D’Andre thought again about that final crossover and jump shot. Marvin had been talking smack all night, trying to get under D’Andre’s skin, trying to make him lose his cool. It was just smack and it didn’t bother D’Andre none. Mama once told him, “You lose your cool on a basketball court and I’ll walk down from the stands and pull you from the game right then and there.”
D’Andre hurried to the corner and crossed 46th Avenue South, getting close to home. It had been so sweet, his crossover. D’Andre busted the ball up court, dribbling low with his left hand, then gave a burst of speed to get Marvin on his right hip. Nearing the three-point line, he dipped his shoulder, like he intended to drive to the basket. Marvin bit and also dropped low. When he did, D’Andre planted his left foot hard. Marvin couldn’t stop. He kept going, right on by, already stumbling when D’Andre crossed the ball from his left to his right hand.
D’Andre leapt from the curb at Renton Avenue South, his orange basketball floating from his fingertips and arcing upward toward the imagined basket. In his mind he watched the ball slip through the rim, compressing that white net in a sweet ripple.
A dark blur in D’Andre’s peripheral vision caught his attention. He turned his head. Too late. The basketball exploded from his hands, seeming to momentarily hang in the air, suspended above the car’s hood. It hit the windshield hard and shot forward. Striking pavement, it bounced high at first, then a little less with each bounce, over and over, until it rolled into the gutter, ricocheted gently against the curb, and came to its final rest.
Not moving.
CHAPTER 2
Tracy Crosswhite had read in some magazine somewhere that the Smith Tower in Seattle’s Pioneer Square had once been the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Now, the building wasn’t even in Seattle’s top thirty, and its significance was largely historic. The city was rapidly changing, and not necessarily for the better.
Seattle was headed for a record year for homicides.
On average, Tracy and the fifteen other detectives in the Seattle Police Department’s Violent Crimes Section investigated thirty homicides a year, but like the height of the downtown buildings, that number had been steadily increasing—another downside to being one of the fastest growing cities in America. It meant more work for them all, work they’d all just as soon do without.
Tracy removed her corduroy jacket and hung it with Kinsington Rowe’s leather coat on a hook at Shawn O’Donnell’s American Grill and Irish Pub. Kins started to sit, but grimaced and abruptly stopped.
“Your hip hurting again?” Tracy asked.
“It’s been catching,” Kins said. “It’s worse in the cold weather.” He rotated the hip and it freed with a small pop. Tracy cringed. A football injury had become degenerative.
“When’s the surgery?”
“Don’t remind me.” He sat across from her.
“You’re worried about it?”
“Hell yeah, I’m worried about it. I told you the story about the woman who stroked out in the middle of the same surgery, didn’t I?”
“You said she was eighty.”
“Eighty-three, but still. They say that’s how that actor died, Bill Paxton. Stroked out after a surgery.”
“He had a bad heart. What, are you reading obituaries for people that died of a stroke?”
Just forty, Kins had put off the surgery for years by chewing ibuprofen. He said he only wanted to go through the procedure once, and the warranty on hip replacements was about thirty years. But lately the pain had become more frequent and more intense. “The doctor said I’d let him know . . . when the pain got too bad.”
“Sounds like you have.”
“Two weeks,” he said. “And I’ll be glad to get it behind me. Feels like a hot knife stabbing my joint and radiating to my knee.” He picked up the menu, studied it for a bit, then tossed it aside. “What number did you get in the pool?”
The detectives and SPD officers paid twenty bucks to enter a pool predicting the number of homicides each year. The number this year had become a hot topic. The skull of death hung from Tracy’s cubicle wall, a macabre reminder that she and Kins were the detective team “next up” for one of those homicides, though they still had two open investigations. She was hoping to get through the week without another killing, but given the way things had been the first months of the year, the odds of doing so were poor. The Violent Crimes Section was still digging out from the previous week, when a jealous young man killed three high school students at a party with an AK-47 assault rifle he’d purchased online. The deaths brought the total number of homicides in Seattle—for just the first two and a half months of the year—to twenty-two. “Thirty-eight,” Tracy said, perusing the menu. “I thought it was going to be too high. Now I’m thinking it’s going to be too low.”
Many attributed the increase in crime, including homicides, to being a byproduct of both the spike in population and the use of heavy drugs like meth and heroin, which was epidemic in Seattle and becoming epidemic in just about every other US city.
“Well, if you’re too low, I’m screwed.” Kins tossed a slip of paper on the table. He’d pulled number thirty-six. “I think we might pass that by June.”
It was warm inside the pub, which had become one of their regular haunts when working the night shift, or maybe Tracy just noticed the change in temperature from the chill outside. March usually brought wind and rain. Not this year. This year it had brought temperatures in the low twenties and, maybe, snow. It had felt cold enough walking down the hill from Police Headquarters at Fifth and Cherry Street. Tracy liked the pub’s ambiance. Across the room, a green digital clock counted down the days, hours, and minutes until Saint Patrick’s Day. It had just dropped below two weeks at thirteen days, two hours, and thirty-six minutes, which explained the heavy mix of the Irish band U2 on the playlist, and the decidedly green décor—even more than normal. Pennants hung overhead with sayings like: “Kiss Me. I’m Irish.” And three-leaf clovers on the wall advertised Guinness. Over Kins’s head, a sign in a wooden frame said:
If I ever go missing I want my picture on a beer bottle instead of a milk carton. That way, my friends will know I’m missing.
Tracy checked her cell phone, though it hadn’t rung; she’d provided dispatch with her number when they left the office.
“Everything all right with you?” Kins asked. “You’ve been acting like you’re the one going under the knife.”
After years as partners, they knew each other’s moods, knew when they were fighting with their spouses, when Kins had kid problems, when they’d gotten laid. “I’m fine,” she said. But she wasn’t fine. She’d been considering her appointment to see a fertility specialist the following afternoon. In the six months since her wedding, she’d never had so much sex and been so frustrated. At forty-three, Tracy was learning that deciding to have children and getting pregnant no longer went hand in hand.
Far from it.
Kins picked up the menu again. “I should lose weight before the surgery. That minimizes the chance of a stroke.”