help being a little satisfied. I had at least part of my answer. I liked touching him. Still, this was too fucked up to continue it.

“You want me to take you home or to the diner?” His head whipped up. “I’m not giving the money back,” he said.

For some reason, that made me laugh. “Keep it.” Grabbing my keys off the dresser, I slipped into sandals and threw a shirt over my head. Peter still hadn’t moved by the time I was dressed.

He eyed the floor, hands tucked into his pockets. I was astonished to see him smiling. Not a sweet, or even humorous smile; it was just a sad little curl of his lips, and it made him appear so vulnerable. And, like every other emotion I’d seen—besides hostility, which wasn't even really an emotion so much as it was a state of being—this one disappeared quickly.

“Whatever.” He pushed past me, and I heard his soft footsteps down the stairs.

As I followed him, intent on driving him back, the front door slammed.

I checked to see if he was waiting by the car, but the area was empty, so I went back inside. Once undressed, I climbed into bed. Exhausted, frustrated and anxious, sleep took hours to find me. I didn’t even spare a passing thought about Angelica.

Theme Of The Day: Prostitutes

Tuesday I was so tired that I confused my orange juice with milk and used the OJ to make scrambled eggs. I didn’t even notice until I was chewing. Too groggy to care, I ate it all anyway. It tasted like sweaty feet. Three cups of coffee later, the taste was finally out of my mouth, and the caffeine woke me up enough that I could get dressed and drive to work without nodding off.

I arrived at work thirty minutes late and in an expensive, but rumpled, brown suit. The only positive about working while being this tired was that I couldn’t dwell on last night and my epic failure at paying for, but not screwing, a prostitute.

“You look like shit,” Luis noted as I took my seat at the desk across from him. His suit wasn’t much better than mine in the wrinkled department, and the whole thing probably cost him less than my tie. I had a feeling he'd bought his blue blazer sometime in the 80's, and the trousers a decade before that—back when maroon polyester had actually been in style.

“And you look like the love child of Barney Miller and Archie Bunker.” It was as much wit as I could summon in my state.

“What’s on for today?”

“Gaines has poofed.” Great. Our new informant was now our new problem.

I groaned and sized up the inviting surface of my desk. I

wanted to lay my cheek against the wood and sleep until everything requiring a functioning brain went away. I didn’t have patience for an idiot like Gaines.

Him ‘poofing’ meant he was going underground, probably because he was vying to take over Alvarado’s operations—a common reason why snitches snitched on their business partners. The only other reason why he might disappear was that he had been outed as a snitch. Either way, Luis and I would be spending the day questioning whores and pimps and the rest of society's dregs in order to find him before Alvarado made bail.

“Can we shoot him?” I asked. That earlier feeling of wanting to press my face against the desk returned. I went with it.

“Didn’t that whore—whatshername? We busted her last month.

Said Gaines was her baby’s daddy.” I mumbled into the desktop.

“Are you making out with that desk?” “Well, my boyfriend keeps refusing to.” Luis stopped typing on his computer. A few seconds later he said, “Rhonda Pendergrass.”

“Think his name is Peter.”

“The whore?”

“My boyfriend.” Well, yes, the whore.

“Right,” Luis said, ignoring my statement. No one took me seriously. “Well the whore’s name is Rhonda Pendergrass. She rents a house on 27th and Gay—, don’t say it, —lord street.” “I wasn’t going to say a word,” I lied, standing up and going to the break room to snatch a cup of coffee from the machine. It tasted like mud squeezed off a sweaty foot (my second foray into that food group today). I deliberated on if Peter had sweaty feet. At least I knew I could stand the taste if he did.

What was with me and feet all the sudden?

Peter had been right about one thing. There was something seriously
wrong with me.

I followed Luis to the car and settled into the passenger seat, leaning my temple against the window. The car dipped as Luis climbed into the driver’s side, but I didn’t lift my head from the glass until the car got moving.

“You need a nap, kid?” Luis asked.

“I was thinking more along the lines of hibernation,” I said, taking a sip, or rather, chewing the coffee as it oozed into my mouth. Blessed caffeine. Who cared about the taste? Or texture, for that matter.

“Late night with Angelica?”

“A male prostitute.”

“Named Peter.”

“Why not Peter?”

“You should watch what you say. One day someone’s is going to take you seriously.”

I doubted it. They never had before. And this conversation wasn’t nearly as absurd as some of the others. Luis still didn’t believe I went to Paris that one night.

“I think I need to ask him on a date,” I said. I knew I was pushing it, but I was trying to gauge his response as clandestinely as possible while at the same time getting myself to say it—admit it.

“The prostitute?”

“He wouldn’t be one on the date.”

“Peter.”

“Unless you’ve come up with a better name?”

“Nah. A date with Peter the prostitute. Sounds like a plan.

Be sure to bring flowers.”

“I was thinking condoms. But, your idea sounds more romantic.”

“Romance with the male prostitute, now?” “It’s a little judgmental to assume they don’t like romance.” “Is he jealous of the boyfriend?”

“He
is
the boyfriend.” I paused. “Maybe.” “I’m going to change the subject now,” Luis said slowly. His careful glance at my hand told me that I was not imagining the uneasiness in his voice.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, echoing his earlier statement.

The coffee cup shook in my unsteady fingers.

Luckily, we pulled up to Rhonda’s ranch style house a minute later, saving us from coming up with a pretense of conversation.

The theme of the day was prostitutes.

If I were casting a commercial on the dangers of methamphetamine use, Rhonda Pendergrass would star in it.

Before meth destroyed her teeth, skin and figure, Rhonda had been a willowy blonde with a come-hither smile; she used to flash it at me as if it could dazzle me enough to keep from arresting her. These days she was still blond, but her hair was greasy. I counted four teeth in various stages of decay, and the dull green of her eyes reminded me of rancid pond water. Her body, encased in a pair of too-tight shorts and tube top, made me worry about bones popping through her scab-smattered skin.

She also had five mixed-age children ranging from two-to-nine

years old, all of them staring through me with vacant eyes.

Additionally unsettling was recalling from her rap sheet that she was only twenty-three.

Since entering her house my main objective had been to leave it, and not just because of the stench of unwashed flesh; I was calling social services the instant we left.

“He ain’t here. I don’t know where he is,” Rhonda stated when Luis asked about Gaines. “He don’t come round ‘til beginning of the month, when my check come in.” Her welfare check. The one she most likely used to buy more meth instead of feeding those kids.

We stood by the front door, at the far end of a brown carpeted living room. The kids sat or crawled on the floor and the holey sofa a few feet away. The pair of preschool-aged twins watched a fuzzy television while a girl about five or six, with a bushel of awesomely bouncy curls, was ”de-stuffing” the cushions. The oldest boy, tall and olive-skinned with angry brown eyes, grabbed a drug pipe from one of the toddlers, who appeared to be using the bulbous end to soothe his gums. I couldn’t help myself; I walked a few steps inside the apartment, took the pipe, and slipped it into my coat pocket before returning to my position by the door at Luis’s side. I tried to avoid eye-contact of any kind with the kids again.

“Why don’t you go ahead and write down a list of his numbers and places he’d go,” Luis said, holding out his notepad and pencil to her. “Friends. Relatives. Anyone or anyplace you can think of.”

“I don’t know his friends.” She ignored the tablet, crossed her arms and scratched her elbow. I winced and unconsciously took

a step back as a scab pulled off and blood bubbled out.

“Do you think going downtown might help you remember a couple of his friends?” I said. “While social services comes and gets your kids? Wonder how big your check would be with them in foster care.” My threat produced a more cooperative Rhonda.

She grabbed the pad and commenced scribbling an info-dump on it.

Except for the TV, the whole house was silent while Rhonda scrawled on the notepad. Likewise, aside from a few small actions, the kids had barely moved since we had arrived. The ones not in diapers were wearing jeans with massive stains. The curly haired girl wore a threadbare dress over hers. I’d heard foster homes were bad, but they had to be better than what these kids were living in.

And then the whole situation, the kid’s emotionless eyes, the mother’s profession, the rank stench of tobacco—all of it made me think of Peter.

This was his future, looking forty at the age of twenty-three with nothing but a string of arrests and lovers who would either steal his money or pimp him out. The sad part was that I had been a cop long enough to know it was probably too late for him. One glimpse of Rhonda’s bony clavicle and I decided I was going to try and change the trajectory of Peter’s life.

“He visit them boys on the Platte,” Rhonda said, meaning the Platte River which ran through the city. Certain underpasses in the warehouse district near the river were notorious for hooker traffic of the ‘different’ kind: young boys, transvestites, transsexuals. The kind of people less wary about cops because cops were busy with the drug trade and the sea of hookers

working on the main street. “He be there three, four times a night before Prisc. Now his boy in jail, he probably go back and shake down them boys for quick cash. They don’t make no fuss.” She handed the pad to Luis. I leaned over to see her writing. Every 'i' had a heart over it.

We left with a list of names and places to check out. Which were probably bogus.

The very second I stepped foot outside, I took a cleansing breath and pressed my cell phone to my ear. Luis said nothing as I contacted the Division of Child Welfare Services on our way across the street to the car. I took his silence as approval.

“I want to wait until they get here,” I told him once we were seated in the car.

Luis’s brown skin dotted with sweat within seconds. “Could be hours,” he said before switching on the car just long enough to roll the windows down and light a cigarette.

“If we had arrested her, we could have put the kids in custody immediately,” I pointed out, leaning toward my open window and waving the smoke out.

He wasn’t going to argue the point. We both knew arresting her would have been a mistake. If we had arrested her, she would have clammed up; she wouldn't have had anything left to lose.

“An hour,” Luis said and maneuvered out of his blazer. I did the same, throwing both our coats across the seat divider.

“Or until the social worker comes.”

“An hour.”

“Or—”

“One. Hour.”

Our wait turned out to be a lot less. But it wasn’t social services that got our asses moving.

Twenty-five minutes into becoming two slabs of broiled cop-steak, Prisc Alvarado parked in front of Rhonda’s house.

The fact that he was out on bail so soon set my hackles up.

“Why do they even call it a justice system? They should call it a motel with mildly restrictive checkout requirements.” “Lawyers,” Luis grunted in response.