Page 94 of Hell Bent

Turner kept clean, of course. He had enough hoops to jump through without worrying about a urine test. And he’d never had trouble staying awake on the job. His father had said it best: You get the habit of looking out, you don’t ever lose it. Eamon Turner ran an appliance repair shop, and eventually he would die in front of a row of used stereos and DVD players—not at the hands of one of the kids who occasionally rolled up on the shop hoping to find a flat-screen or some hidden treasure, but from a heart attack that felled him silently. Business had been bad for a long time, and his father’s body wasn’t found until late afternoon when Naomi Laschen had come to pick up her ancient panini press. Turner had told himself it wasn’t a bad way to go, but he’d been tormented by the thought of his father dying alone in a room full of obsolete machines, running down the way they all did in the end.

Now Turner squealed out of the parking lot and headed toward Kensington. “How do you want to handle this?”

Car took a big bite of his sandwich. “Let’s come down on Elm, past that auto repair place. Get our bearings.” He cut Turner a glance and grinned, grease on his chin. “Your little storm cloud go home for the day?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Turner said with a laugh.

Turner was moody. Always had been. He had to watch for it. If people picked up on that mood too often, suddenly they started steering clear, invitations to grab a beer dried up, no one pulled you in when they needed an extra man. It could be enough to kill a career. So Turner tried to smile, keep his shoulders loose, make things easy for everyone around him. But today he’d woken up feeling that weight bearing down on him, that prickle in the back of his skull, the sense that something bad was brewing. The shit weather and weak coffee hadn’t helped.

From the time he was a kid, Turner had an ear for trouble coming. He could spot an undercover without even trying, always knew when a black-and-white was about to round a corner. His friends thought it was spooky, but his father told him it just meant he was a natural detective. Turner liked that thought. He wasn’t particularly good at sports or art or school, but he did have a sense for people and what they might do. He knew when someone was sick, like he could smell it on them. He knew when someone was lying even if he wasn’t sure how he knew. He’d just get that prickle at the back of his skull that told him to pay attention. He learned to listen to that feeling, and that if he kept smiling, kept the dark part of his heart hidden, people really liked talking to him. He could get his mom or his brother or his friends or even his teachers to tell him a little more than they’d set out to tell.

Turner also learned to expect the look of shame that came over their faces when they realized how much they’d said. So he practiced not showing too much sympathy or too much interest at all. That way they could convince themselves they hadn’t said anything worth being embarrassed about. They didn’t feel weak or small, and they had no reason to avoid him. And they never suspected that Turner remembered every single word.

On the force, they called him Prince Charming, chalked up his way with witnesses and informants to his looks. But they never understood that the charm that got some perp talking about his mom, his dog, the pull he’d done as a favor to a friend just out of the joint, was the same charm that got Turner’s fellow officers yapping about their lives and their troubles over shots at Geronimo.

The prickle usually came before the phone rang with bad news, or before the wrong knock at the door. But ever since he’d joined the force, he’d been on high alert, like he was always sure something bad was about to happen. He didn’t know how to sort that kind of paranoia from actual alarm.

“Of all the things,” his mother had said when he told her he was enrolling at the academy. “Why ask worry to stay awhile?”

She’d wanted him to be a lawyer, a doctor—hell, a mortician. Anything but police. His friends had laughed at him. But he’d always been the outlier, the good boy, the hall monitor.

“The overseer,” his brother had said to him once. “Say what you want, but you like that badge and gun.”

Turner didn’t think that was true. Most of the time. He’d done a lot of talking about changing the system from the inside, about being a force for good, and he’d meant it all. He loved his family, loved his people. He could be their sword and their protector. He needed to believe he could. At the academy, the brass had wanted him there, boosting their stats. There’d been enough black and brown faces and everyone on their best behavior. Not so much when he’d been in uniform. Then it was all us-versus-them, a sense of dread every time he passed the invisible line between work and his own neighborhood. After he made detective, it was even worse, a constant sense of premonition—never proven, never disproven.

And plenty of bad things did happen, but Turner was determined not to let them get to him. It’s the long game, he told himself when the hazing got rough. Survive the bad job to get to the great career, to get to the top of the mountain, where he could actually see what needed to be done, where he would have the power to do it. He knew he could be a legend like Big Car, better than Big Car. He just had to endure. They put shit in his shoes, he stepped right in it, stomped around the locker room pretending he didn’t notice, making them laugh. They got a hooker to hike up her dress and fuck a nightstick on the hood of his car, he laughed and cheered and pretended to enjoy it. He would play until they got tired of playing. That was the deal he made with himself.

It all paid off when Carmichael’s partner retired and Turner got his slot. That was Big Car’s doing. Turner wanted to believe that it was because he’d been a good sport about paying his dues, or because he was a genuinely great detective, or because Car respected his ambition. And that all might be true, but he also knew Car wanted to be seen buddying up to a Black man. Carmichael was getting older, closer to retirement, and he didn’t have a spotless record. He had a questionable shoot in his file—the kid had been armed, but he was still a kid—and a couple of complaints lodged by suspects who said he’d gone rough on them. All in the past, but all the kind of thing that could come back to bite you on the ass if you weren’t careful. Turner was cover. And that was fine. If partnering with Carmichael would move him up the ladder, he was happy to play brown shield for him.

As they pulled up a few blocks from the duplex, Turner scowled.

“We sure this is an actual lead?” he asked.

“You think my CI is fucking with me?”

Turner bobbed his head toward the rundown building, the garbage cans lying on their side in the muddy front yard, the snow covering the driveway, the heaps of junk mail on the front porch. “Looks like a roust.”

“Fuck,” said Carmichael. Sometimes CIs called the cops in when they needed to get squatters out of a building. And it definitely looked like no one was living in that duplex. At least no one paying rent.

The rain had faded to mist and they sat with the engine idling, enjoying the heat of the car.

“Come on,” said Carmichael. “Let’s see what we see. Take the car around back.”

Once they were parked on the street behind Orchard, Car heaved his big body out of the passenger side. “I’ll knock. You stay on the back in case he runs.”

Turner almost laughed. Maybe King Tut was up there sitting on a stash of laptops and jewelry from the Wooster Square jobs, or maybe a few teenagers were camping on a mattress smoking weed and reading comic books. But once Big Car pounded on that door, they were bound to bolt, and it would be up to Turner to corral whoever came down those back stairs. Car wasn’t going to embarrass himself trying to sprint through the streets of New Haven.

Turner watched Carmichael slip into the alley beside the house and took up his position by the back stairs. He peered through the dirty window to the first floor—an empty hallway, no furniture except a rug that had seen better days, more mail piled by the slot.

A minute later, he saw Car’s shadow appear in the front window and heard the loud thud thud thud of his fist pounding on the door. A pause. No sounds from the house. Then again, thud thud thud. “New Haven PD!” Car bellowed.

Nothing. No scramble of feet, no window sliding open above.

Then Car kicked the door in. “New Haven PD!” he shouted again.

Turner stared at Car through the window. The hell was he doing? They hadn’t actually been summoned here by a landlord. There was no reason for them to smash their way in.

Car gestured for Turner to follow.