Perri O'Shaughnessy - Unfit to Practice

Kevin leaned in toward her.

“I guess only one thing,” he said, his voice desperate.

“What?” At that moment, she would do anything to make him happy and get him out of her hair. She had never thought a cop would need so much hand-holding.

He answered by seizing her face between two meaty fists, pushing his face against hers, sticking his tongue down her throat, and moaning joylessly.

The whole thing lasted about half a second and she was so shocked it took her that long to fight back. Then she pushed so hard he fell back against the porch railing. He stood up. So did she. She moved away, putting several feet between them. Looking down, she saw that when she pulled away he had grabbed for her, ripping her silk blouse. Her bra was showing. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, never taking her eyes off him.

He took a step toward her. She carried a small can of pepper spray in her purse. She opened the purse and put her hand inside, found it, and took it out.

Kevin’s face flared red. Apologizing profusely and abjectly, he backed toward his doorway. Making very little sense now, practically babbling at her, he insisted she wait while he looked for a pin for her blouse.

She had been assaulted by him. Had he gone crazy?

“Come inside,” he babbled. “You can’t drive around like that! Just inside for a minute. I can fix this.” He was almost shouting. “Don’t go! Please let me make this one thing right!”

“I’m leaving now,” she said. “Don’t come after me. Go inside, quiet down, and go to bed.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-it just happened. Don’t look at me like that.” He kept calling after her, but she didn’t wait to hear any more.

A FTER INTERVIEWING MARIO LOPEZ at the jail in Placerville, Paul drove back to Tahoe in good time and picked up Wish at Nina’s office. Nina listened without much comment to his report, passed on joining them for dinner, and examined her watch, saying she had to pick Bob up from somewhere. She looked upset, but she waved off his questions.

So Paul gathered Wish up from under the iron fist of his mother. On the way out of town, they hit the Coyote Grill in Round Hill Mall, a spanking-new shopping center just over the Nevada state line. Stuffed full, they drove along the eastern side of Tahoe toward Incline Village as dark descended and stars burst into the dark of a moonless sky. Moist lake smells floated around them until Wish complained of frozen ears and Paul pulled over and raised the soft top.

A funky bunch of wooden cabins that had been around for as long as Paul could remember, the Hilltop Lodge loomed over Truckee from a small hill southeast of town. The lodge rooms backed up to views of the town and curved around a central area. They pulled up to a spot not too far from the main building and parked. For several minutes, they watched groups in various stages of happiness laugh, reel, and lurch around the parking lot, in one case piling into a Jeep, deciding not to drive after all, and bumping out down the hill singing, arm-in-arm.

“Looks like a permanent party,” Wish said.

Paul got out. “Wait here. Keep watch.”

As Wish rolled down the window, Paul could see his breath in the air. In September the weather changed from moment to moment; a cold front must be rolling west from Nevada. Clouds spiraled up in the night sky and a few drops of rain fell on Paul’s head as he went looking for the manager’s office.

Not surprisingly, no one had registered under the name of Cody Stinson. A minor lie involving a special request for service from the girls in number eight that made the manager’s cheeks flame and got him away from his desk briefly meant Paul could check out the register, but no name leaped out as an obvious alias.

He returned to the car. Wish stood next to it, arms wrapped around himself. “Must be under forty degrees tonight,” Wish said. “You bring an umbrella?”

“No,” Paul said.

“Shoot.”

“Tough guys don’t use umbrellas.”

They watched from inside the car for a long time, using the defroster and heat intermittently to keep the windshield clear and their bodies from freezing. Cars from the highway below whizzed by, and the lights of the town turned cloudy in the mist.

Doors opened and closed. People came and went. No sign of Cody Stinson.

At midnight, Paul told Wish to take a nap. They would need to stagger each other. He had a chart marked, keeping a record of who seemed to belong to what lodging, and by now they had narrowed their field of interest to three doors. He hunched into his jacket and prepared himself for a nightlong wait.

By three in the morning, all celebrations ceased. The dull roar from the town stopped. No more trains flew by on the tracks below; the cacophony of different musical styles from bars on the main street faded. Wish snored in the backseat. Paul pulled his leather jacket tighter.

Door number two opened. Paul, half dozing against the steering wheel of the Mustang, first noticed the absence of light. Generally when someone opened a door, they left a light burning in the room behind long enough to see the way out. This time, only a qualitative change in the black of a shadowy doorway showed him someone was standing there.

Paul reached a hand into the backseat and tapped Wish on the shoulder. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” he said in a low voice. Wish opened his eyes with the immediate alertness of the young and slipped silently out of the car to watch with Paul.

The door opened wider and a man stepped out into the light rain, long-armed and lean, carrying a brown bag. Cody Stinson.

They both recognized him. “Now what?” Wish said.

“We call the cops as soon as he goes back inside.”

Stinson stretched, and as he approached a pool of light from an outdoor post, Paul saw that he was fully dressed in heavy boots and a jacket.

“He’s not going out in this,” Wish said. “Not on a bike.”

But he was. He pulled on goggles and a helmet, mounted the Harley, and, indifferent to the hellish commotion of its engine or, more likely, proud of it, revved a couple of times to warm it up and took off down the hill, leaving a drizzle trail.

Paul and Wish jumped back into the car. “Should we call the police?”

“And say what? Tell ’em to go looking for a guy on a motorcycle?” Paul asked, frustrated. “We need him back in his room tucked up tight in bed, or somewhere for more than five minutes so that they can swoop down and grab him without a slipup. Oh, great.” Pea-sized hail pelted Paul’s windshield. His wipers pushed futilely against the onslaught.

“You’re not supposed to eat in bed,” Nina told Bob, who balanced a bowl of tortilla chips and a plate of salsa on the sheet as he talked into the phone. He wore boxers and a towel draped around his neck.

Lately he had begun taking half-hour showers. As his teen years bore down on him, he had fallen into the grip of passions that he understood no better than Nina, passions about everything, from a certain kind of cereal to be eaten every morning for three months, to blue shoelaces ordered off the Net. He had suggested that he would like to dye his hair. His attention span for school subjects had dropped to about five minutes, but he could still surf the Net for hours with an intensity befitting a brain surgeon.

At the same time the blitheness of childhood left him, he began to suffer from a lack of confidence. He believed that he was ugly and socially maladroit, though he was strong and healthy with no particular drawbacks that Nina could see. In fact, she thought he might, with luck and a softening of his lantern jaw, grow up to be an attractive fellow.

However, there were a few years to go between now and then.