The Killing Game (11 page)

The woman glared at Austin. “That big cop treat me like dirt, tell me to get outta the way.”

“What brought you back here, ma’am?” I asked.

“The boy’s mama is bad news, so I come to check a few times a day, make sure Tommy got food in his belly. Tommy a good boy, smart in school. Ain’t no one want to hurt him.”

“Why is Tommy in a wheelchair?”

“He got some disease where his body eat on his body. An audamune problem, something like that.”

“Auto-immune?”

She nodded. “That’s it.”

I looked over Austin and Mailey, Austin jutting his equine jaw, Mailey studying the dirt at his feet.

“How hard was that?” I said.

I called the info to the hospital as O’Reilly came up from the backyard, a tumble of scraggly bushes. “There’s an alley past the brush,” he pointed. “One-way east to west. The fence is trampled to the ground.”

I pushed through the brush, finding the windowless sides of warehouses and defunct factories, a tunnel of brick. “All the perp had to do was stop in the alley. Attack and retreat. Get every available uniform out on the street, O’Reilly, door to door, wino to wino. Find out if anyone saw a car back here, or anything suspicious.”

“On it.” He ran off.

“Detective Ryder!”

I turned and a hundred feet distant saw Ron O’Herlihy, the other half of the O Team, waving from the alley’s intersection with the street. I ran his way, finding a horizontal yellow strip strung between a fence and drainpipe fifteen feet from the alley entrance. I ducked beneath the strip – a three-inch-wide plastic ribbon – and turned to the familiar repeated phrase:

POLICE LINE – DO NOT ENTER

O’Herlihy read my mind. “Not ours, Detective. We strung tape around a robbery scene on Edison Street last night, but someone else put that stuff up.”

The tape made my blood run cold. “Don’t touch it, Ron. Don’t move – I need to get the techs over here.”

I grabbed two scene techs and showed them the tape. They looked puzzled until I said, “It’s not ours.”

A glance passed between the techs. “The perp made certain he’d be alone,” one said.

“Looks that way.”

“Devious motherfucker,” the other tech said. “All the perp had to do was pull a car-length into the alley, jump out and set the tape.”

“Gave him his own private drive,” the first one nodded.

As the techs carefully removed the tape for analysis, I headed back to the house, finding O’Reilly.

“I put the guys on the door-to-door, Carson. What now?”

I stared into the dirt backyard. “Pray the kid got a look at his attacker and lives to tell the tale.”

Gregory padded across the call girl’s floor in nothing but canvas slippers, not wanting his bare feet to touch the green carpet, a cut-pile petri dish culturing a hell’s broth of biological hazards. The sex robot was in the bathroom washing with the hospital-grade antibacterial soap Gregory had provided. The regimen was simple: shower in the soap, rinse, repeat. Hair too. The next step was a potent mouthwash. Not that Gregory’s lips would get near the robot’s lips – most of the time it’d be turned away anyway – but he wanted to know nothing was festering in its food-hole.

Since Gregory had started his new life, he’d been too busy for all the bullshit associated with picking up regular women. Plus the recent event with the bleached-blonde bitch –
Do you always fart like that?
– had proved that the more expensive fuck-machines were superior to regular women. The only fun there was the hunt, and his latest adventures were fulfilling that need by ten thousand per cent.

Everything in his life seemed to have changed the night the two cops dragged him from his car and humi-liated him in the center of the street. Or did his life actually change four days later, when little Kayla dropped to the ground whispering,
Daddy
?

Gregory heard the shower shut off and put his ear to the door, satisfied to hear the robot gargling. He returned to wandering the room, his hand dandling his genitals. The furnishings were simple: a king-size bed with small tables on either side, lamps on each table, a chair in the corner and a large bureau. He saw a packet of white powder on the bureau, picked it up and flicked it with a fingernail.

The robot emerged from the bathroom, a small black woman with flat breasts, slim hips and muscular, heavy-calved legs too large for her frame. Her close-cropped hair was bright yellow and her sole adornment was a slender ankle chain.

Gregory held up the packet of powder. “What’s this?”

The woman stretched her arms and reclined on the bed. “Coke, baby. Primo quality. You wanna taste? Ten bucks a line and I guar-un-
tee
it’ll set your brain free and put steel in your pecker.”

“I don’t use narcotics.” Gregory started to replace the packet, but paused, again lifting it to his eyes. “What does it feel like?”

“Like you’re a hundred feet tall,” the robot purred, “and nothin’ can get in your way.”

Gregory saw his image in the full-length mirror. He flexed his biceps, showed his teeth,
Kristal-White Tooth Gel for that Sun-Bright Smile.

“I feel a hundred feet tall now.”

The robot rolled to the bedside table to pour some cheap, sweet wine into a glass. It downed half the liquid and winked.

“Then it’ll make you feel like God.”

Gregory bounced the packet in his palm. It wouldn’t hurt to try a bit of the powder, would it? But not now. Today had started busy and he still had much to do.

Reluctantly, he set the bag back atop the bureau.

Harry and I hit the streets and banged on our snitches as if they were bells, hearing nothing in tune with the case. At seven p.m. we heard Tommy Brink was drifting in and out of consciousness, his condition precarious. We found a small face with closed eyes. Chrome stands hovered by the bed like alien sentinels, on their arms the bags of pharmaceuticals filling Tommy’s body. Arletta Brink sprawled in the bedside chair, Tommy’s mother, late twenties, silver shorts as tight as paint, her green halter top displaying cleavage and tattoos. Her pink high heels were as bright as they were cheap. We entered with badges displayed, me in the lead.

“What you po-lice want?” she snapped.

“We need to talk to Tommy when he comes around.”

“He don’t wanna talk. Leave me be.”

“Can we speak out in the hall, Miz Brink?”

An elaborate eye-roll. “What’s wrong with here?”

“I don’t want to disturb your son.”

She sighed and followed us into the hall, leaning against the wall with arms crossed and one toe tapping her anger. Arletta Brink was maybe twelve years old emotionally, a fact highlighted by her rap sheet: shoplifting, public intoxication, assault, drunk and disorderly, resisting arrest.

“Where were you when this happened, ma’am?” I asked. “The attack.”

The eyes went evasive. “I was visitin’ a friend down the street. Jus’ a few minutes. You can’t say I did nothin’ wrong.”

“I wasn’t making any inference, ma’am, I’m trying to establish the events.”

“Events is what I say they is.”

“Do you have any idea who would want to hurt Tommy?”

“How the hell I gonna know that?”

“Has Tommy received any threats?” I said, keeping my voice even. “Gotten into any trouble at school?”

“Trouble?” she cawed. “That boy spend his life in a wheelchair. I gotta stick the food in his mouth some of the time. And clean it away when it come out. How he gonna get in trouble?”

I’d been watching Brink’s eyes, saw the pupil dilation. “Are you under the influence of anything, Miz Brink?”

She wobbled on the heels and jabbed a scarlet fingernail my way. “Who the fuck are you to talk to me like that? How about you kiss my—”

A shrill, piercing sound cut Brink short. I winced and turned to Harry, pinkies in the sides of his mouth. Harry could whistle the dead from their graves. Nurses were leaning out of rooms and looking our way. Harry walked to Brink, stopping one step away with his hands in his pockets.

“You spent good money on that buzz, Miz Brink, right?” he asked, his voice as pleasant as springtime birdsong.

“Hunh?”

“Some wine. Something for the pipe. I figure you got twenty, maybe thirty bucks invested in that buzz.”

The chin jutted. “I doan know what you talkin’ about.”

“You spent good money on that high, Miz Brink. Be a shame to haul that buzz to a loud, smelly jail. Especially when you could make nice and let that sweet buzz bloom in this quiet hospital.”

Harry was brilliant as usual, threatening not the woman, but the quality of her high. He looked past Brink and into the room. “Tommy’s awake again, Missus Brink,” he said. “May Detective Ryder and I please speak with him?”

A pause. “G’wan inside,” Brink said.

“You coming in, ma’am?” Harry asked. “To see how your son’s doing?”

“Hunh-unh,” she said, digging in her purse for a crumpled pack of Kools. “I need a smoke.”

We stepped into the room and I studied the monitors. I’d been in a lot of hospitals and knew when things seemed stable. The kid’s eyes followed us.

“Where’s Mama?” asked a paper-thin voice.

“She had to take care of something, Tommy,” I said. “She said to tell you she’d be right back.”

Tommy seemed dubious. I introduced us and pulled a chair close. “Do you remember anything about the attack, bud?”

“I was watching a big jet way up in the sky and wondering what it would be like to go through clouds. I heard footsteps behind me and felt a terrible hurt in my side and got knocked over.”

“Did you see who it was?”

He shook his head. “I tried to git to the house but tipped over. I think I kind of passed out. I could hear, but it was like from far away. I heard a voice.”

I scooted closer. “Man or woman, Tommy? Could you tell?”

He paused. “It seemed like a man.”

“What did the voice say?”

“It wasn’t words, just sounds. Like laughing. Then that Indian thing.”

“Indian thing?” I asked.

“You know…” Tommy Brink pulled one hand from beneath the covers, cupped it over his mouth.

Went “
Woo-woo-woo.
”

Tommy Brink’s eyes started drifting and Harry and I tiptoed quietly away, hoping the kid could turn sleep into healing. We headed down the corridor toward the elevators. Harry frowned at me.

“Woo-woo-woo?”

“Kid could’ve dreamed it,” I said.

“Or the perp said something and it got garbled.”

I flagged a nurse at the floor station. “Tommy Brink – he’ll pull through, right?”

Her eyes went blank and she did the voice that tells you things are bad without saying bad. “Infection’s a major concern since he’s immuno-compromised. We’re hoping for the best.”

I nodded and walked away, seeing Arletta Brink step off the elevator like the hall floor was six inches higher. I figured whatever she was on, she’d had another taste.

In the lobby we headed to the main door, passing the information desk, almost bulldozed by a sixtyish black lady in a flower-print dress, a bag the size of a shopping sack under her arm. Her face was drawn.

“What room is Tommy Brink in?” she asked the blue-haired lady at the desk. “I need to see my poor sweet baby.”

“Granny, you think?” Harry said.

I shot a look at the woman, shuffling toward the elevator with fear in her eyes.

“Or an aunt. At least Tommy’s got someone who cares.”

Morning arrived with dawn rain chased off by hot breezes from the southwest. Gregory pulled into the lot of a restaurant near the bay, gulls shrieking above like bleached rats with wings. The overpriced venue was the current favorite of Mobile’s moneyed types and the lot was already crowded. He muttered about having to park at the rear and trudge through the soupy morning heat in a wool blazer. A dozen summer-weight blazers hung in his closet, but the wool was a particular iron-gray Gregory felt was the perfect complement to the subdued gentian in his irises, and he’d never been able to duplicate the color in a lightweight jacket.

As he passed the first rank of parked vehicles, head craning for a spot, Gregory saw a blue Dakota leaving a space in the row nearest the restaurant, another driver angling for the prime slot. Gregory squealed through a turn and raced down the front row. The other vehicle was in the oncoming lane, indicator signaling the driver’s intention to enter the space.

Using the reversing Dakota as a shield, Gregory zipped into the spot. He grinned and shot a glance into the mirror as the loser cruised past his bumper, two blue-haired old women giving him the frosty eye. Gregory had recently seen a news clip suggesting exercise might improve memory in the elderly, and he figured the desiccated hags should thank him for the opportunity to hobble a couple hundred feet.

Exiting his vehicle, Gregory glanced at an open side door to the kitchen, two youngish men taking a cigarette break, one in waiter garb, the other in a stained dishwasher’s apron. The pair puffed as Gregory walked the two dozen paces to the door.

He entered and crossed the floor, the restaurant at capacity, plates of food on the starched white tablecloths, the population heavily skewed to middle-aged and elderly women in designer clothes. Gregory knew most would be regulars, their weekly gobble-and-gossip session the highlight of useless, wastrel lives.

Ema was looking at her watch as Gregory walked up. A cup of tea sat in front of her, napkin centered on her wide lap. He tapped the back of her neck and she turned, startled.

“There you are, dear. I was, uh, getting worried again.” An attempt at a smile. “Only a bit, though.”

Gregory said nothing, wanting Ema to worry, punishment for all she’d put him through the other day.

The waiter arrived, a slim male robot in his mid-twenties with a mouth like a wet rose, his close-cropped black hair looking more painted-on than grown. His eyes were an emerald green. The man verged on being pretty and Gregory disliked him on sight.

While Ema scoured the menu, the wait-bot metronomed its pen against the order pad, probably to rush them. Was the moron too blind to note Gregory’s jacket cost more than the man earned in a week?