Phew, after missing a day entirely I was affraid I wouldn’t be able to catch up, but since I’m only down by 1000 words at the moment I’m confident I can catch up without too much trouble.
I’m still not entirely sure about the turn the story has taken, it seems like an unneeded complication, but then it seems like the right way to go now. In any case, I don’t have time to go back and change anything, being almost 3000 words into this little change, so I’m going to have to roll with it for now. Even if I have to cut out huge chunks of the story and rework them during editing, that’s fine, this is a pretty solid starting point.
UPDATE: You know, I’m finding that as I re-read these last few entries, they don’t sound as bad as they did when I was writing them. Sure, there’s a ton of editing and tewaking to be done, but the general thrust isn’t bad at all. Cool.
For Idle Hands (working title) - Part 14
The interrogation room wasn’t terribly impressive. It was a plain room, painted white with a checkerboard linoleum floor and the typical suspended ceiling. There was a window, complete with bars, behind me, and a medium sized mirror built into the wall in front of me. Those huge, two way mirrors you always see in the movies and on TV may exist in some large city police stations, but not here. This small one, only big enough for a person to check their hair and make up in, was quite an audacious thing to find in a town like Idle. No doubt there was also a video camera on a tripod in the next room, ready to go, and there was a simple omnidirectional microphone hanging from the ceiling about four feet above the table.
Before he continued, Gunn pinned a t-shirt, like the one he’d given me, over the two way mirror. Then he stood up on the table and detached the microphone from the XLR cable it hung from, and placed it on the table. After he’d climbed down, he was rather spry for a man his age, he retrieved the paper bag he’d placed next to the door, the one he’d taken the t-shirts from, and put it on the table in front of me. The he pulled up a chair and sat down.
The paper bag held my personal effects, including my wallet and badge, my keys, my flashlight, and my guns, though the clips had been removed and were not in the bag.
“So,” I said as I pocketed the wallet and flashlight, “I take it this all means I can trust you?”
“You take it however you like. I don’t want anyone listening in on this conversation, though I suppose that’s obvious. I gave your things back because unless you fail to cooperate, I’m letting you go.”
I checked the guns over, a habit I had picked up after my time in the army, “the clips seem to be missing, though. Does that mean you don’t trust me?”
“I wouldn’t trust my own mother in an interrogation room with a loaded weapon, Shamus, and she was a damn fine cop.”
He opened his tweed sport coat so I could see that the Glock 23 in his shoulder holster was also empty.
“Too many ways it could go bad in here, whether you’re a cop or a perp, so that’s my policy.”
“So I’ll just have to beat you to death with my chair before escaping then?”
“Try it, and tear your balls off and plug that hole in your shoulder with them.”
In spite of myself, sometimes I found that I genuinely liked Gunn.
“So,” he continued, “tell me what you know, everything you’ve found out about Officer Cheevers’ murder.”
“After you,” I said, “age before beauty.”
Gunn glared at me and I smiled back. I wasn’t about to go spilling everything I had just because he’d killed this room’s eyes and ears, and given my things back. I was still in the station, after all, and here he held all the cards. All I had was what I knew, and I wasn’t talking until the odds were a bit more even up. And Gunn knew that.
“Fine,” he grumbled after a moment. “What do I have to do to convince you I’m on the level here?”
“I asked you about Charlie Dyer already. Who is he, and what was the Idle PD doing picking him up at two in the morning? Next, I want to know what Yadira was working on. And finally, I want to know what more information you may have gotten from the crime lab since the initial reports were filed.”
“Charlie Dyer runs the Sienna Club in town, but I’m sure you knew that already since it’s not exactly secret. We’ve known fro some time that he’s running an illegal gambling operation out of the back room, but we haven’t been able to prove it. Cheevers was working the case, along with a few others.”
“Who?” I interrupted, “who was she working with?”
“Officer Ralph Brandt was her regular partner.”
“Who was running the investigation?”
“It’s Detective Cyr’s first case. Gambling isn’t exactly a high priority crime, so the Chief figured it would be a good one for Cyr to cut his teeth on, or so I’m told.”
“So what made Dyer, special, did they find something on him?”
“Not that I know of. He wasn’t the only person we rounded up this morning. We picked up everyone with a record that Cheevers had ever had dealings with, or tried to.”
“Like who?”
Gunn sighed, but continued. “Dante Henrikson was our first pick up, she was the one who arrested him in the Ervin case. We checked out a few punks she’d hauled in a few times, but most were either college students who’d moved on, or were still locked up somewhere. The only other real pick up was Wally McCollin.”
I snorted, “when did you pick up Wally?”
“About four thirty. Rosie called us about your little spat with him at her place, we picked him up heading back into town. Why the special interest in Wally?”
“Later,” I said. “So, Yadira was working on Charlie Dyer for gambling charges. Anything else?”
“Other cases? Nothing specific, it was pretty status quo aside from that.”
“Bullshit. Dyer’s into more than just gambling, and you’re telling me you guys didn’t know that?”
“What do you mean he’s into more? Like what?”
“Word on the street is he deals on the side, my guess is mostly to college students, though I’m sure the high school gets a frightening amount of business done for him.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“How could you not? You’re the police detective, aren’t you? Aren’t you supposed to be the professional here?!”
“Hey, calm down or the deal’s off and you can rot in a cell until your trial for all I care. If there was more to the investigation than the gambling, it’s news to me. It’s Cyr’s case, not mine, and I’ve got plenty to worry about myself.”
I took a few deep breaths. Yadira had a history with drugs. A bad one. She was clean, and adamant about staying that way, but if an inexperienced superior had pushed her back into a role like she’d played in Boston, who knows how well she’d be able to handle it? The emotional toll alone could cause problems.
“Fine, but I suggest you have a heart to heart with Cyr about this. Now, what have you gotten from the crime lab?”
“Nothing aside from a preliminary autopsy report. I talked to the Medical Examiner before I came in here, he’d just finished up.”
“Any surprises?”
“Depends what you know already. She was killed by a shotgun blast to the chest, from three feet or closer based on tattooing around the wound. She had gun powder residue on her hands, so we know she’d fired a weapon shortly before her death. She also had defensive knife wounds on her arms and hands, and a number of bruises and one hell of a knock to the head. Her forehead probably would have required stitches, or at least some good bandaging. Whatever happened to her, she put up one hell of a fight, and someone beat her near to death for it, before they shot her.”
“No clues to the shooter’s identity?”
“Fingerprint and DNA evidence takes time to process, Shamus. There were a couple of decent prints on the shotgun shell and in her car, but it’ll be a week at least before we get anything definitive back. We’ve got the shell, but we need a weapon to check it against, so all that tells us right now is that the killer used 12 gauge buckshot, and that he reloads his own ammo at home.”
“How do you know that?”
“The crime scene guys found a couple of small, half burned disks of paper punched out of newsprint. That’s what a lot of hobby re-loaders use as wadding in shotgun shells.”
We sat for a moment in silence. I didn’t know if any of that would be useful or not, but none of it seemed like much. Except for the part about Yadira fighting desperately for her life, that was definitely a comfort, but it could also provide some useful clues. Odds are, her attacker took a bit of a licking too, and it’s more than probable that some of his DNA ended up on her person somewhere, though it would take weeks to find out.
“Now,” Gunn said after another moment, “you know what I know. Now I want to hear what you know.”
I started relaying what had happened to me since I had left the crime scene almost ten hours ago. I left out Emmett’s name - as far as I knew Gunn didn’t know him and he was too useful a contact right now - and a few personal details that were none of his business, but otherwise laid it right out.
“And you’re sure it was Wally’s car?” he asked when I’d finished.
“Positive, unless there’s another 80s Monte Carlo with a skull sticker and Maine plates roaming the streets of Idle.”
He was about to say something else, but there was a loud crack and both the window behind me, and the two way mirror behind Gunn, shattered.
We stared at each other for just a second, too stunned to act. As one we looked to the mirror. Gunn’s makeshift curtain had a hole in it. Someone had shot through the room, breaking both glass panes. He’d also managed to miss us both, somehow.
In near perfect sync we flung ourselves in opposite directions away from the table. We flattened our backs against the walls at either end of the room before our chairs had even clattered to a halt. I had my iron in my hand before I remembered that I didn’t have a clip for it.
“Shit!” I yelled to Gunn. “Did that come from outside or inside?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, eyes flitting from the window to the covered hole where the two way mirror had been.
If the shooter was outside, we were probably safe. The windows were at least eight feet off the ground, so the shot would have been taken from a distance. He’d have to reposition quite a bit to get a shot now that we’d moved, and he likely couldn’t see us at all as long as we stayed down. If the shooter was on the other side of that mirror, however, there was nothing stopping him from shooting at us again, and this time he’d be able to pull the t-shirt out of the way for a good shot, or just come through the door shooting.
Gunn pulled his sport coat off and tossed it aside. He drew his own gun, then dug into his pocket and came up with clip that he inserted into it. He pulled back the slide, loading the first round with a click.
“I thought you didn’t allow bullets in here?”
“I’m not an idiot, Shamus. I don’t allow anyone else to have bullets, but I’m not giving up mine.”
“Do you happen to have mine in there too?”
“No. Now shut up or I’ll shoot you myself.”
Keeping his back to the wall, Gunn half slid, half crawled to the door. If the shooter was in the other room, he’d be behind this door, probably waiting for one of us to poke our heads through.
I crawled over to the door in the same way Gunn had, scooting low under the broken mirror. Silently I indicated that I should open the door as a distraction, while Gunn scoped the room through the broken mirror, ready to shoot anyone who might be in there. He nodded, and we swapped places.
He counted to three on his fingers. As he hit three I opened the door from the back side, so that it hid me as it opened. I crouched, ready to pounce, though not entirely sure I could manage it.
Gunn pulled the shirt away from the opening and quickly scanned the room. Then he dropped into a crouch and leaned through the open door, scanning again.
“Nothing,” he said, standing.
I saw the red dot on his back half a second before the second shot rang out and Gunn crumbled to the floor.
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