J. Robb: Treachery in Death

They hit the game parlor first, found it packed. Cooler than outside, Eve thought, but the cacophony of bells, whistles, screams, roars, blasts, and the spinning, blinking, flashing lights made her wonder why anyone would want to spend a summer afternoon glued to a machine.

The pudgy, pasty-faced attendant near the entrance took a gander at the ID shots.

“Yeah, true. They game regular. Slash banged high score on Assassins couple days ago. Still standing. Gonna take it down personal when I got space ’cause he’s an asswipe.”

“Have they been in today?” Peabody asked him.

“Untrue. Night gamers mostly. Stone heads when they can get it.” He shrugged. “What do?”

“We need to talk to them.” Peabody pulled out a card. “If they come in, contact me. What’s riding top on Bust It?”

His attention focused. “You game?”

“Solid true G-bitch. Slayed the ace on Bust It.” She held up three fingers. “Triple.”

“Major ups,” he said with respect. “You wanna whirl?”

“On the move, but maybe back around.”

“Take you on,” he said with a grin.

“Set. Taking it out,” she added. “If they whirl, tag me.”

He swiped a finger over his heart and pocketed her card.

“What,” Eve demanded, “was that?”

“Maybe he’d tag us, but odds are against because he didn’t really give a shit, and I thought he might just toss the card. So I got his attention, his respect. Gamer-bop. It’s kind of stupid, but it worked.”

“True,” Eve said and made Peabody laugh.

They wound their way through traffic, past graffiti-laced prefabs tossed up after the Urban Wars where men with nothing better to do sat on crumbling stoops sucking brew and rotgut out of bottles wrapped in brown paper.

Street toughs stood in small packs, most of them in snug tanks to show off a range of tattoos and sweaty muscles.

Rusted fencing surrounded the cracked and faded blacktop court. Somebody had gone to the trouble to push or sweep the piles of litter to the fence line where broken glass glittered like lost diamonds.

A group of men—late teens to early twenties—were playing shirts and skins. And some of the skins were scraped and bruised. Onlookers leaned or sat against the fence, and except for the teenage couple currently attempting to reach each other’s navels from the inside with their tongues, they shouted at, insulted, and harangued the players.

Peabody pulled in behind the husk of a stripped-down compact.

Someone had painted FUK U on the dented trunk.

“What does it say about the literacy rate when you can’t even spell fuck . It’s sad,” Eve decided.

“Bruster,” Peabody said, lifting her chin toward the court.

“Yeah, I saw him, and his asshole companions.”

“I’ll call for backup.”

“Uh-huh.”

Eve watched a moment. They’d come in as shirts, and those shirts were glued to their torsos with sweat. Jimmy K had rolled his baggy pants above his knobby knees, and from his rhythm, his moves, Eve judged he had a little game in him. Maybe he’d have more if he wasn’t currently coming down from a high and sweating like a pig in the heat.

Bruster’s face was lobster red and dripping, and from the fury on it, she expected the skins were kicking ass. Leon panted like a dog as he ran cross-court. Even with the distance she could see his chest heave in and out.

“They’re cooked,” Eve said. “Bottoming out, winded. They couldn’t outrun a one-legged toddler.”

“Backup, four minutes.” When Eve only nodded, Peabody shifted in her seat. “Okay, let’s take these assholes.”

“Looking forward to it.”

Eve stepped out of the car. A few of the fence sitters made them as cops halfway across the street. Some sneered, some looked nervous, others tried the blank look she assumed meant an attempt to be invisible.

On court Bruster stole the ball by ramming his elbow into his opponent’s gut. The short, vicious war that broke out gave Eve and Peabody time to cross the street, ease through the gate of the fence.

Eve kicked the navel ticklers lightly with her foot. “Beat it.” She tapped the weapon under her jacket to add incentive. They scrambled up and out, and clear, she thought, of any potential harm.

She ignored the others who suddenly decided they had better places to be and sidled out of the gate. She focused on Bruster, but took the opportunity to plant her boot on Slatter’s chest where he lay wheezing and bleeding on the ground.

“Stay down. Get up, try to run, I’ll stun you enough to drop you, enough so you piss your pants.” To emphasize the point, she drew her weapon and watched Peabody try to avoid jabbing elbows and flying fists from the combatants still on the ground and reach through to grab Bruster.

Jimmy K sat on the ground nursing a busted lip. “We ain’t done nothing. Little white bastard in there punched me.”

“Yeah?” He’d forgotten, she concluded, all about the Ochis, the market. The lives he’d broken into jagged bits. “Sit, stay,” she told him.

But Bruster hadn’t forgotten. She saw his eyes fire when Peabody hauled him off the kid he was currently pounding. She dodged the swing, avoided the kick, all while trying to identify herself as a police officer.

Slatter tried to roll out from under her boot. Eve merely increased the pressure. “I can crack a couple ribs,” she told him, “and say it happened during the game. Think about it.”

Instead of drawing her weapon, Peabody blocked a punch. Some of it got through, glanced off her shoulder, and the follow-up connected, fairly solidly in Eve’s judgment, with her ear.

The rainbow shades slid, cocked crookedly on her face.

Peabody managed a half-assed jab that had Eve shaking her head.

Heavy on her feet, she noted, telegraphing her moves.

When Bruster grabbed the jammer out of his pocket, Eve lifted her weapon, prepared to fire. And Peabody said, “Oh, fuck this!” and kicked him in the balls.

The jammer spurted out of his hand as he dropped, retching. Eve gave Peabody reflex points for managing to catch it on the fly.

“You are so completely under arrest.” Peabody dropped down, rolled Bruster over, and slapped on restraints. “You want some of that?” she shouted as Jimmy K started crab-walking backward.

He froze. “Uh-uh. Come on, man. Just a b-ball game. No deal.”

“Bet your ass no deal.” She pulled herself up, glanced over as Eve cuffed Slatter. “On your face,” she ordered, and finished the job with Jimmy K as their backup screamed in.

“Call for a bus,” Peabody ordered the first officer to reach them. “A couple of these guys need medical attention. Get names,” she added. “We’ll add assault on these bleeders to the mix. And get a wagon for these three.”

“Yes, sir.”

Peabody glanced at Eve, grinned. She mouthed, “He called me ‘sir.’” Then cleared her throat. “Lieutenant, will you inform these jerkwads of the charges and read them their rights?”

“Absolutely. Bruster Lowe, Leon Slatter, Jimmy K Rogan, you’re under arrest for murder—”

“We done no murder!” Jimmy K nearly screamed it as a couple of uniforms hauled him up. “You got the wrong dudes, man. We playing b-ball.”

“Additional charges include attempted murder, assault, destruction of property, theft, and in Bruster’s case resisting arrest and assault on a police officer. We may be able to bump that one up, just for fun, to attempted murder of a police officer.”

When it was done, and the three men were loaded in the wagon, Peabody swiped her hands over her face. “That was good, good work. But ow!” She patted her hand on her ear.

“You’re heavy on your feet.”