$200 and a Cadillac

XXX



“This is going to take a while.” Paul Kramer studied the bat under a low power microscope. He pulled his eye away from the viewer and looked over the counter at Mickey. “And we may not get anything at all. We’re not well equipped for testing like this. Like I said, the better thing to do would be to ship it to Riverside so a real crime lab can have a go at it.”

Mickey shook his head. “No time. We can do that later. I need to make an arrest and I can’t do it without some kind of preliminary information.”

Paul pushed himself across the tile floor on his stool, the casters squeaked as he rolled to the opposite counter. He took some small tools from a drawer and rolled himself back. He put his eye to the microscope and began to scrape at the wood with something that looked like a dentist’s pick.

“There’s definitely some stuff in here that looks like dried blood. But it could be grease, oil, anything.” Paul worked a small fleck of something dark and dry away from the wood and held it out on the end of the pick for Mickey to see.

Mickey looked it over and shrugged. “Could be blood.”

“If I was betting, I’d say it was blood.” Paul scraped the fleck off onto a glass slide and smiled. “But I wouldn’t bet a whole lot.”

Paul rotated the bat slowly, going over its surface under the magnification. “The interesting thing is,” he said, “there’s nothing on the exterior surfaces of it. Everything’s down in the cracks. Of course, I’m just guessing, but it looks like it’s been washed off.”

Mickey grunted at the suggestion. “That would make sense. I guess he didn’t do a thorough job though.”

“Blood doesn’t take long to dry, especially on a hot day. After only five or ten minutes, it’s going to be pretty crusty. It would be hard to wash every trace of it out of the cracks in the wood.”

Mickey leaned back against the counter and added, “I doubt he tried that hard. I mean, what were the odds that body was every going to be found? I’ll bet he did a half ass job washing it off because he was just trying to get it clean, he wasn’t thinking about hiding the evidence.”

Paul looked up and thought about it. “Yeah. Why would he keep the bat at all if he was trying to hide the evidence? He could have driven half a mile down that dirt road and tossed the bat out into the desert. No one ever would have found it.”

Mickey was getting excited. He paced across the room to the other counter, hesitated for a second and then turned and paced back. He hovered behind Paul and asked, “How long will this take?”

“I don’t know, Chief.”

“Christ. I’ve got to stop this guy.”

“Chief?” Paul swiveled on the stool with the pick in his hand, another crusty black ball on display. “We don’t even know if this is blood yet. It’s going to take some time.”

Mickey knew he had to wait for confirmation. Before that, everything was speculation. But the prospect of sitting around the rest of the day was killing him. He’d already waited the whole morning for Dr. Kramer to finish seeing patients. Mickey leaned against the counter again and checked his watch. It was after noon already. He folded his arms across his chest and said, “But we’ll know something today, right?”

“I’ll do everything I can, Chief.” Paul didn’t look up from the microscope as he spoke.

Mickey hovered in the background awhile longer, realizing there was nothing he could do and that his lingering presence would not speed the process up. The waiting would drive him crazy. “Alright,” he said, after a few minutes of standing there like an idiot, “you’ve got to call the station as soon as you determine if the blood types match. Jimmy will radio me with the news.”

“Will do, Chief.”

Mickey left the clinic in a hurry, although he had nothing to hurry for. Back at the station, Jimmy was still sitting behind the counter, leaning back with his feet up, reading a western novel with a cowboy hiding behind a rock on the cover. He stretched when Mickey walked in, and said, “You find anything, Chief?”

“Don’t know.” Mickey started to go back to his office, but hesitated, and added. “I’m pretty sure I did, but I’m waiting for Dr. Kramer to call with some test results.”

Jimmy looked at him, expectantly, waiting for details. After a few seconds, Mickey told him what he’d found. “Christ,” Jimmy responded, “let’s go get the son of a bitch right now.” He stood behind the counter and clapped his hands together, like a football player leaving a huddle, ready to make the big play. The muscles in his arms swelled and stretched the fabric of his shirt.

Mickey shook his head. “We have to wait. I shouldn’t have gone into his truck without a warrant anyway. That’s going to be a tough one to explain. That’s a big enough problem already. We can’t do anything worse than we have already.”

“Hell, just say you were looking in the window and saw the bat on the floor. Say you saw the blood on it. Who’s gonna know?”

Mickey heard the words but chose not to listen to them. He’d played that game in the past, every cop who’d been around awhile had played it, whether consciously or not. But not with something like this. It was usually with punks, teenagers, or a traffic stop where the driver was being an a*shole. It was a fun game to play. The officer leans in close to the open driver’s window and says to his partner, I think I smell marijuana, do you smell that? The partner knows the game and says he does. Then you cuff the driver and tear the car apart. Sometimes you find something, sometimes you don’t, but you always have a good time looking. And you were always safe doing it. If you found something, you could make an arrest or not. If you didn’t find anything, you sent that bastard on his way and never heard anything about it.

“This isn’t that kind of deal,” Mickey said, giving Jimmy the long stare.

“Shit, Chief, I’m just saying. It’s a way to get the guy off the street. If he’s a murderer, you can’t feel guilty about bending the rules.”

Mickey thought it through. It had a certain appeal, but arresting someone for murder drew a lot more attention than shaking down a couple of teenagers on a roadside at night. If you were wrong about the teenagers, they were just happy to be let go. If you were wrong about arresting a guy for murder in front of his coworkers, you had yourself a serious lawsuit. Especially if you knew the evidence you were using was wrongfully obtained. But he could lie about that. Maybe he had looked in the window. Maybe he had seen the bloody bat on the floor.

Mickey shook his head, thinking it through. But there was no way. He couldn’t lie about it. Not because of some moral obligation to tell the truth, but because a good lawyer would tear the lie to shreds. Mickey had seen the bat up close. So had Dr. Kramer. It was clean except for a dark crust embedded in the cracks. A dark crust that even Dr. Kramer was hesitant to call dried blood until it underwent testing.

Mickey could practically see a lawyer standing in front of a jury, waving the bat in front of them: And Sheriff, wouldn’t you say the bat, on the floor of the truck, was about as far away from you as it is from the jury right now? And you say that you could see the blood from there? You say you knew it was blood? But you heard Dr. Kramer testify that he couldn’t tell if it was blood when he examined it under a microscope, isn’t that right? And you have no medical or scientific training, isn’t that right, Sheriff? But you could see from a distance of several feet, through a dirty truck window, what a trained physician could not identify under a microscope, in a laboratory? Is that what you’re telling us, Sheriff? And all the while, the jurors would be staring at the bat, unable to see any blood at all.

It would not be pretty, and the already strained city budget would be driven into bankruptcy. Mickey couldn’t lie about how he found the bat. Not because it was the wrong thing to do, but because there was no way he could get away with it.

“I know, Jimmy,” he finally said. “But even if Grimaldi is the killer, he’s not dangerous right now. He has no idea we’re onto him. He’s at work, at least until later today. So he’ll be easy enough to keep track of until we know something. All we’ve got to do is watch him.”

Jimmy nodded, appreciating the plan. “Makes sense,” he said. “You want me to go out there?”

“I’ll do it.” Mickey unsnapped the holster on his nine millimeter and withdrew it, feeling the grip in his hand. “You stay here. And I mean don’t leave. I told Dr. Kramer to call here as soon as he knows anything. If there’s any blood on the bat, he’s going to try to match the blood type to the body.”

Mickey pulled the slide back on the gun, slowly, smoothly. He could feel the soft thud of the bullet popping up from the clip. He could hear the click. Then he let the slide go and it snapped back, feeding the round into the chamber with solid, mechanical precision. He cocked it, clicked the safety, and snapped the gun back in the holster.

He smiled at Jimmy. “You radio me as soon as Kramer calls. I’ll stay by the radio and keep an eye on the guy until I hear from you.”

Jimmy nodded, sat back on the stool, and picked up his novel. There was nothing more to say. Jimmy reclined against the wall with his feet up on the counter and went back to his cowboys and Indians.

Mickey went out and stood beside the Suburban, letting the heat soak into him. The temperature had climbed from the cool night air to up over a hundred. He took a few deep breaths into his lungs and felt the heat inside him. There was something unnatural about the air outside the body being hotter than the blood inside the body.

Mickey stopped at the café for lunch. If an arrest did come, it could be a long evening and he would be glad he’d eaten. He sat at the counter and felt the weight of the gun on his hip. With a bullet in the chamber, it seemed heavier than normal, sagging from his side and tugging his consciousness with it. Tugging it down toward some lower darkness he knew all too well, but preferred to avoid as long as possible.

He chewed his club sandwich and ate his fries, shaking off the dread that was coming over him. He knew the dread, knew its dark, familiar intimacy. He’d felt it many times before. It had been with him since Vietnam, lurking in the background, reminding him that terrible things were always just around the corner. When he was done, he paid and went outside and drove out of town, toward the refinery and whatever it was that awaited him.