Stephen White - Blinded

Now he had me by the balls. And I didn’t see a way to free them from his grasp.

“Somebody’s going to see us sitting here and call the cops.”

Carmen and I had pushed the seats all the way back on the Cherokee. We were parked on the same block as the night before, diagonally across from Holly Malone’s house. But this time we were a couple of houses farther away. It wasn’t a neighborhood where people sat in cars parked on the street. Inconspicuous we weren’t.

“That’s always a risk on this kind of stakeout, Sam.”

“This is different, though. Usually you and me, we’re the cops. Here we’re persona non grata.”

“Okay, you’re a Craftsman-style expert, and you speak Latin. What do I have on my hands here?”

I went through the list in my head: Fat-ass cop. Iron Ranger with man-boobs. Schlub whose family dumped him for the holidays. Post-MI jerkface who’s running around the country like he has the heart of a teenager.

Don’t know why, but right then I reminded myself that Gibbs liked me. It helped a little, as sad as that fact was.

“I am what I am.” Until the words were out of my mouth, I didn’t realize I was quoting Popeye.

Carmen tried hard to swallow a laugh.

I laughed first. She followed immediately. “Go ahead,” I said. “Say I’m a complete idiot.”

“A cop who’s a Renaissance man. Quick as a wink from Frank Lloyd Wright to Popeye-I’m impressed.”

“You done?”

She was wiping tears from her eyes. “Yeah, I’m done. Almost. So what are we looking for exactly?”

My neck was as far out as I was planning on sticking it. “This was your idea, Carmen. Remember?”

She reached into her bag and took a reprinted five-by-seven from her purse and stuck it to the center of my dashboard with some gum I didn’t even realize she was chewing.

The photo was of Sterling. He and his buddy Brian looked like a couple of male models.

“Who names her kid Sterling?” Carmen mused.

I didn’t know the answer to that question. “He’s pretty, right?” I asked. “Holly called him pretty.”

Carmen gazed at the picture as though she’d never really looked at it before. “Yeah. He’s pretty-boy pretty.”

“Not your type?”

“No, unfortunately, he is my type. My type-historically speaking-could best be described as ‘assholes.’ And from everything I hear about his life until the moment his rental car crossed that bridge over the Ochlockonee River, Sterling Storey was an asshole. Is an asshole.”

“Assholes?” It wasn’t much of a response, but it was the best I could do.

“Sad as it sounds, that about covers it. If I’m into a guy, he’s going to turn out to be a bona fide asshole.”

“Assholes have bona fides? Like diplomats?”

She found that pretty funny. “The ones I fall for do. I only take them in if they’re credentialed.” Her laughter stopped as fast as it started. “That’s what happened in San Jose. My asshole that time was a judge. He had credentials up his wazoo.”

Carmen had pushed open the front door. I walked in. “Yeah? What did he do to you?”

“My daughter and I had just moved in with him, were just getting settled in his house. I was in love.” She spread out the lone syllable of “love” so that it sounded like a crowd. “She called me from school, said she’d forgotten her calculator-it was one of those fancy ones with all those buttons, you know? I gave her a hard time about her irresponsibility and then I went home to get it for her. I’m a softy.”

“He was there?” I asked. The fact that he was there was necessary to the story, but it wasn’t sufficient to explain walking away from a pension. I knew there would be more.

“With my daughter’s best friend’s mother. I’d introduced the two of them at a volleyball game a couple weeks before.”

Nasty situation. But it still wasn’t sufficient.

“On the stairs of all places,” she added. “He was doing her from behind.”

Interesting detail, though it didn’t compare with what I’d heard about Holly and the basilica. But that wasn’t it, either. “It got ugly?” I asked.

“You could say that. I went berserk-I could take what he was doing to me, but what he was doing to my daughter and her friend? Shit! I screamed the woman’s naked ass right out of the house, but that was just a warm-up for what I wanted to lay on him. I started yelling and cursing-did I tell you I have a temper? Well, I do. And he took one step forward and… the asshole hit me. A hard slap right across the face. It was such a shock, it took me a second to recover, but then I started up again, and he slapped me again, harder still. I couldn’t fucking believe it.”

“That’s when you should’ve left, huh?”

“Would have been better, yeah. But I didn’t, I wasn’t ready to walk yet. So I started yelling all over again. He made a fist, showed it to me-shook it at me, really-and came at me again.”

“You shot him?”

“You already know this story?”

“No. But I know if you just beat the crap out of him, you’d still have your pension, and you wouldn’t be living in Orange County.”

“I shot him.”

“Nuts?”

“Foot. Nuts was tempting, though. Real tempting. Think I might’ve gotten time for shooting him in the nuts.”

“He’s still on the bench?”

“Of course.” She sighed, the exhale carrying a full cargo of cynicism. “He was indifferent to hurting me, Sam. He didn’t care. About the affair, about the slaps, about the pension. None of it. He didn’t care.”

“How’s his foot?”

She smiled just a tiny bit. “He doesn’t play squash anymore.”

Across the way a car pulled to a stop in front of the Malone house. An SUV, one of those little stubby Lexus SUVs that were scampering all over Boulder like Japanese roaches. I hated them less than I hated the really big ones, the Fords and the Cadillacs and the Lincolns, but I hated them nonetheless.

No particular reason. I just did. Actually, it was one of the few things that my friend Alan and I agreed upon.

“I bet that’s Artie.”

“Who’s Artie?”

“The brother-in-law I told you about. He’s an asshole.”

Carmen perked up. “Really?”

“Not your kind of asshole, I’m afraid. No bona fides, and I suspect that Artie’s the kind of asshole who doesn’t like his women to be packing heat.”

She sat back again. “Ahhh. One of those.”

While we chatted, I was checking the parade of clowns climbing out of the little silver Lexus. Artie had been driving, no surprise there. A slightly older, severely less perky version of Holly climbed out of the front passenger seat, and three way-too-well-behaved, way-too-well-dressed children exited the rear.

Carmen said, “No Sterling in that bunch.”

“Afraid not. We wait.” I touched her hand. “Sorry about San Jose.”

“Yeah.”

Twenty minutes later I said, “Shit.”

We’d been silent the whole time, and Carmen was startled by my exclamation.

“What?” she asked. She was staring out the windshield as though she figured she’d missed something important at the Malone house.

“I forgot to turn my phone back on. Damn.” I hit the little on button, and the phone came alive and immediately started probing the atmosphere for a cell tower to mate with. Once the slutty little thing had finished getting intimate with some new anonymous electronic partner, I checked my voicemail.

The first message was from Simon.

“Hey, Carmen,” I said. “Give me a minute? I want to call my kid.”

“Sure, be good to stretch my legs. I’ll walk around the block again, see what I can see.”