Over Tumbled Graves (25 page)

Dupree lurched awake in his car, in front of his old house. He checked his watch. Eleven-thirty. He must have fallen asleep. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, stretched, and looked up at the house. The curtains were closed now. He imagined Debbie waking up on the couch and seeing the patrol car parked in front of the house, staring for a while and then pulling the blinds. This must have seemed to her perfectly in character for a husband who, for so many years, came home without ever really coming home.

He started the car and drove off, blinking away his fatigue. At the end of the block he turned on his headlights. His shift had ended two hours ago. He didn’t know that he could work any harder to get himself fired. At the end of his shift he was supposed to turn in his patrol car, or at least call in and say he was going to be late. The dispatcher would be going crazy trying to locate him. Understandably, the brass took it pretty seriously when a cop fell asleep in his car, especially at the end of shift, because for all the dispatchers knew he could be lying dead somewhere. Dupree switched his radio back on, prepared to be excoriated on the air. But the radio
exploded with the frenzy of a call. “Charley-ten, en route…Charley-two, en route.” Patrol units headed for something. “Be advised, the caller says male subject has a knife.” The dispatcher was apparently on the phone with a witness who described a man and a woman fighting. “Baker-six. You need assistance there?” Cars from other sectors offered help.

Groggy, Dupree turned on his siren and lights and stepped heavily on the gas, the idea forming inside his sleep-dulled mind that perhaps his two-hour disappearance would be lost in the confusion of a big call.

He should tell the dispatcher he was en route, but that might just further confuse the situation. He listened, picking up bits and pieces. A domestic? A woman being beaten. He picked up the address, the East 800 block of Sprague, and understood the frenzy. It was right in the middle of the strip where Lenny Ryan was trolling for victims.

He sped down the rest of the Freya Hill, the trunk of his car slapping against the road as the car leveled off each flat side street and then bounded down the steep hill again. He ran traffic lights, slowing enough to give himself time to dodge drunk drivers, and within a couple of minutes he’d pulled up to Landers’ Cove, the boat dealership surrounded by the high cyclone fence. Two other patrol units were there already, the officers yelling at a couple on the sidewalk across the street, a tall Hispanic woman in a miniskirt and a drunk white guy in dirty jeans. They were locked at the shoulders like Sumo wrestlers, screaming and swinging from close range at each other’s heads.

“Let go of her!” yelled a cop Dupree recognized as being named Vasquez. Dupree moved to the other side, so that he, Vasquez, and the other officer were coming from different angles, each with his hands out, trying to calm the situation.

“She’s tryin’ to kill me!” the man yelled. As if to show that he was telling the truth, the woman brought her other hand up and cut the man across his side with a stubby little knife. The guy yelped and hit her in the face and she cried out as they lurched away from Dupree, squawking and swinging at each other.

They danced this way over to the other cop, a younger guy that Dupree didn’t know, who tried to grab the woman’s arm. She jerked
her head up—blood spraying out from her nose and mouth—and swung the knife at the officer, who leaped back. The woman’s movement caused the couple to lose their balance and they tumbled to the pavement. The woman landed on the hand holding the knife and it squirted free, but before Vasquez or Dupree or the other cop could do anything the man reached over, grabbed the knife, and tried to slash the woman across her already bleeding face. She got one of her hands up in time and the knife opened her palm and more blood spurted.

Vasquez threw himself into the man and knocked him off the bleeding, crying woman. The knife flew out of his hand and they rolled off the sidewalk onto the street, and suddenly the man was on top, grabbing Vasquez by his hair and slamming the back of his head into the curb. The other officer was there in a flash, swinging his side handle baton across the drunk man’s shoulder. From Dupree’s vantage point, it looked as if the man had actually been lifted in the air, the blow from the baton raising him off Vasquez and depositing him a few feet away, on his side in the street. Dupree pounced on the man, cranked his left arm up, and pushed his own baton into the man’s neck.

“Don’t move!” he yelled, and then over his shoulder: “You all right, Vasquez?”

“I’m gonna kill that fucking bitch!” the man beneath him screamed.

“I’m okay,” Vasquez said. He started to say something else, but stopped. Dupree could hear a rustle of activity behind him. “Watch out!” Vasquez yelled.

The next thing Dupree felt was a sharp pain in his shoulder.

“Let him go!” the woman yelled. “Donnie! Donnie!”

Dupree brought his side handle baton up and hit the woman and she fell back, leaving the blade in his shoulder. The other officer grabbed the woman and wrestled her to the ground.

“You okay, baby?” screamed the man on the ground and he squirmed beneath Dupree. Not knowing what else to do and wanting to tend to the knife in his shoulder, Dupree cranked a little harder on the man’s arm. “Aaah!” yelled the man, but he finally went limp and allowed Dupree to handcuff him.

Other police cars were arriving, as well as paramedics. Dupree
reached back over his own shoulder and felt for the knife handle. He pulled it out. It was a small kitchen paring knife. It had gone straight in and not too deep, maybe a couple of inches. Still, Dupree knew what this meant. The Big Worry. There were plenty of small worries on patrol. Break up a street fight and it’s like you’re wading into a giant petri dish of unknown germs and bacteria and viruses. Drag some old transient to detox and you automatically start scratching, whether you’ve picked up his head lice or not. But the Big Worry was something else entirely, something that dried out your mouth every time you noticed a scratch on your arm, every time you found someone else’s blood on your skin.

He didn’t know a cop who hadn’t been strapped with the Big Worry at least once. In the everyday buzzes of adrenaline on the street, you don’t notice the bite marks or the dried blood until later, when you’re alone with your thoughts. Of course, the odds were astronomical, but that didn’t matter at three in the morning, after your shift, lying next to your wife, wondering whose blood cells were mingling with yours. Dupree had never known a cop or paramedic to get it that way, but that didn’t stop the Big Worry. This little paring knife had slashed both of these drunks and then had been calmly deposited in Dupree’s shoulder, joining their blood as plainly as a transfusion.

A paramedic arrived and Dupree took his uniform shirt off and then his T-shirt. The blood made a circle on the back of his T-shirt the size of a baseball

“I love you, Donnie!” the drunk woman was yelling as the paramedics finished bandaging her wounds and the cops eased her into a patrol car.

“I love you too, baby!” Donnie yelled back.

“That’s touching,” Dupree said quietly, under his breath. The paramedic applied some cream to his shoulder. It burned worse than the stabbing.

“You need stitches,” the paramedic said.

Dupree rolled his eyes. “Can you do it? I don’t want to go to the hospital.”

“Sorry. I’ll bandage it for now, but you’re gonna have to go in and get stitched.” The paramedic reached for his kit. “When was your last tetanus shot?”

“I had one for lunch today,” Dupree said.

The patrol corporal came by with his camera and snapped a picture of Dupree’s wound, and then Dale Henderson, the zombie-eyed graveyard sergeant for Charley Sector, came over to look. He was a few years younger and Dupree was taken aback by the condescension in his voice, even as he tried to make a joke. “I guess this is what happens when you respond to a call off your shift.”

“I guess,” Dupree said.

“You had us a little worried,” Henderson said. “Why’d you turn off your radio?”

“I don’t know. My shift ended…and I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

Without looking up from Dupree’s shoulder, Henderson asked, “Where were you drinking tonight, Alan?”

“I wasn’t drinking!” Dupree didn’t like the snap in his own voice. It was a natural question for Henderson to ask. “I wasn’t drinking,” he repeated more quietly.

Henderson checked his watch. “Okay, but you understand my asking. Two hours after your shift ends, you just happen to be driving past a call in another sector?”

“I wasn’t drinking, Dale.” He blew a mouthful of air toward the other sergeant.

Henderson shrugged as he wrote something in his notebook. “It’s no big deal. You’re clearly not drunk. I was just curious.”

But Dupree couldn’t shake the desire to explain himself. “Debbie and I split up almost two months ago,” he said. He told Henderson everything that had happened, from the Christian concert to his decision to drive by his wife’s house when his shift ended. Henderson quietly took notes. “I was sitting outside her house and it was so quiet,” Dupree said. “I guess that’s why I turned off my radio, because of that quiet.” He told Henderson about the fight and the knife in his shoulder, and when he was done Dupree laughed ironically. “Just put down that I was drinking. That’s a lot less pitiful.”

Dupree remembered Henderson’s own messy divorce, six, seven years earlier, in that same cluster of breakups as Pollard’s. Henderson had been dating a woman in the prosecutor’s office, a clerk he later married. Dupree’s story seemed to have softened him. “Well,”
he said, “you were a big help with the homecoming king and queen over there.”

“Yeah, I should’ve stayed asleep.”

“You should’ve called in and told someone you were off work,” Henderson said, a scolding tone in his voice. “You’re gonna have to write this up yourself, you know, explain how you got stabbed outside your sector, two hours after your shift ended.”

“Yeah,” Dupree said. “I figured as much.”

Henderson flopped his notebook closed and considered Dupree carefully. “You takin’ care of yourself, Alan?”

Dupree just nodded and watched Henderson walk away. The paramedic finished taping the bandage on his shoulder and handed Dupree a handful of antiseptic creams in small packages connected at the ends like sausages. “After they stitch you up, you’re gonna need to keep an eye out for infection,” the paramedic said.

“Thanks,” Dupree said. He put his uniform shirt on, and gave the T-shirt to a patrol officer to take to the evidence room. When he stood up to button his shirt, Dupree noticed an old man across the street, pressed against the chain-link fence of the boat dealership, watching him, a guy in a security uniform. Dupree walked over.

“I don’t envy you guys,” the old man said. “I don’t know where you get your restraint, how you don’t just shoot idiots like that.”

“Did you witness our little party here?”

“I’m the one who called the police. They were just walking along, both of ’em as drunk as the day, just laughing, and I’m watching ’em, thinking how nice it is that even drunks get to fall in love. And then she wanted to go one way and he wanted to go the other and next thing you know…Battling Bickersons.”

Dupree looked through the fence, past the old man to the rows of yachts and smaller boats in the sales yard of Landers’ Cove. In the center of the huge lot was a glass-and-steel showroom that was in the process of being remodeled. Construction crews had set up a trailer and a small crane, and the one-story, glass storefront had been stripped to its metal frame, which apparently was being expanded.

“What’s going on here?” Dupree asked.

The security guard noted the construction and turned back.
“They’re expanding, adding Jet Skis and snowmobiles. What do you call ’em? Snowboards. I guess they’re gonna call the new part Landers’ Mountain.”

Landers’ Cove had been here at least forty years, and during that time the wealthy South Hill people had been forced to come down to this ever-worsening neighborhood to buy their boats. The owner had continued to pour money into the place, hoping to wait out the neighborhood. Of course, Dupree had seen neighborhoods gentrified. But he never would’ve seen it coming in this neighborhood. Across the street, a three-story brick building also was being remodeled. It had housed a dive bar and two levels of lowlife apartments for as long as Dupree could remember. Now the facade was being scrubbed and a demolition crew had set up a chute leading to a dump truck and was gutting the building of its lathe and plaster.

“What’s going in across the street?” Dupree asked.

“Electronics store,” the old man said. “’Course, if they keep cleaning up the neighborhood, I’m gonna be out of a job.”

Dupree remembered when he’d been on the task force, mistaking Kevin Verloc for a potential suspect, only to be reminded that Verloc ran the biggest security company in the city. “You must work for Verloc,” Dupree said.

“That’s right,” said the old security guard.

“How long have you worked here?”

“At the boat shop? Six, eight months.”

“And how long have you worked for Kevin?”

The old guy smiled wryly. “Ever since the doctor slapped his butt.”

“You’re his father?”

“Paul Verloc,” the man said and gestured toward the fence, as if to show he would shake hands if they weren’t separated by the chain link.

“It’s good to meet you,” Dupree said. “I’m Alan Dupree.”

Verloc’s father nodded. It seemed like years ago that Dupree had been fishing for tips and had mistakenly called Kevin Verloc.

“You ever talk to anyone about these murders?” Dupree asked.

“Couple weeks ago,” Paul Verloc said. “A woman came by and asked if I’d seen anything out of the ordinary.” The old guy
laughed. “It’s amazing what you start to think of as ordinary. I’ve walked around corners and seen kids, fifteen, sixteen years old with a needle stuck in their arm, givin’ some old drunk a smoothie. And a cop asks if I’ve seen anything out of the ordinary and I can’t come up with a thing.”

Dupree nodded. “I know what you mean.”