April Smith - Good Morning, Killer

“What do you think that thing you are looking for might be, Jason?”

At 10:48 p.m. an older green Dodge van pulled up to the apartment building. It had a dent on the left side.

“Did Juliana say the van was damaged?”

“Don’t know,” said Jason.

I was sitting up straight now, trying to get comfortable as the last of the codeine pills wore off. My eyes hurt and my back was sore, as if I had the flu.

The van sat there a minute and then a dark-complected woman got out the driver’s side. She had a skinny black ponytail and was wearing running pants and a sweatshirt. She looked like a cannonball, big in the bust with a round stomach, and she carried an oversized cup with a straw. She put her head down and worked with determination, sipping the drink as she went around and opened the rear doors.

“Call for backup!” Jason hissed, fingers twitching toward the radio.

“Not yet.” I wanted this takedown all for myself.

“Right, right. We don’t want to look like idiots.”

“Move your butts,” the woman was saying.

Two young boys and a teenage girl climbed out. One of the boys started for the apartments.

“Stay here,” called the mother.

“I’m tired.”

“So am I,” she said.

“I want to go to bed.”

“Get your sleeping bag. Help out.”

“I don’t want to.”

“ Get your sleeping bag. I don’t want to say it again!”

The boy kept going toward the building.

“If you don’t get your sleeping bag right now ,” said the mother, “you can sleep on the floor.”

She tossed the cup into the street and started pulling stuff out of the van.

The teenage girl was saying nothing. She had an oval face, ordinary, wore low-riding jeans and was emaciated-thin, tiny breast buds pointing through a tank top too slight for this fifty-degree night. She was holding a plastic laundry basket filled with toys and clothes, a cigarette between two fingers. She had no affect. She just waited.

“Is that someone else in the van?” I said. “On the passenger side?”

We strained to see in the greasy lamplight.

“If Brennan comes out,” I said, “I will approach him and you back me up.”

Jason waggled in the seat.

We had shifted into high alert. I was aware of the pounding of my heart. I wondered if the camouflage cave was still intact in the back of the van, if the woman was complicit, kept the kids in handcuffs on the long drive to the religious retreat.

“Roxy,” she called, sliding the doors shut, “go get your brother.”

The girl pivoted obediently on one hip.

“Come back here, cootie head,” she said lazily, “or I’ll beat your brains in.”

The little brother taunted back. “You’re ugly. You wear stupid shoes.”

“Mom,” she repeated with the same lackadaisical scorn, “he called me ugly.”

I tried to see in the shadows. Were those bruises around the girl’s neck?

The mother did not answer, nor did she attempt to discipline the son, who had ducked inside the apartment building, but heaved a knapsack over one shoulder and picked up two duffel bags. Used to defeat, to carrying the burdens.

The passenger side door of the van opened and a muscular young man climbed out.

“Go for it,” I ordered, but as we made for the door handles someone right outside my window said, “Special Agent Ana Grey?”

I jolted off the seat.

A heavyset man wearing a sport coat and tie was holding up a badge.

“Please identify yourself,” he said.

Jason was already out of the car, demanding, “Who are you ?”

“Chill,” I said, looking back and forth to the van.

“Are you Special Agent Grey?” he repeated.

“Excuse me,” said Jason. “What’s the problem? We are FBI and that is very possibly our suspect getting out of the van.” He’d flipped his badge open and held it out impatiently over the roof of the car. “Are you here to help, or to screw everything up?” “Take it easy ,” I told Jason. “I am Special Agent Grey. What’s the problem?”

Across the street the man, about thirty years old, wearing baggy pants and an undershirt, was peering at us nervously from the other side of the Dodge, shifting on the balls of his feet.

“Sergeant Pickett, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, special team. Agent Grey, you are under investigation for attempted murder. We have a warrant for your arrest. Please keep your hands in plain sight. Are you armed?” “What the fuck?” Jason wanted to know.

“Put your hands out the window.”

“We’re working a kidnap case,” I said. “The Santa Monica kidnapping, did they inform you of that? We are looking at a rape suspect—”

“Ana?” Jason asked, drumming the roof, twisting toward the suspect. “What is going on? I thought this guy was—”

“She’s under arrest for trying to kill her boyfriend,” said Sergeant Pickett, adding venomously, “He’s a cop.”

“You guys are nuts,” Jason was insisting. “This is Special Agent Ana Grey! She’s one of the top … the top … agents that we have.”

“We are cooperating with the FBI, so just put your little prick back in your pants. Believe me, your supervisor knows all about it.”

“There goes Brennan!”

And the kid took off, sprinting across the street to where the man had leapt a fence and disappeared.

There were more units now, doors opening, a pair of officers running after Jason.

“Tell them he’s FBI!” I shouted.

The sergeant wet his meaty lips. He had shoulders. Flat up the back of the head. You would not mistake him for a ballet dancer.

“I’m still waiting for you to put those hands out that window.”

He had a job to do.

I could not, up to that point, unclench my fingers from around the steering wheel. I could not offer up my wrists. But he would not tell those bozos they were chasing a federal agent until I did.

“Let’s not make this harder on ourselves.”

“Okay, just don’t mess up my manicure.”

I thrust both fists out the window and immediately the handcuffs ratcheted shut.

“Thomas?” he said into the radio. “This is Pickett. The suspect is secure over here, but her partner is pursuing a rape suspect—”

“—Special Agent Jason Ripley.”

“Special Agent Jason Ripley,” he repeated. “No, that’s the guy from the FBI , genius, help him out.”

An acid ball was rising up from the depths of my gut and expanding until my throat went numb.

Pickett holstered the radio. “Please get out of the car.”

The door opened and I stumbled out. The Santos family was lined up on the curb looking on with glazed expressions as if watching the greatest TV episode of all time. People in the stucco minarets had come out on their balconies. There was intermittent laughter and jeering shouts at the police action in the street.

The sergeant took the weapon from my belt and patted me down.

“We are working a case,” I repeated. “That female adolescent over there may have information—”

“I got to cuff you in the back, turn around.”

I hesitated.

He didn’t.

A sudden jerk on the upper arm twisted my back so it went into a spasm like lightning from hell. The legs went out from under me and I collapsed.

I was proned out, facedown in the gutter. My head turned to rest on a cheek and I caught sight of Jason, now running the other way, gesturing to the sheriff’s officers, who seemed to have finally gotten the picture, jacket open and tie flying as he turned in a disbelieving circle of frustration. His bewildered eyes met mine and I moaned and tried to scrabble to my knees to beg his forgiveness, I don’t know what, but the sergeant flattened me with one hard cut and my nose rebounded off the asphalt as he recuffed the hands behind my back.