Long Way Down, page 14
“They said he was, in their words, fucking creepy. That he wanted to choke them and slap them around a little bit. They told him he couldn’t leave a mark on them, and he said ‘sure,’ but then he got too rough in the middle of things. Blacked a girl’s eye. Made another one pass out. The last girl was wise to him, and she pulled a knife when he put his hands on her throat, laid the blade right under his ribs, and told him to back the fuck off. When he didn’t, she stabbed him in the side, and he took off.”
“Sounds like a real piece of shit,” Pongo said. “But it doesn’t mean he’s the guy I’m looking for.”
Kat’s head tilted, and he lifted a single brow. “In the middle of the action, this guy started muttering under his breath. He said, ‘This one’s for you, Davey,’ over and over.”
Pongo whistled. “Welp. That’s him.”
“It’s like that shitty movie,” Kat said, lip curling. “‘This one’s for you, Jackie.’”
“Yeah, that was my thought.” He didn’t say that he’d just watched that movie – or most of it – with a cop who was hunting the same man. He didn’t think Kat would appreciate involvement with the law. “Only he’s paying tribute to someone else – someone he knows, I guess.”
“Any idea who Davey is?”
“Nope.”
They regarded one another a moment, Pongo absently toweling sweat off his neck and shoulders, Kat receding back into himself, gaze visibly closing off.
“Anything else?” Pongo asked. “That’s not a lot to go on.”
“It’s enough,” Kat said. “Go around and talk to the girls at the Dog if you want. I don’t care. It’s not my problem.”
Pongo sighed. “Thanks for asking around. I appreciate it.”
Kat pushed off the lockers, and made for the door – only to pull up short when it swung open.
Jim Rydell stood in the threshold, in all his shorts-wearing, bandy-legged glory, with his socks up to his knees and his stopwatch dangling around his neck. He looked like the ghost of some 1980s P.E. teacher, and, florid-faced and loud-voiced, sounded like one, too. Pongo was pretty sure he’d heard him call one of his fighters “Mary” once, when he wasn’t jumping rope to his satisfaction.
He propped his hands on his hips and fixed Kat with a stern look. “Katsuya! What did I tell you about comin’ in here?”
Pongo sat upright on the bench, hands falling to his lap. He watched, amazed, as Kat’s face crumpled into something cowed and petulant, his eyes downcast and his lower lip worried between white teeth. “I know,” he muttered, and his voice had transformed completely, small and unhappy.
“You’re supposed to come and see me!” Jim huffed. “You slink in here like a kicked dog, all secret like. Like you think you’re too cool to talk to your old uncle.”
“Jim,” Kat said, pained. “Please.”
Pongo could feel the predatory edge of his grin. “Uncle, huh? Well, that’s news.”
Kat shot him a warning glare that was diluted by his still-caught-out expression.
“Is that long hair fucking up your brain?” Jim demanded. “Making you act like I’m a stranger?”
“No, sir,” Kat muttered.
Pongo laughed, and watched Jim step forward and crush his nephew in a surprisingly strong hug, Kat’s face faintly ill over his shoulder.
~*~
“If you ever breathe a word of this to anybody,” Kat growled, fifteen minutes later, hot breath startling against Pongo’s ear. “I’ll gut you.”
“Whoa, easy. Down, boy.” Pongo sidestepped and finished buckling his belt. He’d just finished his shower and stood now in front of his open locker, changing back into his street clothes; he’d assumed Kat had left, and hadn’t expected to be threatened with his fly not yet done. He did up said fly and reached for his t-shirt before he turned to him. “So. Old Man Jimmy’s your uncle.”
Kat’s nostrils flared; his knuckles cracked as his hands curled to fists.
“On your mom’s side? Or are you a Rydell?”
A muscle in Kat’s cheek jumped as he ground his jaw. “I mean it. Tell anyone–”
“Oh my God. Who would I tell? I don’t know you. I don’t care. I’m just giving you shit now ‘cause Jim’s right and you do think you’re too cool – for everyone.”
Kat blinked, taken aback.
“You a fed?” Pongo asked. “Deep undercover? Yakuza? Owe somebody a shitload of money? I don’t know your business. Why the fuck do I care if Jim’s your uncle?”
His mouth opened – and closed. Opened…and he sighed. He stepped away, took off his cap, and raked his flattened hair back. It was thick and shiny, super-straight and no doubt the envy of more than a few women. He sat down on the bench, shoulders slumping, turning his hat round and round in his hands.
Pongo felt a little like he’d stuck a pin in someone’s balloon. “Look,” he said, tone lapping back into his usual, friendly territory. “I approached you in the first place ‘cause Denny said maybe you can help me. You didn’t have to, so I appreciate you doing some digging for me. I’ve got no beef with you and neither does my club.”
When Kat slanted an uncertain look up at him, he offered his hand.
“Nathan McCoy,” he said, another offering. He hadn’t even volunteered his real name to Dixie. But there was a certain honesty among outlaws, sometimes. Certain kinds of outlaws. “Club calls me Pongo.”
A long beat passed…stretched out thin and tense, until Pongo was sure Kat would ignore the proffered shake. But then he clasped his hand, skin cool and dry and a little rough in all the right places, proving he was someone who handled weapons; that was a language they both spoke, and one that firmed Kat’s expression into something not-unfriendly when he said, “Katsuya Rydell. My dad was Jim’s brother. Met my mom in Japan when he was stationed with the Navy in Sasebo.”
“Sweet.” He frowned. “Wait. You said ‘was.’”
Kat retracted his hand and went back to fiddling with the bill of his hat. “He died a few years back.”
“Shit. That sucks.”
“Yeah.” His look said that he wouldn’t say anymore about his personal life, and Pongo didn’t blame him.
Pongo pulled on his shirt and then his hoodie. “So are you with anybody? Or do you work solo?”
That earned a snort. “Solo. Clubs attract too much attention.”
“We get stuff done, though.” Pongo grinned as he shrugged into his cut, and flicked the patches on the front with the tips of his fingers. “This gets respect.”
“It gets people talking every time you walk into a place. Civilians are jumpy and cops are watching you all the time.”
“Meanwhile, you’re the picture of approachability.”
Kat gave him an unimpressed look. “I’m invisible.”
“And I’ve got backup. Loads of it. And not a single alphabet agency’s been able to take down a chapter of the Dogs.”
“We’ll agree to disagree on the value of working with others.”
Pongo shot him finger guns, and earned a sneer. “Okay, so now that we’re friends–”
“We’re not friends.”
“–how about you give me the long version of this story?” He pulled the matchbook out of his pocket and waved it.
Kat stood and settled his cap back on his head. “How about you do your own legwork with all that backup you were bragging about?”
“Hey, now,” Pongo said, as he walked to the door. “That’s not how being friends works!” he called, suppressing a chuckle when he got an over-the-head bird before the door swung shut.
Ten
Ivy’s daddy, Melissa’s Uncle Earl, had, according to the adults in both their lives, “run off,” because he was, in Mama’s words, “a no-account piece of garbage.” Ivy’s mama, Melissa’s Aunt Macy, worked two jobs to make up for it. She waited tables during the day and ironed laundry on the weekends, spending Saturdays and Sunday in front of the TV with her ironing board and two big baskets, one for clean, one for folded and ready, the whole house smelling of hot, clean linen. Occasionally, Melissa and Ivy played there, but mostly, Ivy wanted out of the house, and with Daddy asleep, and Granddad busy jawing over the fence with the neighbors, the Dixon house was the preferred spot for those endless summer days of childhood dreams and boredom.
Also, the swamp was there.
If their last trip out into its steamy clutches had scared Melissa off from it, it had done nothing but encourage Ivy.
“Let’s go back,” she said, thumping Melissa’s knee with the toe of her jelly shoe.
“I wanna go to the swamp.” Said hanging upside down off the couch, hair puddled on the carpet like poured-out corn oil.
“Come with me,” over PB&J sandwiches.
“What are you so afraid of, you baby?” Said huffily, with a flick to her ear that left her flinching away.
“You’re a pussy.” Hissed right in her ear, the fat of her arm pinched tight until she yelped. “A stupid little pussy who’s too scared to go into the woods.”
Melissa didn’t know what a pussy was, but she didn’t think it meant the same thing if you left “cat” off the end. She did know that she was angry – face heated, teeth clenched, boiling mad at her cousin. For pestering her, for pinching her, for trying to get them in trouble out in the swamp again. The place had lost none of its wonder – she wanted to walk its dappled paths and peer into its hidden pools more than ever, wanted to see if there was a true gingerbread house beyond the shack full of bottles – but every time the wanting became acute, she recalled Pastor’s Keith’s smile. Remembered the sun glinting off his glasses and the curve of his mouth when he whispered in Ivy’s ear, too soft for Melissa to hear.
“Stop it,” she said, rubbing her arm. “We can’t go.”
“Says who?”
“Says everybody! If Pastor Keith catches us again, he’ll tell Mama and Daddy!” And then, she didn’t say, but knew with certainty, there would be no Little Debbie cakes after church on Sunday. Even warm, half-melted and smudged from Mama’s purse, they were a treat not to be trifled with.
“Baby,” Ivy said, stomping her foot, tossing her hair. “You’re such a fucking baby.”
Melissa gasped at the sound of the worst curse word she knew.
Ivy grinned nastily. “Baby, baby, just a fucking baby. So fucking stupid. Afraid of your own fucking shadow.”
“Ivy, stop!”
“Stay here, then, Pissy Missy. Stay here and suck your fucking thumb like the baby you are.”
The door rattled in the frame when she slammed it, the screen door slapping a beat later, loud like a gunshot.
It was the last time Melissa saw her cousin alive.
~*~
There’s a magic word in policing. No matter the division, no matter the crime committed, there’s one word that has the whole department sitting up like dogs with ears pricked, half-eager, half-fearful. A word that can turn them into stars…or land them on Cold Cases indefinitely. A word that’s a career maker or breaker.
Serial.
Neither Melissa nor Contreras said it as they left the hospital. As they parked in front of a gas pump and she filled up the tank while he ran in for coffee and packaged junk food. Nor when they perched on the heavy-duty brush guard on the front of the Charger and ate their pizza Combos in silence, washing them down with burnt-tasting mochas.
“Well,” he said at last. “The Post-It was pink this time, ‘stead of orange.”
She snorted. “Yeah. ‘Cause that matters.”
He let out a long, loud breath as he crumpled his Combo package. “Captain’s gonna shit a brick.”
“And if he was as careful with Lynn as he was with Lana, Forensics won’t find anything of value besides the note.”
“But Lynn narrows the field.”
She shot him a questioning look over the lid of her cup.
“They’re both artists at NYU.”
“That doesn’t mean they know each other.”
“No.” He frowned like he thought she was being obtuse. “But they’ll have classes in the same department. They’ll go to the same professors and move in similar friend circles. It’s a connection.”
“A loose one.”
“I’ll take whatever we can get. We need to hit the school and start talking to profs, interviewing classmates. When the girls are up for it, they can walk us through their routines on campus, and maybe shed a little more light.”
“Yeah.” She had a headache coming on, and the coffee wasn’t helping, nor was the threat of rain: dark clouds were rolling in on a cold breeze, humidity building at street-level, thick and greasy against her face. “How long ‘til the press starts going nuts about it, you think?”
“Oh, I’d say within the hour. By the noon news cycle, there’ll be a serial rapist on the loose in Manhattan.”
The word. He’d said it.
Melissa hadn’t thought it would affect her personally, so was surprised to feel a hitch in her stomach. His mouth flattened grimly afterward, as if he’d felt something similar.
“It won’t matter,” he continued, “how far we try to stay away from TV and radio, that sort of label is pervasive. Gets people scared.”
She swallowed lousy mocha. “Maybe they should be scared.” Not enough people in this city were scared, was her personal opinion. If her hometown could be visited by evil, how could anyone hope to bumble along in a city like this without incident?
“Oh, they should be,” he agreed. “But media frenzy gets people scared in an unhelpful way. They come up with some kinda nickname for the guy, and then he’s a boogeyman. Calls flood the tip line. An old woman saw him poking around her garbage cans; a kid saw him outside a fourth-floor window, like the damn gremlin on the wing of the plane. It’s chaos, and that makes it hard to find and follow the worthwhile leads.”
She knew all of that, objectively. But this was her first time working a case like this on the inside, rather than as a uniformed floater on the fringes. Her first time hearing such tried-and-true wisdom from her partner, rather than a man briefing the whole precinct from behind a podium.
She wasn’t sure what it said about her that it gave her a little thrill. She was disgusted and stressed, yes…but that part of her that had wanted to matter, to do something that made a difference, was wagging its tail.
“Right,” she said.
Contreras drained off his coffee and executed a perfect three-point shot into the trash can five yards away. “We’ll head over to the school,” he said, “but before we do, I wanna talk to the captain and get him to call Sing-Sing. I think,” he said, slanting her a look that left her nails drumming on her cup, “it’s time we talked to Davey.”
~*~
The Dirty Dog was aptly named because it was dirty, and it smelled like a dog…among other things. Pongo secured a seat at the surprisingly crowded bar and surveyed the main room over the rim of his pilsner glass.
The bar ran the length of the back wall, which was mirrored, so anyone seated there had a view of the red-curtained front windows and anyone coming in through the front door. The carpet was flat and dark red with black patterns designed to disguise all manner of dirt and spills. The tables were round and scar-topped, with red-glass hurricane lamps at the center of each, candles inside flickering and swaying in the breeze of a lone ceiling fan that seemed only to stir the air, but not cool it. And it was warm in here; despite the crisp weather outside, there was no need for anyplace, least of all a bar, to be this hot. Pongo plucked at the front of his hoodie and realized the men seated around him had unbuttoned collars and shrugged out of jackets. That the “waitresses” who moved between the tables wore very little, sweat turning their cleavage shiny in an appealing way.
He clocked a stage on one of the short walls, where a woman in her forties was trying to look twenty, failing badly, and strumming a guitar, murmuring low, half-sung verses into a crackly mic.
He’d kept the stool next to him empty, his boot resting on one of its rungs, and a hand touched his arm on that side to draw his attention. The woman who slid onto the stool’s seat, straddled his leg, and flashed a bit of black thong from under her skirt had been pretty, once. Time, stress, drink, and drugs had aged her face so that even the thick coats of makeup she’d applied couldn’t disguise her age. Still, she had a good rack, and her hair extensions were convincing, and her smile was sly when she walked her painted fingernails up his arm and purred, “You know, despite our name, we don’t get many Dogs ‘round here. What’s your name? Fido?” Her grin widened at her own joke, each tooth edged with nicotine stains.
His personal, family connection to Queens and a desire to stay mostly local was one of the reasons Maverick kept him in the city; his charm and easiness were the others. Some of his brothers – Toly, for instance – would have given the woman a flat look, dredged up an insult, and watched indifferently as she stalked away in a huff. Others were too manic, too forward, too loud, too awkward. He, though…he was slick.
He grinned back, sultry to match. “Heh. You’re gonna get a real kick outta this: it’s Pongo.”
Her mouth fell open and her eyes flew wide in mock surprise. “Shut up.” She batted lightly at his shoulder. “It is not.”
“Oh, it really is. You wanna know why?”
Her grin turned delighted. “A dog name for a Dog?”
He leaned in close – close enough to smell wine on her breath and to see the burst capillaries in the whites of her eyes; close enough to feel the body heat radiating off her exposed chest, where her breasts threatened to spill out of her tube top. He laid a finger on his own cheek, right over his freckles. “Spots.”
She laughed, a loud smoker’s cackle. “Oh, that’s good. You do have ‘em.” She traced his freckled cheekbone with the pad of her pointer finger. “Spots.” She hummed, pleased, and her finger skimmed down his throat and hooked in the neck of his hoodie. “Okay, Pongo. Since you’re so cute, and I’m curious, you wanna buy a girl a drink and show her the rest of your spots?”
He leaned sideways, elbow on the bar, at his leisure. “Well, now, that depends. What’s your name, sweetheart?”
