Seth spent two days and nights in the hospital in Weatherford and I drove him home upon his release. The bullet that struck him had nicked his right kidney but no other major organs or arteries. On the drive back, loopy from all the pain meds, a thick bandage around his middle, he had insisted that we stop at a Dairy Queen, where he finished not only his large chocolate-dipped cone but mine as well. By the time I got him to his apartment, his shirt was covered with chocolate, like a four-year-old’s. He was told he’d be on medical leave for at least a month, although he insisted that he’d be back to work in two weeks. It’s been five days since the shooting and he is already driving me crazy with phone calls, looking for updates in the Ruiz case.
The Dallas and Weatherford press had made a very big deal about the shoot-out—one news channel using the lead-in banner “A Second Chance for the Confederacy?”—and announced that a manhunt was continuing for cartel member Tomas “El Gitano” Ruiz. Most of my on-air appearances, captured at the hospital where Seth was being treated, involved me swatting away microphones and glaring into lenses.
The general, however, seemed to hover in the background of every shot, waving to the cameras, willing to speak to any interested reporter.
Jackie reaches over and gently scratches the back of my hand with one nail. “Hey,” she says. “Want to go out for dinner tonight?”
“Better yet,” I say, “let’s do takeout from that Korean place and then spend the rest of the evening causing a domestic disturbance.”
The three boys, their swim trunks comically low on their skinny hips, shuffle past us, scraping their flip-flops against the concrete. Sergei makes piggy snorts, his hand covering his mouth, as though we won’t know whose hole is producing the noise.
“Speaking of domestic disturbances…” I say, burning the back of Sergei’s shaggy head with my eyes.
Late last night, Sergei, or maybe his brother, had been making a racket bouncing a basketball right above our bedroom. I banged on the walls, but the bouncing got louder. Taking a few deep breaths and determined to keep it friendly, I walked upstairs, knocked on the door, and politely asked the boys’ mother, Nadia, to tell whichever son was making the noise to desist.
“Hey, I saw you on TV,” Nadia had told me, her eyes round with surprised recognition. “In hospital, with the crazy old costume guy.” She looked me up and down. Her initial antagonism had been replaced by an appreciative interest. “I didn’t know you were cop.”
“Yes, I am a cop,” I said.
“Your partner gonna get well?” she asked.
“He’ll be fine. Thanks for asking.”
“Okay. I make Sergei quit.”
“Okay, thank you.”
I started to turn away, but she stepped out into the hallway, motioning for me to stay.
“You know manager?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. Jackie and I were the super’s two favorite tenants. Having a doctor and a cop in one apartment was pure gold for Jimmy—emergency CPR services for heart-attack victims, ejection of noisy, disruptive kids (like Nadia’s son) from the parking lot—and anytime we needed maintenance, he usually fixed whatever was broken on the spot.
“Tell him we have rats in wall, please,” Nadia said. “One is dead and it stinks. He needs to do something. You get Jimmy to take out dead animal, I make sure the noise stops.”
I had noticed the faint but distinctive tang of something rotting wafting from Nadia’s apartment but had thought it was old garbage. The heat was impressive enough to accelerate any decomposition process, and a dead animal would make itself known pretty quickly.
Her request seemed reasonable so I dialed Jimmy’s number on my cell phone and left a message for him to check Nadia’s apartment, as a personal favor to me, for an expired rodent.
Nadia thanked me and, true to her word, ensured that there were no more practice games upstairs for the rest of the evening, although I could hear her admonishing the boys in rapid-fire Russian.
After the encounter with Sergei at the pool today, however, I’m not sure how long the quiet will last.
Jackie and I spend the next few hours by the pool reading and talking. The women finally harvest their dripping, squirming children from the water like they’re pulling up fishing nets filled with krill, and soon we’re alone. The sun has moved behind the building and I float on my back in the pool, eyes closed, and feel Jackie’s wake as she swims past me until I stand in the water up to my chin and embrace her. She wraps her legs around my waist and kisses me, weaving her fingers into my hair.
The Ruiz case has all but ended. Let someone else in some other flyblown Texas town catch the missing dealer. My partner will heal; Jackie and I will get on with our lives. Tomorrow we’ll look at another house. And tonight…Korean food and early to bed.
At four I bring out wine in two paper cups and we sit and watch the sun turn the clouds purple. Once the sky starts to darken, Jackie goes in for a shower and I leave to pick up two spicy Korean dinners.
At the restaurant, one of the few in our neighborhood open on a Sunday, I tell the waitress to slip some pork into my order, and we laugh like conspirators. Ha-ha! Crazy vegetarians.
When I get back to the apartment, Jackie’s in bed. I set the food on the counter and join her.
14
I wake in the morning with the back of Jackie’s head nestled under my chin, her whole sleeping body neatly tucked into the resting curve of my own. The skin on her forearm is cool and dark against the sheet and I run my fingers down the length of it to her wrist, play with the stack of beaded bracelets I gave her, one for every year we have been together. Each bracelet has three hundred and sixty-five tiny wooden beads, smooth as beach sand—the days of our lives on eight circlets of gold, a secret Braille of desire, of trust, of love, of gratitude. It’s Monday, and we both need to be at work early, but I allow myself another few moments of entanglement.
When the woman starts screaming, it’s muffled, but it sounds as though it’s coming from above, and I’m instantly annoyed that the Russians’ TV has been turned up so high, so early. But the voice immediately gets louder, more desperate, the pitch soaring upward to an almost operatic range. I hear a door slam open, and the voice is now in the public breezeway right over us. The woman is yelling in Russian, “Oobistva! Oobistva!” You can’t be raised in a Polish community in Brooklyn without learning some Russian, including the word for “murder.” “Oobistva!” she screams again, this time in one drawn-out wail.
Jackie wakes with a start at the last and vaults out of bed and pulls on a robe; I’ve already thrown on a T-shirt and shorts. I run barefoot into the hallway and at the stairs see Nadia above me on the second floor, shrieking in Russian.
“Sergei!” she cries, and I run up the stairs, two risers at a time, thinking that the kid must have really screwed up to make his mother come so unglued.
Standing outside Nadia’s apartment, the door wide open, I see Sergei with his arms wrapped protectively around his younger brother, Ivan. He looks up, bug-eyed, face drained of color, and when he sees me, he presses himself against the wall, and I realize he’s terrified of me.
Nadia utters Russian phrases too rapidly for me to catch, but she points through the open doorway, insisting that I go inside. Jackie has come upstairs and instinctively she goes to the boys, kneels down, and calmly begins asking them questions.
I enter the apartment, but Nadia will only stand at the threshold, clutching her robe with one hand, clawing at her hair with the other. Her voice has dropped to a whisper, and it sounds like she’s praying.
The rotting smell is like an ammonia fog sprayed from an industrial-size canister, and I pull the bottom of my T-shirt up over my mouth and nose. The apartment is in a friendly state of disarray, but there is a large, square shipping box on the kitchen counter, the top open and folded down. At this distance I can’t see what’s in it.
Nadia finally comes in, points to the box, and demands, “Look…look.”
; She takes a few steps back as I approach the counter. The smell is now stronger, the bottom of the cardboard box stained dark, as though something liquid has leaked through. There is a box cutter on the counter as well, probably what Nadia used to slit open the clear packing tape sealing the top.
Closer in, I begin to see the contents: a rounded, melon shape topped with thick, dark fur. No, it’s coarse, black human hair, and below that the sloped beginnings of a forehead transected with scrubby, jet brows. The forehead is crimped and deeply lined, the brow prominent and masculine. At that point I quit looking. With the Saint Michael’s medallion firmly in hand, I back out into the breezeway. The thought crosses my mind that we’ve been residing below a psychopath, and I search my memory for any suspicious visitors to Nadia’s apartment—a boyfriend, a relative from the Crimea covered in prison tattoos.
Jackie moves the boys, along with Nadia, farther down the hall. I’m not ready for them to see my face, so I turn away and pull my phone out of my shorts pocket. After the bile has settled, I dial the police dispatcher, tell her who I am, and ask to be put through to the Homicide division. I provide them with as much information as I have and then I slip the phone back in my pocket. I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I startle, but it’s Jackie, her eyes searching and worried.
I don’t know any other way to soften the information, so I whisper into her ear that in the apartment, in a box on the kitchen counter, is a human head. She jerks backward, but I put a cautioning hand on her arm. “Just keep Nadia and the boys down the hall and calm until Homicide gets here, okay?”
She nods and goes back to stand with Nadia’s little family. Five minutes later a patrolman shows up, followed by several more. The cops go into the apartment and quickly come back out again, asking me for the whys and wherefores that I can’t yet give. I can tell by the expressions on their faces, though, which ones have eaten too much breakfast. Then we stand around waiting for Homicide to arrive.
From down the hall, Jackie signals for me to come over. She tells me in a low voice, “You need to talk to Sergei.”
The kid has maneuvered his younger brother between us, positioning him like a shield.
“You have something to tell me, Sergei?” I ask him, trying to keep my voice calm.
The kid is deeply frightened—although I don’t know how much of the surprise package he’s seen—but he doesn’t want to appear scared, so he presses his lips together and stares up at me with hard eyes. It’s an impressive look and will hold him in good stead six months from now when he’s being booked for something, most likely a B and E.
“Did you see what was in the box?” I ask him.
He nods, a barely discernible dip of the chin.
“Obviously, your mother saw it too.”
The mention of his mother puts a momentary crimp in his hard-guy attitude, but the chin dips again.
“If you know something, Sergei, you need to tell me now. Before Homicide shows up.”
He says, “The box was for you. I took it.”
I feel the hard crawl of flesh along my spine and I think I’ve misheard him. “What do you mean, the box was for me?”
Sergei’s eyes flick toward his mother. “A man left it at your door. A few days ago.”
I want to grab him up by his Dumb and Dumber T-shirt because now I’m deeply frightened—some guy left a box with a head in it at my and Jackie’s door—but I fold my arms instead. “What man, Sergei?”
I think I’m keeping my voice neutral, but Jackie has placed the flat of her palm against my back, reminding me that I’m not interviewing a hardened criminal.
Sergei looks at his mother again. “I don’t know,” he says defensively. “A deliveryman.”
“Was he wearing a UPS uniform? FedEx? A postman’s uniform?”
He shrugs and looks at his shoes.
“Why would you take a box left for me?” I ask him.
“Because…” Sergei meets my gaze and I realize that he took the box for no other reason than that I am the bitchy, bossy, lesbo neighbor. He pilfered it just because he’s a teenage kid and the opportunity presented itself. But he hadn’t opened it, which meant that maybe he had second thoughts about the theft and was contemplating returning it later.
Nadia, who has been hovering next to me, says anxiously, “He had box in his closet. That’s what smelled so bad. I found it this morning and opened it without thinking. I didn’t know it was for you. I didn’t know…”
Nadia begins to sob hysterically, and I see Maclin and two others from his division appear at the top of the stairs.
I tell Nadia, “You and the boys stay here with Jackie, okay?” She looks at me with her wild-eyed, tear-streaked face, ready to dash away, but she agrees and I walk back to join the Homicide team.
Maclin greets me by saying, “I’ve never seen you in your bare feet before, Detective.”
A wall of cops, all men, all eyes on me. When heading nearly naked into battle, it’s best to go on the offensive.
“I’m not wearing a bra either, Maclin, but don’t let that throw you.”
Maclin smothers a smile and looks down the hallway. “Those the tenants?”
“Yes.”
“Wow,” he says, staring at Jackie. Through the filtered light of the breezeway, I see what he’s seeing: the silhouette of a shapely woman with long, tanned legs wrapped in a thin silk robe. The neckline has opened, showing the red tattoo below her left collarbone, shining like a bull’s-eye.
I move into his line of sight and point at the open doorway to the apartment. “What you need to be looking at is in there.”
I follow him into the apartment, watch him peering at length into the box. The open door has diminished the smell only slightly.
Maclin asks me, “Did you get a close look?”
I shake my head.
“There’s not a lot of him to see,” he says, making a face. “Male. Maybe Hispanic. Not young, not old. Days’ worth of decay, though, so it’s hard to tell.”
He takes a pen from his pocket and carefully lifts up the box flaps.
“Damn, Rhyzyk,” he says, surprised, his eyes meeting mine. “Your name is on this box. No shipping label, though.”
“You need to talk to the tenant’s son Sergei,” I tell him. “He says the box was delivered to me a few days ago but that he took it.”
“Delivered to you?”
“Some man left it outside my door. Kid’s got a thing for me, so he swiped it. Kept it in his closet.”
“You’re just making friends all over the place.” Maclin gestures for us to step into the hallway. “No need to stand in the charnel house.” Outside, he takes a few deep breaths and asks, “What did this deliveryman look like?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I was just about to ask the kid.”
I take Maclin down the hall and introduce him to Nadia, who shakes his hand in a formal, deferential way. He spends a little too much time introducing himself to Jackie and then turns to Nadia’s elder boy.
Sergei has let go of his little brother and now stands off to one side, arms crossed, trying to look bored over the lack of drama.
Maclin says, “Son, this police officer tells me that the box in your kitchen was originally delivered to her apartment. Is that right?”
Sergei mumbles something in Russian.
“In English,” I say. “Exactly when? What day and what time?”
“Three days ago,” he answers. “Friday, I guess. In the afternoon.”
“Where were you?”
Sergei points to the stairs. “I saw him down below leaving the package.”
“Did you get a good look at him?”
“Kind of. Yeah.”
“What did he look like?” Maclin asks.
Sergei regards me for a few beats. Then he points to me and says, “Like her.”
15
Seth lies on his couch in shorts, bare-chested except for the large bandage covering the healing bullet wound just below his right rib cage.
He’s eating a Popsicle, dripping orange slush onto a truly hideous crocheted blanket across his legs, one that looks to be a thousand years old. It had, in fact, been made for Seth by his grandmother as an eighteenth-birthday gift, a large Cowboys logo hot-glued onto one corner. He assures me that at one time it had been white.
He’s also dribbling all over a printout of the report I created for Taylor to update the sergeant on the events surrounding the gruesome discovery on my neighbor’s kitchen counter. Seth reads the report while keeping an eye on his TV, playing clips of the Cowboys’ last game.
“Where’s the pup?” I ask, watching Seth watching the replays, a mixture of horror and disgust on his face. I toss a stack of his dirty sweatpants and shirts off a chair and sit down.
“The lovely Shawna is taking care of Rita, and me, at the moment,” he says, smiling now, one brow raised like a victory flag.
I can only imagine what “the lovely Shawna” must look like based on the women my partner’s dated in the past: upscale blondes with perfect teeth who carry expensive handbags.
“Why do men do that?” I ask, pointing at his forehead. “Waggle their eyebrows around like scuzzy caterpillars when talking about getting laid?”
Seth shrugs coyly, biting off the end of his Popsicle.
“Yeah, well,” I say, lifting a woman’s camisole off the coffee table with the toe of one boot. “If you’re fit enough to be gettin’ some, then you’re well enough to come back to work.”
“Right? That’s what I keep telling the sergeant.” Seth holds out his Popsicle. “Want one? I’d offer you a beer, but I’m out.” He grins, palming away some of the sticky residue on his naked chest. “I can give you an Oxy, though.”
He does a pretend narco-nod, mouth slack, eyes rolling back in his head, chin drooping onto his chest.
“No, thanks,” I say. “And if you get too used to those pain meds, I’m going to kick your scrawny ass all over Dallas.”