AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A fucking water pistol?
“That does it!” he snapped as he whirled Bozo around and slammed him facedown on the hood on the car, dragging out his cuffs and snapping them on before the guy could stop whining about being burned. He felt as if steam were boiling from the top of his head, he was so angry. “I’m not stopping for fucking coffee ever again!”
Behind him, the crowd that had spilled out of the McDonald’s began applauding.
“Hey, Wilder, are you paying these dickheads to rob places so you can play hero?”
The jibe was lobbed at him as soon as he showed his face in the bullpen. He growled under his breath as he wove his way to his battered desk. Garvey walked over, grinning. Hell, everyone around him was grinning. “That kid they interviewed did a great job,” he said. “Of course, they had to bleep the part about what kind of coffee you’re never stopping for again, but if you’re any kind of lip-reader you can tell what the kid was saying. By the way, the lieutenant wants to see you.”
“Now?”
“Wouldn’t hurt.”
“Fucking great,” Eric muttered, but took himself upstairs. How was he supposed to have stopped one of the local TV stations from interviewing the restaurant’s customers? He supposed he could have slapped a hand over the kid’s mouth and told him to keep quiet, but at the same time he hadn’t realized how many of the customers had heard him ranting about his coffee. Wouldn’t you know it, the reporter had picked one of the kids with bright eyes and big ears who was all but dancing with excitement at being on television. Why couldn’t they have gone for some shy kid who was scared to death, hiding his face against his mama’s arm?
It had been all over the noon news. “Whoosh!” the kid had said, imitating the motion Eric had made in tossing the coffee in the bozo’s face. A big grin had lit the kid’s face like it was Christmas. “Then he took the gun away from the robber and threw him down on the car, wham, like this—” He imitated that motion, too. “And said he was never stopping for fucking coffee again!”
They’d bleeped the “fucking,” but Garvey was right, there wasn’t any doubt about exactly what the kid had said.
He knocked on Lieutenant Neille’s door and pushed it open at the muffled “come in.” “You wanted to see me?” He sounded grumpy to his own ears, but he didn’t care.
“Sit down.” Neille leaned back in his black leather chair, a perplexed look on his face. “Wilder, do you have any objection to making an apprehension using normal methods?”
Eric dropped into one of the visitors’ chairs. “There was a restaurant full of people. I didn’t want any bullets flying around.” That should have been self-explanatory.
“I don’t know if you could get any luckier, considering the guy didn’t have a real gun. If you’d shot him, the media would be raising hell.”
“If I were lucky, I wouldn’t keep walking into situations like this,” he said irritably.
“As it is, the mayor’s office has called, I’ve already had five requests for interviews with you, and a charity group wants to know if you’ll be one of the bachelors auctioned off—”
“Hell, no!” Eric barked, then caught himself. “Sorry, sir.”
Neille grinned. “I didn’t think so. I refused on your behalf.” Still grinning, he looped his arms behind his head. “I don’t know if I can get you out of the interviews, though. This is two days in a row you’ve brought the bad guy down in an unconventional way, and the mayor thinks this will be great publicity.”
“Except I don’t have time for publicity.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “I’m investigating a murder, I have suspects practically falling out of the trees but none of them look all that good for the job, and this circus has already taken up most of the morning.”
“Understood. I’ll do what I can to stall, and maybe something else will happen to take the spotlight off your smiling face and turn it on someone else. But if the mayor says you do the interviews, then you do the interviews.”
“Yes, sir.” Frustrated, Eric got to his feet and returned downstairs to his desk, and the mountain of paperwork that was waiting for him. It didn’t help that grins followed him every step of the way. Of all the days for a huge time-suck to happen, when he had more to wade through than he could handle.
He glared at the thick stack of reports and paperwork on his desk. That was something about television cop shows that really griped him: they never showed the mountain of paperwork real cops had to wade through on every case, every day. Reports had to be written and filed, requests written and filed, every shred of evidence accounted for every step of the way.
He dropped into his chair, and began flipping through the reports to see what he wanted to read first. He knew the report on Jaclyn’s clothes wouldn’t be back yet; he’d just logged them in last night, so the lab techs probably hadn’t even started yet. The clothes had been wet, and they’d have to air dry before they could be tested.
There was a preliminary report on the trace evidence the crime techs had turned up. No analysis yet; that took time. But just knowing what was there would usually point him in the right direction. It might take him awhile to weed out what was important from what wasn’t, but this was a start.
He pulled the report out of the manila envelope and began to read. The first thing he noticed was that there was hair—a lot of it, in just about every color he thought human hair came in, though there were a couple of hot pink ones that threw him.
Garvey dropped into the chair beside Eric’s desk. He glanced up at the sergeant. “Have you seen this?”
“Yeah.”
“Gray hair.”
“No telling where it came from, though. It’s a public place.”
Which enormously compounded their problem, but then again, maybe not. Sometimes when you started digging into something that looked complicated, at the end of the day you found that the answer was simple, after all.
