The Killing Game. J. Kerley A.

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СКАЧАТЬ picked up her purse, a beaded concoction the size of a bowler’s bag. Gregory watched her pudgy pink fingers scrabble for her wallet.

      “It’s my turn to pick up the check, right, dear?” she said, staring into the junkyard of her purse.

      “I’ll get it, Ema.” I don’t have twenty minutes for you to find your wallet. Though both had money from their inheritance, Gregory made additional money writing code for a company specializing in industrial controls. Ema had a part-time income doodling out chatty little women-directed newsletters for an HMO and insurance firm, and Gregory figured she did it while watching television.

      The pair stood and Ema hugged Gregory so tight he smelled her body odor beneath the cloying perfume. After kissing his cheek – Gregory hiding the grimace – Ema waddled out to the parking lot.

      Gregory went to the restroom and washed his hands for two minutes before opening the door with his elbow and striding toward the entrance. An elderly woman pushed the front door open and he jumped past her, drawing a sharp glance for the incivility, but he’d not had to touch anything.

      On scene at the C-store until three a.m., I spent Sunday in busywork trying to push the attempted robbery from my mind. Sometimes it even worked for a couple minutes. When Monday arrived, I slept till nine, then walked the hundred paces from my stilt-standing home to the Dauphin Island beach, interrupting a flock of gulls and sending them into the cloudless sky.

      I ran the sugar-white strand for three miles and returned, launching into the Gulf and swimming a leisurely down-and-back mile. Then I had breakfast on my deck – cheese grits and andouille sausage wrapped in a plate-sized flour tortilla, a grittito, in my parlance – and drank a pot of industrial-strength coffee with chicory. I felt steady again, Saturday night’s memories fading away. I climbed into a beater truck painted gray with a roller, and headed thirty miles north to Mobile, Alabama.

      Almost summer, the coastal heat was nearing typical blast-furnace intensity, so walking into the chilled air of the Mobile Police Department felt delicious. Several colleagues called out as I walked the hall to the stairs.

      “Hey, Carson, I need a bag of pretzels.”

      “Ryder … now that I know you moonlight at a C-store, how’s about bringing in the Krispy Kremes?”

      “Yo, CR … I need fifteen bucks on pump three.”

      They were congratulating me, but being cops wouldn’t use those words. The accolades were in their grins. Or the thumbs up after the joke. I climbed the steps to the homicide department. Harry was on paid leave for three days, standard procedure for a cop involved in a killing.

      “Carson!” a voice called. My supervisor, Lieutenant Tom Mason, stood at his office door, lean as a teenager though in his mid-fifties, wearing his cream Stetson and cowboy boots. Tom hailed from piney-woods Bama, but he always looked straight from a cattle drive across the plains. I banked in his direction.

      “Chief Baggs wants to see you, Carson.”

      I winced. “Why?”

      “Probably something to do with last night. Make nice, Carson,” Tom said pointedly. “He’s the chief, right?”

      I went upstairs to a hushed and carpeted row of offices inhabited by the brass hats of the department, crossing the floor with the same thought I get in funeral parlors: Where’s the nearest exit?

      Chief Baggs’s personal assistant sat at a desk outside the closed door of his corner office. Though Darlene Combs was only in her late thirties, she’d already buried two husbands, one a suicide, the other OD-ing at a Jimmy Buffett concert. Her green eyes always seemed as irritated as her hair was red. I studied her outfit: a blue skirt hiked high to display plump thighs she thought slender; a white silk blouse a size too small, to highlight a pair of odes to silicone; and an Evan Picone jacket, to show she didn’t have to wear the big box knock-offs worn by the women on the lower floors.

      Darlene said, “The Chief is very busy today.”

      “He asked Lieutenant Mason to send me up here.”

      “You’re not in the Chief’s appointment book.”

      “Perhaps I’m in the footnotes.”

      She tapped a button on her phone. “Chief?” she said. “Detective Ryder is out here.” She listened for several seconds, put the phone down. “He’s on the phone to the Mayor. It’ll be a few minutes.”

      Every time I’d come here, I’d waited out a call to the Mayor. I once compared notes with Harry, who’d been here twice. Both times Harry cooled his heels while the Chief finished his consultations. Harry, ever the detective, had noted Baggs’s phone line wasn’t lit, but perhaps he communicated on a secret line like the Batphone.

      Darlene returned to penciling a magazine page as I studied the walls, laden with photos of Baggs shaking every political hand in four states, including such Washington stalwarts as Alabama senators Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby. Both men’s eyes seemed to say, Who is this geek at the end of my arm?

      Though the degree in Police Administration was framed near center on the Wall of Baggs, most prominent was the law degree. The name of the institution was unknown to me, perhaps a correspondence subsidiary of Harvard or Tulane. While the bulk of the photos and certificates were in simple black frames, the degree was in a baroque gilt rectangle. It seemed a shade overwrought, but who was I to judge, being sans entrée into the world of police administration.

      The ambition-prone Carleton Baggs was late to the top floor. Though he and a cabal of like-minded administrators had been headed upstairs several years back, Baggs had cast his lot with an ambitious manipulator named Terrence Squill who eventually ascended to Acting Chief. Squill’s career had slammed a wall when he’d been murdered by an even more ambitious manipulator.

      Since Harry and I – me particularly – played a major role in the incident, we were not beloved of several old-timers in administration, feeling we had delayed their ascension to the uppermost ranks, thus costing them time and money. When the former chief retired last fall, enough years had passed for the scandal to have become history. Baggs, twenty years in grade and boasting well-framed degrees in law and police administration, got his shiny new Chief hat.

      Darlene’s phone buzzed. “You can go in,” she said, not looking up from her pencilings. I shot a downward glance and saw Darlene was taking a quiz: “Test Your Hotness in Bed”.

      I mumbled Somewhere between death and dry ice.

      “What?” she said.

      “I said you look lovely today.”

      Chief Baggs was staring out his window, his back broad and blue in summertime seersucker. I could smell his cologne, one of those over-musked concoctions advertised by ageing jocks wearing towels. He turned, snatching a memo from his jacket pocket.

      “Your lieutenant recommended you for a citation,” he said. “I want to present the award in a department-wide ceremony to let the public see what their taxes are paying for.”

      The situation wasn’t about me, it was about the department’s image. Baggs pursed his lips and studied my clothes: green tee, cream linen jacket, jeans, black running shoes. “You’ll wear a uniform or a suit,” the Chief said, recalling the time I received a citation dressed in chinos СКАЧАТЬ