“YOU UP for this? ’Cause, you know, Brownie and I can handle this.” Sanchez put their police-issued unmarked into park and stared at his partner. “You had it rough last night, man. Nothing stopping us from turning the car around and taking you back home.”
“Kel.” Kane shot his friend a disgusted look. “It’s six in the morning, and I’m sitting outside of some teacher’s house, holding a cup of coffee Miki made—which could go from soup to oil—and hoping the guy inside of said house doesn’t have a hard-on for my baby brother and is killing people out from under Quinn. What part of this face says ‘Sure, let’s turn around and go have pancakes at IHOP instead’?”
“Just saying.” Sanchez sighed in return. “Something tells me we’re either going to need riot gear going in or get laughed out of the force coming down on a guy with petunias in his front yard.”
An access alleyway was going to be as good as they got for a parking space, especially in the tight streets of Merris’s old-tree neighborhood. The houses were on single lots, long rectangles taken up mostly by old wooden structures built with a longing for a frillier time. Kane counted five turrets among the three houses near Merris and about as many bay windows as there were cars. It was a few blocks of nostalgia, dew-kissed streets where children chased after ice cream trucks in the afternoon and people sat out on Adirondack loungers to drink iced tea in the early evening.
He’d grown up in a neighborhood much like the one Graham Merris called home, and while Kane couldn’t imagine the earth-tone shingled walls concealed a murderer, he knew better. His gut told him ugly lived just under the skin of most people, and sometimes all it took was one ill-timed word to let go of the killing beast seething beneath the surface.
Although—taking another sip of Miki’s dinosaur-remains coffee—it wasn’t that far of a leap to go from placid to rage if he drank much more of the sludge he’d tried to offset with sugar and cream.
“Can’t anybody in my damned family make coffee right?” Kane got out of the sedan, glancing at the blooms lining the short cement walk up to a pristine, prissy bungalow draped with enough gingerbread to attract packs of out-of-work Christmas elves. “And those are impatiens, Sanchez.”
“Gotta admire a man who knows his flowers,” Kel muttered at Kane’s back. “Want to put on a couple of vests, or do you think we’re going to be safe from the mad professor?”
“Shit. Go in vested, he’ll know we’ve popped him.” He chewed on the inside of his cheek, thinking. The alley gave them a bit of cover, as did a high, thick hedge wrapping around the property next to Merris’s. They’d thrown their gear into the unmarked’s trunk, mostly as a precaution, but Kel’d called out a good point. They just didn’t have enough on Merris to know how he’d react to a pair of cops coming down on him. “But I don’t want to go in stupid. We got any info on guns for him?”
“Nothing that says stone-cold killer.” Kel tapped his phone’s screen, scrolling through his transcribed notes. “Just what you’ve got on him and the twelve hundred activist groups he belongs to.”
“Yeah he’s big into saving the show-tune singing naked mole whales covered in gluten, but nothing with a gun.” More chewing, and Kane forced himself to stop before he drew blood. “Vests on. Jackets over. Let’s not be stupid.”
It took them a few minutes—minutes Kane felt were worth the time—and other than a little old woman wearing a pink floral housecoat toddling out to get her morning paper, they saw no one else on the street. The eye fuck he got from the purple-haired woman was enough to bring a smile to Kane’s lips, and he winked at her before she headed back into the house.
“Quit flirting with the natives,” Sanchez growled.
“Hey, she started it.” He adjusted his harness, then slid on his leather jacket, checking his radio clip. “You ready?”
“Yeah, let’s do this.” Kel peered down the alley. “Want to do a walk-around? There’s a pass-through back there. We can check to see if his car’s in the back garage.”
“Sounds good. Didn’t see what he’s got registered to him out front.” Kane scanned the street again for Merris’s import. “Let’s go knocking on Merris’s door.”
They didn’t go in hot. Nothing in Merris’s background said he’d come out to introduce the cops to his little friends. Instead, Kel kept watch as Kane checked out the single-car wood-slat garage behind Merris’s tidy little house. He had a sense of déjà vu skulking around the structure. It’d been almost a year ago he’d come around Vega’s broken-down house with its rattle-boarded shed in the back to find Miki lying on the ground, hands bloody and teeth bared.
Kel cleared his throat. “Kind of weird. Garage kind of looks like—”