The Good Boy (6 page)

“That’s it, Murph,” Danny imitates, voice squeaking.

“All right,” Zack says. “Enough.” He takes Felis Catus from John-Wayne and the animal curls up in his arms, a reprieve. “Good kitty,” he says, and then pets the cat. He actually pets him. Felis Catus bends to the sudden kindness, madly hopeful.

Finally,
Joel thinks. Things could work out okay. He should tell Zack—tell them all—that a vet could help. His dad knows a real good one. He could fix the cat’s leg. After that, maybe a shelter would take him, or Grandma Sandee could change her mind. And, if Felis Catus ran in front of the car, then it was an accident. Nobody would get in trouble. He should tell them that first—

“Bad kitty,” Zack says in the same nice voice, and then he kneels down and puts Felis Catus behind the left front wheel. The cat stays, thinking he’s protected, same way he stayed under the lumber truck that day Molly discovered him.

Then Zack pushes Joel out of the way and gets into the car, the door hanging open. He looks around at the boys. He says, “I’m the one who hit the thing. This is on me.” He looks at Joel. “And you? You are never going to say a word about this. Ever. Or else I will find you, and I will hurt you. I will use the bat. Understand?”

The other boys, Aaron first, back off as Zack presses on the brake and puts the gear in Reverse. His foot on the brake, eyes on Joel. Waiting. For what?

In all his eleven years, Joel never felt hate like this. “No,” he finally says, his voice breaking, just the one word.

“No?” For a second, Zack looks scared, or like he never wanted to hurt anybody, but then his eyes go empty, nothing left behind them. And then he takes his foot from the brake.

Joel can’t bear to watch and so he turns—he’ll run for his own life—except that John-Wayne stops him, a hand around his arm. John-Wayne is laughing and he takes Joel’s face and turns him by the chin. To make him watch. So he’ll see.

Joel shuts his eyes. Hears the car’s engine. The exhaust.

His arm feels like it’ll break as he pivots, weight back, but he is too small, too light to get leverage, to get away.

Danny is laughing.

Joel twists. Strains. He tries; like the cat, there is no use.

But then he remembers the scratches. Would look for them; can’t look. Doesn’t want to see. So feels, his free hand along John-Wayne’s forearm. Finds raised skin. Traces swollen lines.

And scratches there, too.

“Fuck!” John-Wayne isn’t laughing anymore when Joel slips away.

Joel runs, blood on his hands.

3

Pete is at the end of a bag of Fritos and an ice-cold grape pop when Sergeant Finn comes into the vendeteria. He doesn’t say anything; just drops a file folder on the table, puts his jacket over the folding chair across from Pete’s, goes to one of the machines.

Pete watches Finn in profile, all definition, his DNA cut from military cloth. The guy doesn’t have an ounce of fat on him and he probably does a hundred pushups before breakfast—protein shake, an egg in there—so what the hell is a guy like that going to get to eat in this rat hole?

Pretzels. Pete bets on the minipretzels.

His other bet is that the file folder is the real reason Finn is down here, bowels of the building, since his lips were pretty tight while he had Pete in his office. Of course, there were four other guys in there, another sergeant and some detectives, and booting them out for a one-on-one would have been a real thing. Talk about bets: cops on the other side of a closed door like that might as well be at the sportsbook, the wagers they make on who’s about to lose what.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” Finn asks, moving over to the next vending machine.

Pete wasn’t, because he already said everything right there in the bite report and the TRR, plus he did all the talking in Finn’s office. But: “Pretzels?”

“What?”

“Gum?”

“What?”

“I’m trying to guess what it is that you want.”

Finn feeds a dollar into the far machine and watches his selection spin off the coil while his change drops into the return.

He collects his nickel and then his snack: a slim package of peanuts. Nuts were Pete’s third guess.

Finn takes a look at the wrapper—maybe checking the calorie count, more likely stalling. Annoying, since he told Pete to stick around even though the vet cleared Butch hours ago and that was hours after Pete finished writing up the incident and so he’s just been waiting, every flush of the upstairs toilets reminding him that this is supposed to be the start of three days off and here he is, where the shit drains.

Finn shakes the nuts to the bottom of the package, looks around the windowless room. The overhead fluorescent throbs, a bad ballast; the machines’ LCD lights blink in time. A broken box fan sits on the counter next to the sink that doesn’t work, which doesn’t matter since there aren’t any cups or a coffeemaker or anything. A Hefty Bag–lined trash can and the other table are empty. There is nothing on the bulletin board to consider.

Pete gets at the last of the Fritos, pressing his fingers into the greasy crumbs. When he’s finished he slugs the rest of the pop and crumples the bag into the can and tosses it into the trash and when the silence is officially awkward he asks, “Aren’t
you
going to say something?”

“I am.” But he doesn’t. He pulls out the chair, straddles it, tears the package open with his teeth and dumps half the nuts directly into his mouth.

So then Pete sits there and watches him chew.

When he’s through, Finn runs his tongue around the inside of his mouth while he flattens the package and folds it over, precise, twice more. Then he asks, “Have I given you enough time?”

“For what?”

“To get your story straight.”

“It’s been straight since it happened.”

Finn turns his head, looks at Pete sideways. “Depends how you look at it.” He turns his head the other way, same thing. “No, nope. I think you’re going to have to see it my way.” He pushes the folder across the table. “I need a rewrite.”

Pete opens the folder: his reports are torn neatly in half. He says, “I wrote the truth.”

“I’m going to tell you the same thing I told Majette: the only one who
isn’t
going to bullshit me here is the dog and thank God he can’t talk. The truth according to your agenda or your self-preservation is not what I want. What I want is for you to quit pouting and do your job which, if I’m not mistaken, includes following orders.”

“You’re telling me to lie.”

“Jesus, Pete. Do you want to be a headline again?”

“This isn’t news—”

“The hell it isn’t.”

“Because of Butch? He alerted. He was—”

“I don’t give a shit about Butch. Dogs are dogs. They bite. Who I do give a shit about? David fucking Cardinale. He just posted White’s bail.”

“I’m supposed to know who that is?”

“You will when he’s through stripping your star. And then your last dollar.” Finn sits back, uses a sharp fold of the nut wrapper to pick a seed coat from between his front teeth. He looks disgusted. “People saw you, you know. Here. Today. Sulking. Spoiled.”

“How am I the guy in question?” Pete asks. “White’s a known felon.”

“Correction: he’s known because he’s Felan White’s brother.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means you need to switch your words around like I just did so your version of the incident reads like you’re a good cop and not the butt of a fucking bad joke.”

“The stop was a mistake, Sergeant. I thought Edwards’ vehicle was the one in the APB. I thought the men inside were BFMs—”

“You can say that, but you can’t prove it. What Cardinale can prove is that you stopped Ja’Kobe White. He has two witnesses who confirm you called White by name. That you
said
you knew him. He has, you know—on camera—he has you calling White an animal.”

“Sergeant, I didn’t know White was in the car. When I made the stop.”

Finn raises his eyebrows, straight as his face. “That’s why you’re going to write this up same way as Majette. He heard your radio transmission with Dispatch and arrived
before
you initiated contact with the suspects. He assumed control at the scene, he ordered you to approach the vehicle, and then he requested a K9 search on the vehicle. You were following orders. Not trying to be a hero.”

“I was doing the job.”

“You want to keep doing it? You think—after everything with Katherine?—you think you have a chance against White? You make him a victim, Pete. Not a suspect.”

“Kitty has nothing to do with this.”

“Sure she does.
She
makes this a story. And the way it reads? An off-duty traffic stop for a search that produced nothing more than a baseball bat and a bottle of prescription drugs,
prescribed
to White—”

“It was a sawed-off bat inked with Hustler insignia and it was hidden under the floor mat. And who knows what kind of pills White had in his bottle? All three of them were high—”

“I don’t give a shit if they were floating around in circles above the fucking street. The camera was on you.
Your
dog bit the guy linked to you and your beloved judge. And I’m sorry, but no jury is going to rule in favor of that coincidence.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“And yet here we are.” Finn unclips the pen from his shirt pocket and tosses it onto the table. “Look. I know you didn’t do anything wrong. But we can’t prove that. So what we have to do now is make it go away.”

“I don’t know why Kitty has to be a part of it.”

“I don’t know why you refer to her that way,” he says, and gets up. “Makes it sound like you’re still fucking.”

“You know better than that—”

“Forget the truth,” Finn says, spitting the last word and with it, another seed coat. It sticks to the table and he looks down at it and as he flicks it away he says, “Start talking about what will save you and your dog.”

He pockets the nut wrapper and he’s about to take the folder, too, but Pete stops him—a hand on the file—because Finn is right: the truth hasn’t done a damn thing for him so far.

“What is it, exactly, you want me to write?”

*   *   *

When Pete finally gets back upstairs, the real world, the guys left over from the last shift look day-old, and glum, and the sight of Pete does nothing to rouse a single hello. The handful of others—those who just came on, and should have missed the White thing completely—don’t say hello, either; hard to know whether they’re hung up on the old thing or have been recently convinced by the new.

It’s okay; Pete doesn’t feel much like the hi-how-are-ya. And anyway, Butch has been waiting all this time, too, back of the squad. Though he’s always content in his aluminum nest, he’s got to have his legs crossed by now, so Pete humps it out of there.

Almost out of there. At the back door, he runs into Jetty. Or else Jetty was waiting for him.

“Pony,” he says, folding a piece of green gum into his mouth.

Pete wants to ignore him or else poke him in the eye, that fucking nickname a burned-out candle on top of this big shit cake, but he can’t, because Jetty’s got leverage now. So: “What.”

“It used to be that we did the job and if there was a problem, the higher-ups would make it go away.” Majette sounds reasonable enough, but his eyes are a little wild. Like someone forgot to let him outside.

“This administration, now?” he says, getting close, his breath heavy on spearmint. “The higher-ups don’t care what we do, the job or what anymore, so long as we’re the ones who make it sound good.”

“That’s what I’m told,” Pete says. “Twice just today.”

“I wanna know: did you make it sound good, Pony?”

“I made it sound like you made it sound. I don’t know if that’s good.”

Jetty’s hands go to his hips, an elbow between Pete and the door. “Hey: I’m speaking for you on this. Don’t fuck me up.”

“That was never my intention.”

“What was your intention, exactly? Stopping your friend White.” His smile like he wants in on the racket.

“Jetty, I didn’t know it was White.”

“You bullshit your friends, I’ll bullshit mine,” he says, then loses the smile. “How about we go for a beer? Make sure you understand
my
intention.”

Pete supposes he has to oblige but then he feels his phone buzz, right pants pocket, and it’s Sarah, who already called once while he was in the basement without a signal. He shows Jetty the phone and says, “The wife.”

Jetty stretches the gum over his tongue, splitting it to strings. “Bet you’re on a shorter leash than your dog.”

“Yeah, but I’m not as well trained. Just a second.”

Pete turns away to answer and when he does Sarah says, “Where are you,” not a question, or much of a greeting.

“I’m just finishing up.”

“I thought you were going to be here today.”

“Something happened.”

“Something happened, yes,” she agrees, even though she isn’t talking about the same something. She’s become real good at removing the
co-
from conversation. “Your son is in trouble. I need you here.”

“
My
son,” he says, hating her for her uncanny ability to provoke a trite argument. “How about you—” he starts, but Sarah hangs up; apparently she isn’t taking suggestions.

“No—of course,” he says, pretending they’re still talking; Jetty’s already pegged him as a sop; he doesn’t need more proof.

And then, because he’s going to need an inarguable reason to duck out of that drink, he asks, “What did the doctor say?” He turns around, shrugs at Jetty. “Okay,” he says, “I’m on the way.” He pockets the phone, ready to explain about Joel’s broken arm, but—

“You’ve got problems,” Jetty says. “Don’t make me one of them.” He snaps his gum, teeth showing, and walks away.

*   *   *

Outside, the squad is parked in the lot off Flournoy against the fence that backs up to private property. Pete got a spot right next to an out-of-service unmarked, camouflage for the K9 dog decal the general public treats like an invitation—as if the dog inside is all smiles, too.