J. Robb: Treachery in Death

“Hey, no fat comments while I’m primary.”

“Not your weight, Peabody—except you keep too much of it on your feet. And you hesitate. Good reflexes, but your moves are slow. You need to polish up your hand-to-hand.”

“Since my ear’s still ringing I can’t argue. I’ll work on it.”

“But you took him down, so yeah, that’s good work.” Eve swung around at the high-pitched scream of her vehicle alarm.

She watched the hopeful booster land on his ass in the street as the warning charge engaged. His lock popper rolled into the gutter.

“It works. Good to know.”

She strolled back, letting the booster limp off—considering it a valuable lesson learned.

“I’m thirsty. I want a fizzy.” Peabody slid a glance at Eve. “I’m stopping on the way to Central for a fizzy. I want to give them a little time to sweat anyhow. I told the uniforms to keep them separate, and to book the interview rooms. Jimmy K’s the weak link, right? I thought we’d take him first.”

“Works for me.”

“I want to be bad cop.”

Eve shifted to look at her partner—the cop with rainbows in her eyes. “I worry about you, Peabody.”

“I never get to be bad cop. I want to be the über-bitch, and you be the sympathetic one. He was blubbering when they loaded him. I don’t even have to be that bad. Besides,” she muttered, “I’m primary.”

“Fine.” Eve settled back. “You pay for the drinks.”

Jimmy K was still blubbering when they walked into Interview. Peabody scowled at him. “Peabody, Detective Delia, and Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, in Interview with Rogan, Jimmy K, on the matter of the murder of Ochi, Charlie, and connected charges.”

“I didn’t kill nobody!” Jimmy K wailed it.

“Oh, shut the fuck up.” Peabody slapped the file on the table, took out the still of the dead, slapped that down on top. “See that, Rogan? That’s what you and your friends did.”

“Did not. Did not.”

“And this.” She laid out the photos of Mrs. Ochi, the close-ups of her bleeding head, her black eye, swollen jaw. “I guess you like beating up on grandmothers, you asswit punk.”

“I didn’t.”

Peabody started to lunge out of her chair.

“Hold on, hold on.” Playing her part, Eve laid a hand on her partner’s shoulder. “Give him a chance, okay? He looks pretty shaky. I brought you a cold drink, Jimmy K. You want a tube of Coke?”

“Yeah man, yeah.” He took it from her, gulped it down. “I didn’t kill nobody, no way.”

“We got witnesses, you fuckhead.”

“Uh-uh.” Jimmy K shook his head at Peabody. “Nobody was in there when we went in, and Skid, he zapped the cam. So you don’t.”

God, Eve thought, what a moron. “You were in Ochi’s Market today?” she asked him. “With Bruster Lowe—Skid, and Leon Slatter—Slash?”

“Okay, yeah. We wanted some munch, you know? So we go in to get some.”

“You always zap the cam when you go for some munch?” Peabody demanded.

“We’re just playing around, see?”

“Playing?” Peabody roared it, shoved Ochi’s photo in Jimmy K’s face. “Is this playing around?”

“No, man, no, sir. I never did that.”

“Relax, Jimmy K,” Eve told him and made sure he saw her shoot Peabody a disapproving look. “You know jammers are illegal—even homemade ones.”

“Yeah.” He sighed it out. “But see, I was just experimenting, like. Sometimes I pick up some scratch working in an e-store, and you learn shit. Educational shit. I told the dudes I could make up a jammer from some of the shit we got around, and they’re all, ‘Bullshit you can, motherfucker,’ like that. So I showed them. I worked on it for, like, hours, man. We got a buzz going. You know how it be when you’re hanging.”

“Yeah.” Eve nodded. “Sure.”

“We tried it out, and it fucked Slash’s comp good. That’s some funny shit, man. Skid and I busted gut. Slash was a little pissed, and so he starts to grab it from me, and I try to hold it, and I, like, hit the control. Zapped him. Jesus, shoulda seen him jump. Laughed our asses to the ground . We just fooled around, zapped each other a few times, did more Ups. And you know, we got hungry, and we decided, hell, we’d go hit Ochi’s, get our munch, play with the zipzap. That’s what we called it. Zipzap. I made it myself.”

He said that with no little pride, and Eve could see Peabody felt sorry for him.

“That’s a real talent, Jimmy K,” Eve said, and gave Peabody a kick under the table.

“You asshole.” Peabody toughened her face. “You went to Ochi’s Market to steal from them, to bust their place up, to bust them up carrying an illegal device that jammed security and emitted an electronic charge? Carrying saps?”

“Okay, listen, okay, just listen.” He patted the air down with his hands. “We were buzzing, had the munch on. Ochi has good munch, and that old man, he’s always running us off, even had the cops go to Skid’s old lady’s place once just because we knocked a few things over. We just wanted the munch, and to show them not to keep messing with us. Just spook them up, get me?”

“So it was just going to be a robbery,” Eve said, picking up the rhythm. “The three of you took your zipzap, the saps, and went in intending to steal, to intimidate, maybe, if they gave you grief, rough them up a little, break a few things.”

“Yeah, that’s it. We were buzzing, man. We had a really good buzz going. Skid had the zipzap. It was his turn, and hey, the old guy called the cops on him and all that. Zapped the cam good, too. The old lady, she got all, you know, so Slash clipped her some.”

“Leon Slatter—Slash—hit her with the sap,” Eve encouraged, “because she was yelling at you to stop.”

“That’s it. She was yelling and bossing, so Slash sapped her a little to shut her up. Me, I got some candy and chips and shit, and the old man comes out half crazy. He’s, like, attacking me, so I just defended myself and gave him a knock. And he’s going after Skid, and he’s screaming, like, insane shit, so Skid, he gave him a zap. We were buzzing and all so we broke the place up, then we left. See? We didn’t kill nobody.”

Peabody pulled a paper out of the file. “This is the autopsy report on Ochi. Do you know what an autopsy is, you asshole?”

He licked his lips. “It’s like when they cut up dead people. Sucks, man.”

“And when they cut up this dead person, it turns out he died of coronary arrest. His heart stopped.”

“See, like I said, we didn’t kill him.”

“It stopped due to an electric shock, which also left electrical burns on his chest. Your fucking zipzap’s the murder weapon.”

Jimmy K’s eyes bulged. “No. Shit, no.”

“Shit, yes.”

“It was an accident, man. An accident, right?” he said, pleading, to Eve.

She was tired of good cop. “You went into Ochi’s Market, intending to rob, to destroy property, to cause intimidation and physical harm to the Ochis and whoever else might have been present. You went in carrying an illegal device you knew caused physical harm, and weighted bags fashioned into saps. You indeed did rob, did destroy property, and did cause physical harm by your own admission. Here’s what happens when a death incurs as a result of a crime or during the course of committing a crime. It bumps it up to murder.”

“Can’t be.”

“Oh,” Eve assured him, “it be.”

EVE LET PEABODY SET THE PACE. IT TOOK A BIT longer than it might have, but she couldn’t say the interviews weren’t thorough. At the end of the long process, three dangerous idiots were in cages, where she didn’t doubt they’d spend many decades of their idiot lives.