Joel Goldman - Stone Cold

“Button up, Odyessy. I’m a cop, not one of your johns. If I find out you’re lying to me, you’ll go down for obstructing justice, harboring a fugitive, and being an accessory after the fact.”

“That so, Detective?”

She tilted her head to one side, trying for sexy, but she was too used up to make it work, coming across instead as desperate.

“That’s so. Shake your tits all you want, but you’re still going down.”

She bunched her shirt, tying the ends in a knot, yanking it hard, defiant.

“You wanna arrest me, go on ahead and arrest me. I ain’t seen my boy. You find him, tell him I say come home and pay me what he owe me.”

Rossi pushed the door open. The house reeked of body odor, spoiled food, and decay, the paint chipped and peeling, electrical wires poking out of bare sockets, fast-food wrappers strewn across the floor like dead leaves. The only light came from a few floor lamps.

There was another smell, something burning. He looked beyond Odyessy, down the center hallway that led to the kitchen at the back of the house, then into the front room on his left. Ashes were piled in the fireplace, a few embers still smoldering.

A T-shirt identical to one Reed had been wearing when Rossi arrested him after the Donaire murder trial was draped across the sofa in the front room, a pair of men’s sneakers on the floor, a bowl of cereal and an open carton of milk on the coffee table. A cat jumped onto the table, knocking the milk carton over, as a toilet flushed and a door at the end of the narrow hall opened. Reed stepped out, locking eyes with Rossi before darting out the back door.

“Hey! Dwayne!” Rossi yelled.

Rossi started after Reed but Odyessy jumped on him, digging her fingernails into his shoulders, wrapping her legs around his middle. He jammed his thumbs into her armpits, squeezing until she yelped and let loose. Shoving her onto the porch, he bolted down the hall, catching a glimpse of Reed through the kitchen window, barefoot and shirtless, climbing the six-foot chain-link fence in the backyard.

Rossi shouldered through the back door and ran after him, stopping when Reed caught his foot in the fence and fell over onto the other side, arms outstretched, his thigh impaled on the spikes of the top rung, blood gushing down his leg as he flailed against the fence and screamed.

“Goddamn muthafucker!”

Rossi patted him on the rump.

“Hey, Dwayne. How’s it hangin’?”

“Fuck you, muthafucker! Get me offa this goddamn fence!”

Dwayne was upside down, dripping blood and writhing with pain. Rossi crouched so that he could look him in the eye.

“You ever see one of those Freddy Krueger slasher flicks where Freddy is supposed to be dead only he’s never really dead?”

“No, man! Why you axin’ me ’bout that shit?”

“Cause you kinda look like one of Freddy’s victims, you know, the one who tries to run away but can’t make it over the fence in time, ends up getting clawed to death.”

“C’mon, man! Get me offa this damn fence! I’m dyin’ here!”

“I don’t think you want me to do that.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“Because if I do it wrong, you might bleed out. You’d be better off waiting for the paramedics.” He tugged on Dwayne’s ankle and Dwayne screamed. “See what I mean? The slightest wrong movement and who knows what that would do to you.”

Dwayne groaned. “Oh, man! My leg is killin’ me! How soon the paramedics gonna be here?”

“Well, I gotta call them first.”

Dwayne’s eyes popped. “Then, call ’em! What the fuck you waitin’ for?”

“I thought we might have a little chat first.”

“’Bout what?”

“About where you’ve been since, say, I don’t know, around six o’clock last night. And when was the last time you saw Kyrie Chapman or Jameer Henderson.”

Dwayne grimaced, crunching his eyes tight, his breath coming hard. “I ain’t tellin’ you nuthin’, muthafucker, till you get me offa this goddamn fence!”

Rossi shook his head. “And here I thought you and I were tight. You disappoint me, Dwayne.”

“Get the fuck away from my boy or I’m gonna blow your mutherfuckin’ head off!” Odyessy yelled.

She was standing on the back stoop aiming a gun at Rossi, shaking so badly she had to hold the gun with both hands. She was a good thirty feet away, far enough that there was little chance she could hit him. But the odds changed when she stepped off the stoop and walked toward him until the barrel of the gun was a foot from his chest.

“I tol’ you to get the fuck away from my boy.”

“Shoot him, Mama!” Dwayne yelled. “Shoot him ’fore I bleed to death!”

“You don’t want him to die,” Rossi said. “Let me use my belt as a tourniquet and stop his leg from bleeding. Then you can shoot me.”

Odyessy glanced back and forth from her son to Rossi, her mind struggling with the calculus, finally nodding.

“Go on, then.”

Rossi loosened his belt, slipped it out of his pants, not taking his eyes off Odyessy. He held the belt up for her to see.

“Okay?” he asked her.

“I said go on, didn’t I?”

Rossi turned his back to Odyessy, threaded the end of the belt through the buckle, and yanked on Dwayne’s pant leg. Dwayne screamed again and Odyessy cried out.

“Oh, my baby!”

Rossi spun around, swinging the belt buckle, catching Odyessy in the cheek as he grabbed the gun from her hand. She crumpled to the ground and he cuffed her.

“Hey!” Dwayne yelled. “Put that damn tourniquet on me ’fore I die!”

“You told your mother to shoot me and now you want me to save your life?”

“Hey, man. I wasn’t serious. You know that. No way my mama gonna shoot you. It’s the pain, man. Makin’ me fuckin’ crazy. Come on, man! You can’t let me die!”

Rossi looped his belt around Dwayne’s wounded thigh, cinching it tight, the blood flow slowing to a trickle.

“You’re not going to die. Not today, but I’m not making any promises about tomorrow.”

He opened his phone and called for an ambulance, a squad car, a CSI team, and a search warrant. Closing his phone, he gave Dwayne another pat on the rump.

“Hang tight,” he said.

Lena Kirk led the CSI team. Willowy and dark haired, with cafe au lait skin, she had a beauty that crime scene gore couldn’t dull and Rossi couldn’t forget. She was intense, thorough, and immune to his perpetual efforts to elevate their relationship from dead bodies to each other’s bodies, something she explained to him after their last case when he asked her for the tenth time if she wanted to grab some dinner.

“The problem,” she said, “is that I get two vibes from you-do and don’t.”

“What’s the do?” he asked.

“Like I have to tell you.”

“Okay, what’s the don’t?”

“There are three things I want to know about a man right up front,” she said, ticking them off her fingers. “How’s your hygiene, what’s your credit score, and are you crazy.”

“I shower every day and my credit score is over eight hundred.”

“You left out crazy, and you’ve got a little too much of that for me,” Lena said.

“How can you say that?”

She cocked her head to one side, raising an eyebrow. “You’re forgetting that I’ve worked a lot of your crime scenes, including the ones when you were the shooter.”

“C’mon,” he teased. “A little crazy can be a good thing. We could be a good thing.”

She shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t do crazy.”

And that was the last time he hit on her until she was called out to Odyessy Shelburne’s house. Kneeling in front of the fireplace, she probed the smoldering ashes with a long-handled grabber, plucking out bits of fabric, tamping down any threads still burning before dropping them into a metal container.