Wendy Hornsby - Bad Intent

We were looking for a bigger house.

From habit, I checked on Casey, saw her sleeping in the usual tangle with Bowser. I yawned, wiped away the water running down my neck, and opened my own bedroom door. The elves had cleaned up Bowser’s mess, refolded the bath towels and stacked them on the floor.

Mike, wearing only boxer shorts, was stretched out on the bed, propped up on pillows and surrounded by street maps, the newspaper classifieds, and a couple of rental guides. He had reading glasses perched low on his nose. When I leaned over to kiss his bare shoulder I dripped water onto his reading matter.

“Is it raining?” he asked.

“I went for a swim.”

“Naked?”

“Almost. You should have been there.”

“If you’d whistled, I would have been.”

“There was no time,” I said, beginning to shiver. “It was an emergency sort of thing.”

“I can understand that,” he said. “Feel better?”

“Much.” I peeled off my soggy shirt and underwear and started for the bathroom.

“Where’ve you been?” he called after me. “Out.”

Mike’s big terry robe was on a hook in the bathroom. I put it on, wrapped a towel around my hair, and went back to the bed. Still shivering, I slipped under the covers and snuggled up against Mike, stealing his body warmth.

When I had quit squirming and had my cold feet wedged under him, he said, “Out?”

“I went to Etta’s.”

“Guido go?”

“No. I went alone.”

I might as well have hit him across the face. “You went to Etta’s alone?” he exploded.

“Etta does it all the time.”

“Jesus Christ, Maggie. Promise me you won’t ever go there alone again.”

“Okay.”

“I used to work that neighborhood. You have no idea what can happen.”

“I said, okay. I won’t go there alone again.”

“Okay.”

He was still breathing hard when he enveloped me in his arms. He muttered, “Jesus,” a couple of times, most unprayerfully. He needn’t have fussed; I would never go back there alone. I had been scared from the moment I got off the freeway until I got back on it. With reason. I could add up at least four incidents that occurred during the space of an hour that might easily have gone deadly wrong. That’s four possibilities before I gave any thought to car problems or drive-bys. Mike was right: Etta’s neighborhood was no place to wander through alone, at night. I should have known better.

All my moving around under the covers scattered his maps and classifieds. I retrieved a section of ads sliding off my hip: houses and apartments to rent, three bedrooms. He had starred a few.

“Find anything?” I asked.

He shook his head. “The geography’s the tricky part. You want a canyon or ocean view out of the smog belt. Michael has to be within easy commuting distance of Occidental in Eagle Rock. Casey needs access to Pasadena. I don’t want to spend my life on the freeway. The neighborhood has to be reasonably safe. We need at least three bedrooms, but we can’t spend much more than we’ll get in rent for this place, assuming we find a renter. Any ideas?”

“One thought,” I said. “If we find something big enough, I won’t have to rent an office. I miss working from home. When I have to work late, it’s so much easier to keep track of Casey if I’m in the next room instead of down the freeway. God, I’m beginning to hate the freeway.”

With a comer of the towel he dabbed at water on my cheek. “Sounds like regrets.”

“What sort of regrets?” I asked.

“Moving down. You miss your own house.”

“I miss order.” I played with the little patch of hair at the base of his throat. “I wish the elves would come in and move us to a cottage in the woods somewhere, do the laundry, drive Casey around while they’re at it, because the details are beginning to overwhelm me. That’s a long way from regret. Remember what I told you when we decided to live in sin?”

“Let me think.” He rested his chin on my wrapped head. “You said that you wouldn’t care if we had to sleep on army cots in an abandoned airplane hangar, as long as we could wake up together every morning.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“An airplane hangar would give us more space than we have here.”

“Look into it, will you?”

“Yeah.” He gathered the ads and maps and dropped them off the side of the bed.

“How was your meeting with the lieutenant?” I asked as he slid between the sheets and snuggled into me.

He found my breast inside the robe and covered it with his warm hand. “You don’t really want to talk about all that now, do you?”

“Actually, I do,” I said. “What did the lieutenant say?”

Mike frowned and rolled onto his back. “We didn’t get very far. He wanted to go over the case with me, check our procedures. Then he told me to take some time off. I can come with you to Casey’s orientation tomorrow. Maybe we can spend the rest of the day house hunting.”

“Time off? Like a suspension?”

“Not at all like a suspension. Just until things cool off, I’m going to be invisible. One thing you have to understand: As far as the department is concerned, I’m not in any trouble. They’re taking good care of me, because they believe me.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “But if you disappear, won’t it look like the department is hiding something, keeping you under wraps?”

“You know, we did some things differently in the old days when our job was keeping the peace instead of holding teat-to-teats with the bad guys to keep their feelings from getting hurt.”

“That’s a new one.” I laughed, getting a strong visual. Teat to teat was a definite improvement on head to head.

“You know what I mean,” he groused, but not serious about it.

“I know what you mean. You used to kick butt and take names later, or something.”

“Kick ass,” he corrected. “Kick ass.”

I had to ask: “Did you kick Charles Conklin’s ass?”

“I just helped him decide it was time to move out of the neighborhood. The witnesses were little kids and he kept them terrorized. Soon as he was gone, they couldn’t talk fast enough. They saw Conklin at the scene with a gun in his hand. They saw him run away. We had a jail-house snitch to corroborate them and, boom, we nailed Conklin, dead bang.”

“The D.A. says you intimidated the kids.”

“Didn’t have to. The girls came clean, that’s all.”

The girls. Hearing that made something click. Two girls, ages ten or eleven, about fourteen years ago. So, okay, I was a philosophy major, but I can still add about ten and about fourteen. Comes to about twenty-four.

Feeling something between befuddlement and anger, I scooted out of bed to get my bag. I pulled out the newspaper copies and, sitting with my back against Mike’s raised knees, I sorted through them.

“It’s weird, Mike,” I said, hearing sarcasm. I passed him the three short news items about the shooting of Officer Johnson. “I thought that when a police officer was shot everyone made a big fuss about it. Big funeral with thousands of officers in uniform, a eulogy by the chief, grieving family on TV, a motorcade, bagpipes-the whole twenty-dollar package. Johnson got none of that. Why not?”

“A few things.” Mike put his glasses back on and began reading through the articles. “Like I told you, Johnson was off duty and out of uniform when he got it. Second, we thought he might have been up to something dirty.”

“Dirty with Charles Conklin?”

“Don’t know. We didn’t pursue it once we had an arrest. You have any idea what our caseloads are like?”

“But a fellow officer was shot. Surely that meant something. Another thing, there was nothing in the paper about Conklin’s arrest. When did you get him?”