Mike Faricy - Bombshell

“Exactly? Okay, I’m grabbing some ribs just around the corner at Fat Daddy’s. Why is there a problem?”

“If they’re not there yet, some of the city’s finest are on their way to pay you a personal visit.”

“Now what?”

“I haven’t been informed. My guess? They found something during their search of your place.”

“There was nothing to find.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, Louie, honest there was nothing. Look, they come up with drugs or something, it’s a plant. I’m not kidding. They find any money they have to split it with me.”

Louie didn’t react to my joke.

“Think you can get to your car?”

I looked out through the second ‘B’ in Fat Daddy’s three foot high, hand painted B-B-Q letters running across his front window. My car sat across the street, parked at the curb, minding its own business maybe thirty feet from the corner.

“Yeah, I can see my car from here.”

“You should be on your feet and moving now, you got two, maybe three minutes tops. I want you to meet me downtown at the police station.”

“What?”

“We’re going to turn you in, do the upstanding citizen thing, answer whatever questions they have and hopefully move on. You’re sure there’s nothing there, at your place?”

“Yeah I’m sure, there’s absolutely nothing there, unless they’re looking for laundry.”

“Unregistered guns, drugs, kiddie porn?”

“No nothing, honest, maybe some vacation photos of naked women, but…”

“Are they over eighteen?”

“Yes, they’re over eighteen.”

“Good, meet me at the cop shop, you know that parking lot, across the street?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t screw around, Dev. I’m talking a couple of minutes here, that’s all you got.”

I pushed back from the card table and walked out the door.

“Gotta run, Fatty,” I called over my shoulder

“You coming back, Dev?” Fat Daddy called after me as I crossed the street to my car. He never left his stool behind the cash register.

I got in, turned the key in the ignition and took a right at the corner. I hadn’t driven more than thirty seconds when I saw a flashing light turn onto Randolph maybe three blocks further down coming toward me, fast. I pulled to the side, gave the car plenty of room. It was a dark blue Crown Victoria, with a removable light flashing on top, no siren, just like on TV. Franco was driving, Manning sat in the passenger seat, I could tell he was chewing gum. They shot past me and I watched them in my rear view mirror. A black and white came off a side street and pulled in behind them. They parked going against traffic, right in front of the stairs leading up to my office. They jumped out of the cars and left the lights flashing. That was enough for me, I pulled away from the curb and went to meet Louie.

I had been baking in the parking lot for close to an hour, watching as the heat shimmered off the hood of my car. The lot was two acres of weeds and graveled pot holes completely devoid of shade. Every time a car drove through another layer of choking yellow dust sifted down on the parked vehicles fading beneath the unrelenting sun.

Louie’s Sentra finally scraped up the entry and across the sidewalk then wheezed into a spot next to the sign that warned drivers ‘Do not leave your vehicle unattended’. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for the police station across the street.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked, drifting through a cloud of blue exhaust. Louie had shut his car off but it continued to rattle and shudder for another fifteen seconds, before finally shutting down altogether in a mild explosion.

“Trying to figure out what they’ve got cooked up for us,” he groaned as he climbed out from behind the wheel.

He wore what used to be a light blue suit. The trousers looked permanently wrinkled, there was some sort of brownish sauce dribbled down the right hand side of his coat. He attempted to straighten his tie, but only managed to position it slightly more off center. The top button of his shirt was undone, but chins managed to hide the fact. Darker sweat stains began to seep through the underarms of his suit coat.

“Might as well see what they’ve got on you,” he said, heading across the street in the direction of the police station. He was wheezing heavily before he made it to the far curb.

I watched for a moment, then hurried to catch up in the event he needed help crossing the street.

“Maybe you should find out, then let me know, rather than bringing me in there and…”

“Let’s just go in there and let them know you’ve got nothing to hide. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for whatever it is they found.”

“For the thousandth time I’m telling you I have no idea how in the hell that thing got in my garage. I sure as hell didn’t put it there.”

I was moving up in the world, this time we were in Interview Room Number One. Its decor remarkably similar to the previous interview room, charmless grey cinder block walls with a video camera hanging in one corner. The green light was on, indicating I was being filmed. The back wall had two-way mirrors mounted the entire length, I gathered we were playing to an audience. There was a scent in the room mixed with the damp air conditioning and most likely emanating from me. Fear, desperation, panic?

Detectives Manning and Franco were in the room with us, sitting across from Louie and me, at a grey Formica table whose only feature was a couple of cigarette burns snaking their way toward the chipped edge.

There were a dozen different photos strewn across the table in front of us. Each one a slightly different image of a finger they’d found while searching my garage. It was a severed middle finger, with the finger tip hacked off.

The thing had been wrapped in a plastic bag and placed in a small refrigerator that stood in the back of my garage. Based on the photos I guessed the thing was decomposed. Substantially decomposed.

“Dev, do you mean you forgot you left that finger in your garage?” Franco asked. He’d been the good cop for the past hour, or was it two hours.

“No. I’m saying I’ve never seen that thing before. I never put it in my garage.”

“Why did you keep the finger in that refrigerator?” Manning asked.

“So I could give you one, the finger that is.”

“Dev,” Louie cautioned.

“Look, I don’t know how the thing got there, okay. If I was storing a bunch of fingers would I put them in a refrigerator that hasn’t worked in over two years? If you guys bothered to check you would have noticed the thing was unplugged. It’s been unplugged for a couple of years. Someone is setting me up here.”

“So you admit you were storing a number of fingers. Was this the last one?”

“I don’t admit anything of the sort. I just told you, the refrigerator didn’t work. It’s been broken for a couple of years. If it did work I would have had beer in it.”

“Lets go back to the night you fire bombed the hotel room,” Manning said.

“I didn’t fire bomb anything.”

Manning was walking back and forth across the room, playing to the audience behind the mirrors. As he walked he absently stretched and twisted the rubber band that had held the photos of the fingers.

“So you go to the hotel and…”

“I didn’t fire bomb any hotel room.”

“You stated you were intoxicated that night.”

“No, as a matter of fact, I said I was very intoxicated that night. So much so that I parked on the street, because I didn’t want to attempt driving down my narrow driveway and into my garage.”

“And you left The Spot bar sometime after two that morning.”