Jon Talton - The Night Detectives

I pushed her over to the desk, kissing her, caressing the soft skin beneath the hem of her shirt. After enough kissing to feel her body relax and even wilt, I lifted her onto the desktop, removed her sandals, and slid off her panties. Sitting in the chair, I started sucking her toes and licking her perfect ankles, slowly working my way north with my mouth and tongue. The fabric of her miniskirt tickled the top of my nose. She didn’t resist. I held my arms behind her so she could lean back against my hands. She clutched my head with her hands, bent her knees, and rested her warm feet atop my shoulders.

Circles and slides and figure eights. Cheerleader legs. I played her, made it go on a long time, loving being so connected to everything she was feeling, loving giving her pleasure. I even knew when she was ready to intertwine her hands in mine, gripping me for the grand last movement.

Afterward, she slid into my lap and this time didn’t resist being held.

“I love you.” I couldn’t help myself. It came out involuntarily.

She didn’t say anything, but nestled closer.

I was a fool. The Bettye LaVette song played in my head: Everything Is Broken .

Sex would keep anxiety and time and death at bay. I never have panic attacks if I am getting laid. I had to be satisfied with this eternal truth for the moment. But sex with Lindsey made me lose focus, made me forget, made me fall in love with her again, ensured that I might withdraw my emotional siege machines.

Steps on broken pavement.

The sound was so soft I wasn’t sure I had even heard it over the periodic whoosh of cars on Grand. Lindsey noticed my expression and I held up a hand. Someone was walking across the lot, very slowly. It couldn’t be Peralta, whose entrance was announced with the alert of the gate opening, followed by roaring engine and bumping suspension. My blood stopped pumping for a couple of seconds. Someone had jumped the fence, no easy maneuver. It could be anybody. The office door was unlocked.

Mail, she mouthed?

I shook my head. The mail lady came later in the afternoon and the gate was locked.

“Get under the desk.”

She didn’t question me and scrambled into the cave where my legs would normally go. I pulled out the Python, dropped to my knees, and stayed close.

“Are you armed?” I whispered.

She shook her head.

I slipped the Airlite from my pocket and handed it to her.

The only fancy furniture in our office was our chairs and the leather sofa. Otherwise, most of the rest was second-hand, including the two heavy Steelcase desks that looked as if they had once been part of a 1960 secretarial pool. You could fire a rocket-propelled grenade at them and barely make a dent.

I waited for the door to open. Maybe the gate had somehow jammed open, an innocuous malfunction, and the footsteps belonged to a new client, a traveling salesman, or a Jehovah’s Witness who would knock and say, “Hello, is anyone here?”

The room was silent.

I didn’t dare move to catch a glimpse. The desk sat so close to the ground, I was confident that if someone did come in he couldn’t see us. That would change if he walked behind Peralta’s desk, or toward the Danger Room. By then, I would have him in my gun sights, unless he was prepared.

If I get hit, come out blazing, I telepathed to the frightened blue eyes watching me.

The floor was old and creaked when you walked on it. The hinges squeaked when the door opened. But nobody tried to enter. The sound of footsteps came again, this time from the carport. Whoever had come into the lot was still out there. The palm of my hand was sweating into the custom combat grips of the Python.

Then, nothing.

I had to let a good five minutes pass before I dared slither out on the far side of the desk, ready for action. But no one was there. Waiting was the safe way. But it also ensured that I couldn’t see if our visitor had a vehicle. For that matter, I also couldn’t get a license tag number. We waited. Finally, I stood and locked the door. Peering out the blinds, I could see the gate was indeed shut.

Not long afterwards, Peralta arrived, sweeping into the room like a parade.

“Lindsey.”

“Sheriff.”

She was sitting on my desk. I stopped stroking her knees, said nothing, and resolved to avoid his glance.

“Lindsey!” Sharon’s voice. I looked up, and she walked in carrying a bag of hot dogs from Johnnie’s on Thomas. This was fun food.

As Lindsey and Sharon embraced, Peralta’s eyes found mine, and he knew what we had been doing, and his eyes actually twinkled like a tough Saint Nick of nooners. I felt my face flushing.

“We’re all here together, like it should be,” Peralta announced like the paterfamilias. As if anything were settled. “So let’s eat and get to work!”

Lindsey had fixed us healthy salads, to which I added a Chicago dog from Johnnie’s.

“He’s too gaunt,” Sharon whispered to Lindsey.

I told Peralta about the visit from the San Diego cops and the mystery guest who had been in the parking lot but never came in. His forehead tightened as he listened, but he only dived into lunch.

Peralta, with his mouth full: “Sharon talked to Tim Lewis’ parents,” which I translated from shawob awked a wimoois barents . It had taken many years of listening to Peralta over breakfasts at Susan’s Diner and lunches at Durant’s to master this particular dialect.

I said, “They talked to you?”

“I used my winning people skills,” she said, pulling a chair closer to his desk as she ate her salad like a lady. “Empathy, trust, respect…”

“She flashed her credentials,” Peralta said, amazingly pausing in his eating. “Show them.”

She held a wallet identifying her as a police psychologist for the San Francisco Police Department.

“After being married to him for thirty years, who could be more qualified?” She winked at him.

“Plus, Tim’s mother had all of Sharon’s books,” he said.

“As I was saying…” Sharon reclaimed the floor, and Peralta, uncharacteristically, shut up. “The mother’s name is Vicki, father named Mike. They were both there, a nice couple, and were very generous with their time considering all they’ve been through. They’re devastated by Tim’s death and sick about their grandson. The police have tapped their phones, but they haven’t heard anything, much less a ransom demand. They don’t understand why anyone would have killed Tim or Grace.”

I actually swallowed my food before speaking. “So they knew Grace?”

Sharon nodded. “They met her when she and Tim first started dating. After they got together again, they saw her more than a dozen times, including at their wedding, which was held in Riverside, and when she gave birth. They loved her. That was the word each one used.”

I listened to Sharon and was so glad to see her. She was a couple of inches shorter than Lindsey’s five-seven, but was still in great shape with the black hair and angelic face off a tapestry in a Mexican church. In a way words couldn’t describe, she centered our world. I had known her when she was a young, uncertain mother, then as she put herself through college and graduate school, not always with Peralta’s emotional support. This had been one of the old battlegrounds between Peralta and me. Then she had hit it big and finally she had divorced him. But apparently “finally” had a second act.

She said what we had heard before: Grace was stable, not suicidal, and had no enemies. Tim’s childhood sounded suburban normal, the kind that produced golf pros or lone mass shooters. And Grace had done a very good job of keeping people from knowing how she had made money working through college.