“Adrenaline gets pumping,” Kellaway said. “It’s dark. You know the guy you’re hunting has already sliced some people up, that he’s crazy. I don’t see how you blame the cops for shooting.”
“You don’t, and a grand jury didn’t. But it was a scandal and a heartbreak. The cop who shot the kid developed a serious drug and alcohol problem, poor guy, and later had to be fired for domestic abuse. Anyway. The cousin with the Little Mermaid backpack witnesses the shooting. Fifteen years later she’s working for the St. Possenti Digest, and she writes this great big goddamn exposé about it. All about systemic racism in Florida policing and the reflexive tendency to protect officers who abuse the badge. Anyway. I sat down with her, gave her an interview, said all the things I had to say. I bragged on our hiring of minorities, said 1993 was literally a different century, said that it’s our job to make certain the black community sees us as an ally, not an occupying power. I made sure there were nothing but black faces in the typing pool when I led her to my office. I even had our IT guy sitting at one detective’s desk. I had the dude who cleans our windows at another. It was so black in there you’d think she walked into a Luther Vandross concert instead of a police station. You do an interview like that, you got two choices. Either you say what they want you to say or you get smeared by the press for committing a thought crime. I didn’t like doing it, but I got through it. You might want to remember that when she talks to you.”
“What do you mean, when she talks to me?”
“She’s on your ass now, partner. Aisha Lanternglass. The girl who wrote up the story of the dead drama student and who made my whole department look like the local chapter of the KKK. They’ve got her covering the mall story. You want to watch out for her, Kellaway. She does hate whitey.”
Kellaway sipped his Corona and thought it over.
“They ever get the guy who sliced up the couple?” he asked finally. “The black dude with the knife?”
Rickles shook his head ruefully. “There was no black dude with a knife. Turned out hubby had a girlfriend. He murdered his wife, then had his honey stab him a few times to make it look like he’d been attacked as well. Then he had her drive off in the Miata and park it in the Black & Blue. We got the girlfriend on a security camera, abandoning the car in the lot.” He sighed. “Shit, I wish we had more security footage of what happened in Devotion Diamonds. We’ve got her going in, but nothing from what went down in there. I wish we did. I know Telling Stories would sure as shit like to have it.”
“So you can’t lift it off Roger Lewis’s computer?” The security footage for Devotion Diamonds fed to the big iMac in Lewis’s office, and at some point the computer had toppled off the desk. Kellaway had made sure it couldn’t be turned on again by giving it his boot a time or two.
Rickles wiggled one hand in a gesture that seemed to mean maybe yes, maybe no. “The tech guys think there’s a chance they can rescue the hard drive, but I’ll believe it when I see it.” He sipped his beer and said, “Maybe if we can save it, Telling Stories will want to have us back on.”
If the tech guys rescued the hard drive, it would show Kellaway putting a bullet through a six-month-old and his mother, then using Becki Kolbert’s gun to kill Bobby Lutz. Kellaway hoped that if such a thing did come to pass, he had another gun by then. He could imagine quite calmly sitting on the toilet in the master bathroom and putting the snub nose of a .38 against the roof of his mouth while cops shouted in the next room. He could do it. He knew he could do it—swallow a bullet. Better to die his way than to live life mocked by the tabloids, loathed by the public, and separated from his child. To say nothing of what would happen to him if he wound up in prison.
The thought of sitting on one toilet brought to mind another, and he said, “When do you think I’ll be able to get back into the mall? I’d like to collect some of my things. And maybe . . . I don’t know. Walk the scene.”
“Give it a week. After they open again. We’ll walk the scene together, if you want. I’d like that myself. See it again, through your eyes.”
Kellaway wondered if Rickles was going to move in with him, if he should buy bunk beds.
When Kellaway looked around, a perfect ten was standing in front of him, a blonde who had to be at least six feet tall, wearing a flower-print pencil skirt and a satiny white silk blouse and a straw cowboy hat. She held the hands of two small children, one on either side of her. One of them was a profoundly ugly fat girl with an upturned piggy nose, her pink Hannah Montana shirt riding up her bulging belly. The boy looked like the Mini-Me version of Jay Rickles, a towhead with narrow blue eyes and a stubborn, mulish expression on his face. Their mother was so tall they had to stretch their arms up to reach her hands.
“Mr. Kellaway,” said the perfect ten. “I’m Maryanne Winslow, Jay’s daughter, and my children would like to say something to you.”
“Thank you,” the children recited together.
“What for?” Maryanne said, pulling one arm, then the other.
The girl with the porcine features said, “For saving our lives,” and began to pick her nose.
The boy said, “For shooting the bad guy.”
“They were in the mall,” Rickles said, turning his head and giving Kellaway a watery-eyed look of wonder and gratitude. “Bullets flying a couple hundred feet away from them. They were on the carousel.”
“Oh, Dad,” Maryanne said. “We didn’t even get inside. We were going to ride the carousel, but when we reached the doors, a security guard sent us back to our car. It was all over by then. We missed the action by ten minutes.”
Rickles told Kellaway, “But for the grace of God,” and held out his bottle. They clinked longnecks.
“What’d you shoot her with?” the little boy asked Kellaway.
Maryanne jerked his arm. “Merritt! Rude!”
“A .327. Ruger Federal,” said Kellaway. “You know about guns?”
The boy said, “I got a Browning Buck Mark .22.”
“Merritt! You do not ‘got a Browning Buck Mark.’”
“I do too!”
“You have a Browning Buck Mark,” Maryanne said, and rolled her eyes at her son’s disgraceful indifference to proper grammar.
“You like guns?” Kellaway asked, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
Merritt nodded.
“I have a boy only a bit younger than you. He likes guns, too. Sometimes we go fishing together, and then afterward we’ll walk along the beach and find bottles to shoot. Once we found a smelly old pair of boots and shot them. We were trying to make them dance.”
“Did you?” Merritt asked.
Kellaway shook his head. “No. We just knocked them over.”
Merritt stared at him with his deep blue eyes for another moment, as if in a trance, then jerked his head up and looked at his mom. “Can I play Xbox now?”
“Merritt Winslow! So rude!”
“It’s all right. Old people are boring,” Kellaway said. “My own son told me so once.”