Frank Zafiro - Waist Deep

I clenched my jaw.

“Young Steffie here watched Winter die, didn’t you?” Stone’s voice had grown hard.

I was there, I thought. I held Winter’s hand and watched the blood spread out from beneath him, black in the moonlight, resembling a pair of dark wings on the asphalt.

“You just sat that there like a dipshit rookie and watched the life bleed right out of him,” Stone said.

I didn’t answer.The doctors all said that Scarface’s bullet had nicked Winter’s aorta.They said he’d have probably died even if he’d fallen straight onto an operating table after being shot, with a host of emergency room doctors already scrubbed and prepped for surgery.

Even so, Stone’s words hit home.

“Scarface didn’t quit there, Richie,” Stone said, but he continued to look at me.“No, he was a heroin addict and we found out later that he was supporting at least two whores and their habits, too.So out he went again.Only the next time he came out of a store, our hero, this man right here, had the dumb luck to roll right up on the whole thing in progress.”

Matsuda sniffed, feigned contempt on his face.

“What were you pulling into the Circle K for, Steffie?”Stone asked, sneering.“There to get some Bubble Yum?Or maybe a dirty magazine?”

Coffee, I whispered inside my head. All I wanted was a cup of coffee.

Stone glanced over at Matsuda.“They had themselves a little gunfight.‘Shootout at the Circle K,’ they called it.Scarface got hit in the exchange, but Steffie couldn’t quite finish the job.Thomas Chisolm had to, didn’t he?”

My stomach burned.He was leaving a lot out, like the part about Isaiah Morris and his flunkie ambushing me from behind, but I didn’t bother correcting him.

“Chisolm?” Matsuda asked.“He was my last FTO before I got out on my own.”

“There was a real cop,” Stone said, turning back to me.“Tom Chisolm. He sure carried your water, didn’t he?”

I winced and rubbed my knee, trying to ignore the rising bile in my gut.

“You were the toast of the department there for a year or so, weren’t you?” he asked, shaking his head while he spoke.“A little hero in our midst.”

“I wasn’t a hero,” I said.“I just did what I had to do-“

“No,” he interrupted, “You’re right.I guess you weren’t a hero, after all.I think Amy Dugger would agree with that.She’d be about sixteen or seventeen right now, wouldn’t she?A perfect age for your newfound career.If she were alive, that is.”

Newfound career? What the hell was that supposed to mean?

Stone turned to Matsuda.“I suppose you don’t know the Amy Dugger story, either.”

Matsuda shook his head, sticking to the script.

Stone gave me a look.“Rookies,” he sighed.“Take ‘em out of the uniform and put ‘em in the dick’s office and they act like rookies again.”

I didn’t respond.

Stone continued.“Amy Dugger was a little six-year-old girl that went missing one fine spring day in…what was it, Steffie?Ninety-five?Ninety-six?”

I shrugged.

“It was ninety-five,” Stone said.“I’m sure of it.Anyway, she was snatched up off the street by what turned out to be her own grandma.It was some messed up situation where the mom and the grandma were fighting each other and fighting over the kid.One or the other of the bitches was crazier than forty bastards, if I remember right.But the grandma was definitely a suspect.Not the prime suspect, not at first, but she definitely needed a talking to.”

Stone leaned in toward me.“And who else should they send, if not the hero from the Circle K?”

I ground my teeth, willing myself to remain still.

“Such a hero,” Stone muttered, then looked at Matsuda.“What do they teach in the Academy, Richie?Huh?If a suspect gives you permission to search, what do you always do?”

Matsuda responded immediately.“You always search.”

“Why?”

“Because the assholes give us permission all the time when they’re holding something.They think we won’t really search or we won’t find it.”

Stone nodded in agreement.“That’s right.But when Stef went to see Grandma and she gave him permission to search her house for little Amy Dugger, do you think he did?”

“No,” Matsuda said.“I don’t think he did.”

“Right again,” Stone said.“He didn’t.Even though Officer Jack Willow, who was a youngster at the time with less than a year on the street, argued and pleaded with him to do the search.But Steffie wouldn’t.No, he was a hero and heroes know best, don’t they?”

Stone fell silent and his sarcasm hung in the air.My jaw was clenched and I forced myself to relax it.I couldn’t let him get under my skin.That’s what this whole charade was about.He was enjoying himself, that much was certain, but the point of the whole thing was to get me off balance. Then he could attack me on whatever it was they were charging me with right now.

“The thing is,” Stone continued, “we eventually got around to figuring it was the grandma and her stupid pedophile husband who had kidnapped Amy.And rather than give her back to her mom, especially after what the husband had done, they killed her.They killed that little six-year-old girl.Can you believe that?”

Matsuda shook his head.“Terrible.”

“Oh, it gets worse,” Stone said.“The husband eventually copped to the whole thing.The kidnapping and how Grandma killed little Amy.He wouldn’t confess to the sex stuff, but DNA on her body took care of that.He told us everything else, though.He sat right there in a chair just like that one Steffie’s in and he spilled his guts.And you know what he said?”

“What?” Matsuda asked, on cue.

“He said that when our hero, Officer Golden Boy here, came to their house to question the grandma and she offered to let him search the house which he refused to do, that little Amy Dugger was alive and well in the upstairs bedroom.” He paused a moment, then repeated,“Alive and well.”

My stomach burned, but I said nothing.

Stone shook his head.“That little girl died because of him,” he said, looking at me while he said it.“He could’ve saved her, but instead he just let her die.”

My jaw clenched again. My hands balled into fists.

Matsuda whistled.“What a screwup.”

We sat there, all three of us, in silence.I could hear the distant tap of feet outside in the Investigation Division, along with the occasional rattle and clang of a desk drawer or a file cabinet.The sound of Stone’s breathing was the loudest thing in the room, after the sound of my own heartbeat raging in my ears.

The silence was a tense one. It was a challenge, too.Stone was challenging me to say something, to defend my actions a decade ago.He wanted me to say that Karl Winter’s death was not my fault.He wanted me to say that Amy Dugger didn’t die because I let her.He was counting on it.

There was no way I was going to give it to him.

Matsuda twirled his pencil absently.Stone gave me a hard stare. I reflected it back to him and waited.

Five minutes might have passed that way.Matsuda looked dutifully straight ahead, twirling his blue pencil while Stone and I stared at each other.I was patient, knowing it would be him that would have to break first.He had a job to do. He was on overtime and that was the way of it.I had all the time in the world and I’d already spent over two hours waiting on him.

Finally, he sighed and flipped open the folder he’d brought with him.

“How do you go from hero cop to pornographer?” he asked, without looking up at me.

“Pornographer?”

“How the mighty have fallen,” Matsuda said, staring absently at his pencil.