Things were getting weird.
Sometimes working a case is like being the parent of a large family: controlling the direction of the avalanche is the most you can hope for. Well, the avalanche had started, and things weren’t looking so good. If the Dead Jennifer Case had been a family, Junior would be smoking crack, Missy would be shooting amateur porno, and little Bobby would have been busted shoplifting panties at Walmart.
Needless to say, Molly politely declined my invitation to spend the night. “Let me get this straight,” she said in the no man’s land between our two motel room doors. “A girl is dead. A good cop’s career has been ruined. Some poor homeless guy took a bullet in the head. And you were thinking you might get laid a second time, huh?”
“We all grieve in our own way, Molls.”
She gave me a look I had seen 138 times before… Funny, the way old dope smokers grow suspicion like fur.
“You actually scare me,” she said in the flat tone women reserve for utterly honest comments. “You know that, Disciple?”
She was exhausted, bewildered, and now she was hurt.
Even still, I said, “Yeah… I suppose you have your fifteen hundred words to write… “
Her tears took me by surprise. She started to say something but literally caught her mouth in her hands. She darted to her door without a word, but I knew what she had wanted to say.
Poison, Disciple. Why do you turn everything into poison? I schlepped into my room, absorbed the chaotic landscape of tangled sheets, pocket trash, and tossed clothes. What a slob I was.
Tired. So tired.
I smoked a joint.
Jerked off.
Bed. Sunday… I slept like the dead. Cruel hearts always sleep soundly, I suppose. It was almost noon before I awoke.
I had no idea how police shootings were investigated in Pennsylvania, so I thought it would probably be a good idea if I stashed my bag of weed for the time being. I went to Odd-Jobs for a solo breakfast, hid my Baggie in the dropped ceiling of their washroom.
They had this ancient TV in the dining area, one of those fat-screen jobbies that had looked futuristic back in the Clinton days. A little electric window on the world, and a safe haven when Brittany, the waitress, caught you checking out her cleavage. There it was, live as live can be, electromagnetically speaking.
Ruddick was being televised. I could tell by the courthouse facade rising behind the saccharine beauty of the reporter’s face. Some local channel by the looks of her-too much asymmetry in her face for the big time. Too much nose. The volume was muted, or maybe broken, but the title glowing beneath the painted woman confirmed what I already knew…