Illegal Alien Page 2

  I held up the six pack for his inspection.

  “Want me to tuck one of these babies in the back of your fridge for you? I got it from that new microbrewery near Franklin Park. There’s raspberry porter and vanilla stout.”

  “Save me a vanilla, will you? I’ve got to go play racquetball. Mostly, I run around the court like a madman and miss the ball, but it’s still good exercise.”

  “Because you can’t see it?” All joking aside, I looked at him in concern. His eyes weren’t great, and if they got much worse, he’d lose his job. His wife Leah worried about it, although she tried to keep it from him. “Dude, that’s not good.”

  But he waved me off without seeming particularly concerned. “Nah, I can see it just fine. I just can’t aim for shit.” He checked his phone. “I’ve got to run, or we’ll miss our court time. But we should have you out for dinner soon. Leah’s dying to set you up with her cousin or something. Be warned.”

  “Thanks, man,” I said. “You earned your brew.”

  “That’s right.” He sketched a little farewell salute with two fingers. “Later.”

  He climbed into an SUV and pulled carefully away from the curb. Bug drove like an old woman—and not my Aunt Rose, who drove like a teenaged boy—but I couldn’t give him grief about that. He’d confided in me once when we’d gone through most of a six pack that he didn’t sleep well because of this recurring nightmare that he’d run over someone’s kid. I’d had recurring nightmares on and off, particularly after a grueling case, and I knew how bad they could get. Between the nightmares and his sight, I was fully in support of a little over-careful driving.

  I waved as he drove off down the street and then went up the walk toward his house. The pristine white Colonial screamed professional-couple-without kids. I didn’t have to knock, because Carnage, their Chihuahua, sat in the front window barking his fool head off. Leah opened the door before I even got there. She looked good. A little Frozen ice princess, maybe, what with her blonde hair, pastel sweater, and white pants.

  “There you are,” she said. “I was beginning to think we were going to have to knit penis cozies without you.”

  “Who’s knitting a penis cozy?” I asked, before kissing her cheek. “And where in the hell do you get a pattern for that?”

  “Jenn, and I have no idea. You’ll have to ask her. Toss your coat on the sofa and come on in.”

  My coat landed on Carnage’s head, and I leaned down to free him and give him a scratch. The heavy black parka was too much for his scrawny self to move on his own, and I didn’t want him to chew his way out. He spent most of his life trying to live up to his name, but it was hard to stay mad at him. The bugger was cute and knew it.

  Leah and Bug’s great room was one of those super-tall jobs with the giant windows. Great light, no privacy, and every time I went there, I wondered how in the hell they kept the damned windows clean. Of course, the blinds were closed this time, since the sun had set long ago, but I wondered anyway out of habit. I hauled my knitting bag inside and plopped it on the floor. Sitting on the overstuffed couch was my closest friend and former college roommate, Jenn.

  “Holy shit. You cut your hair. And what’s this I hear about a penis cozy?” I leaned over to give her a quick hug.

  “Hey, Audrey! It looks like you did yours too. You’d think we were on the same wavelength or something,” she said, amused.

  “Be honest, does mine make me look like a soccer mom?”

  She tilted her head to give me a closer look. Her cut definitely didn’t make her look like a soccer mom. She’d gotten it shaved down close and tinted red, setting off her ebony skin and high cheekbones. She looked like a rock star.

  “I don’t think so. But I still say you should go full pixie,” she said. “You’ve got the bone structure for it.”

  “And dye it platinum,” added Leah, setting a bowl of pretzels on the hand carved coffee table.

  “Platinum? I’d look like an old lady.”

  I took a handful of pretzels and stuffed them in my mouth before settling down on the couch with my current project. I’d been working on this damned blanket for ages. As in, I’d intended to give it to my son Greg to use in his dorm. He was almost in his second year of college already. I really hated the sight of it, but I was determined to push through so I could knit more amusing things. Like penis cozies. Not that I had access to a penis to cozy, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared.

  “So where did you get a penis cozy pattern?” I goggled at the cozy in Jenn’s hands. It was…elephant-like. Huge. A little frightening, even. “Holy shit.”

  She held it up for my inspection. “I didn’t. I’m eyeballing it. And I’m going to put a little drawstring at the end, for easy urination without getting your dong cold.”

  I had no words. Really, what could you say to that? I bought a little time by snagging one of the bottles of raspberry porter, removing the top with the opener on my keychain, and taking a swig.

  Then I said, “Well, Reginald is a lucky man. Or you’re a lucky woman, if the size of that thing is anywhere near the size of the real thing.”

  She threw back her head and laughed. Reginald was her shy giant of a boyfriend, and although no one was good enough for Jenn, I rather liked him. “I might be exaggerating a little, but there’s no harm in that, right?”

  “Nah.”

  Leah sat down opposite us in her rocking chair. She’d been working on a series of little superhero dolls for her niece over the past few sessions, and it looked like she was starting a new one.

  “Wonder Woman’s done?” I asked.

  “Yep. Moving onto Black Widow.” She held the piece up for us to admire, even though it was just a disc. “So did you make your arrest today?”

  “Sure did,” I said. “One more bludgeoning lunatic behind bars tonight, and it feels damned good.”

  “Did you and Ronda go out to celebrate? You should,” suggested Jenn. “You both worked your tails off on this one.”

  “Are you kidding? We had to finish the paperwork documenting the arrest. And then paperwork to document the fact that we did paperwork to document the arrest. Honestly, being a detective is not half as exciting as it seems on TV. Sometimes I think I should go back on a beat.”

  “You hated that.” Jenn swatted me with the penis cozy. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Besides, you’re good at the paperwork,” observed Leah. “Bug says your documentation is some of the best in the department, and that’s part of the reason why your conviction record’s so good.”

  It was a nice compliment, and I shrugged awkwardly under the weight of it. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. Now gimme a beer already.”

  Jenn stretched out her hand, and I gave her a porter. She’d been my roommate up until I got pregnant with Greg my junior year, and we’d remained friends ever since. I’d better know her drink preferences by now.

  She held up the drink and said, “To Detective Audrey Vorkink, kicker of asses and taker of names.”

  “Hear hear!” exclaimed Leah.

  “That is maybe a little excessive, but I’ll drink anyway,” I said, and I did.

  After that, the room fell silent while we each tried to orient ourselves to our respective projects. My stitch markers had fallen out, which made the process much more difficult, but I wasn’t really bothered by it. I was thinking about the triumph of catching Demetrious White. It felt good but didn’t change the fact that he’d killed somebody. Ronald Montrose had been a stain on society, but he’d had a mother. For a moment, I wondered if she missed him despite everything he’d done, but of course she did. My catching Demetrious White wouldn’t change a damned thing for her; it wouldn’t bring her boy back. So much for my ass kicking and name taking. Ultimately, it felt like all I could do was clean up after the damage had already been done.

  My melancholy must have shown in my face, because Jenn launched into a story about one of her diva actors at the Valentine. She ran the old th
eater, and her stories were epic. This one involved a petition for compulsory breath mints before kissing scenes. Gradually, I felt myself relax as I listened and snickered to myself.

  Then the story ended, and Leah said, “You know, Audrey, you deserve a date after all your hard work.”

  “Oh no,” I groaned. “Not again.”

  But Leah forged on. The woman was dogged for sure. She would have made a good detective, but she’d become a paralegal instead.

  “Listen, you’ll like this one,” she insisted.

  “Leah, I’m just not interested—”

  The loud squeal of tires outside cut my protest short. A terrific crash rattled the giant windows of the great room. We all jumped. Jenn dropped her penis cozy.

  As a trained first responder, I needed to actually respond. I leapt up from my spot on the couch.

  “Leah, get your phone. Sounds like we might need to call 911.” I hurried down the hallway, nearly tripping on Carnage. The dog was yapping, loud and panicked, at the door. He’d piddled on the floor in fright, and I nearly slipped in the puddle as I ran for my boots. “Jenn, come with me. I might need you.”

  I flung open the door, not knowing what I might find outside.

  CHAPTER 3

  One glance at the accident convinced me someone wasn’t walking away from this one. Leah and Bug lived a few houses down from a four-way stop in a nice subdivision dotted with 25 MPH signs and Slow Down! Kids at Play! placards in the front yards. The residents had been lobbying the city for speed bumps for years, because commuters detoured through their neighborhood all the time en route from the highway entrance on one side to the shopping center on the other. Something told me this crash would give them the ammo they needed to make that happen.

  Two interlaced vehicles sat crumpled in the intersection. It looked like the sedan had been in the middle of a right-hand turn, only to get T-boned by an SUV, extensive damage obvious even from the Murphy’s front porch. That SUV had penetrated the sedan like a penis into a freshly knitted cozy. If the driver of the SUV hadn’t been speeding, I’d give up my badge, because the damage was too massive for a nice, sedate 25 MPH collision. The sedan had compressed like an accordion. In the two seconds it took me to survey the scene, smoke began curling out from under its hood.

  “We need a fire extinguisher,” I ordered Jenn. “And fast.”

  She looked stricken and afraid but nodded. The screen door banged closed behind her as I leapt over the porch stairs and sprinted for the accident. A few doors down the street opened as the neighbors came out to see what had happened. The houses in this neighborhood sat far apart, at a fair distance from the street. The expansive lawns looked nice, but they were probably a bear to mow. Leah’s yard wasn’t much fun to run across either, especially in the middle of a Toledo winter. I alternately slogged through muck and crunched across icy patches of snow.

  At least my cardio regimen paid off again. I was only mildly winded as I approached the collision site.

  “Everybody okay?” I called, in the hopes that a response might help me locate any injured passengers more quickly. No one answered. I called out again, eyes searching the wreckage. Still nothing.

  The smoke pouring from beneath the sedan’s hood seemed thicker and blacker than it had only moments before, so I decided to check that car first. Given the condition of the vehicle, I thought there was a good chance the occupants might be dead already, but I didn’t want the car to go up in flames regardless.

  The smell of smoke and spilled gasoline seared my lungs as I approached, and I pulled my Toledo PD sweatshirt up over my mouth to screen out the worst of it. It didn’t help much. I started coughing as I crunched across the broken glass on the pavement outside the car. Good thing I’d taken the time to shove my feet into my boots.

  Smoke fogged the interior, but as I leaned through the passenger window, I could only make out one occupant: the driver. Male, early 30’s, presumably deceased. I took an extra second to double check the back just in case. Sometimes passengers got thrown onto the floor or ejected from the car entirely. I didn’t see any evidence of that, no car seats or child detritus, which was good. I hated working a scene involving injured kids. I’d do it if necessary, but I really didn’t want to.

  The crumpled door and console had combined to crush the driver against his seat. It was hard to get a good look at him, and I had to lean way into the car to do it. I sliced my hand something fierce on the pebbled glass of the passenger window. My hiss of pain turned into an explosive cough as I waved the smoke away, trying to get a better look. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  The driver’s head had been squished by the impact, and his torso hadn’t fared any better. I hiked my way further through the window, feet lifting off the ground to put a finger to the side of his neck, but I was 99% sure he was dead. Still, verifying it made me feel better about turning off the engine and leaving him behind to check the SUV.

  As I wormed back out of the sedan, Jenn came running back out of the house with a small kitchen fire extinguisher. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. Tiny flames began to lick out from beneath the sedan’s hood. Hopefully we could contain it until the fire department arrived. There was a station not too far away, so response time would be good.

  “Leah’s on the phone with the dispatcher,” said Jenn. “Help’s coming. What do I do?”

  “Aim it right at the hood,” I directed, “and cover as much of the area as you can. We don’t want it to spread to the gas tank. I’m going to check on the other car.”

  “Okay.”

  Her face tensed as she squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. The extinguisher remained inert, and she twisted the container to squint at the tiny print on the side, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

  “Take out the pin,” I ordered, already hurrying toward the other car.

  She pulled the safety pin with a sheepish expression and began coating the hood of the sedan with white foam. I skirted the chemical spray and made my way around to the driver’s side of the SUV, hoping that perhaps this driver was luckier than the one in the sedan.

  The driver’s seat was empty, the door still closed. It looked like the driver’s head had impacted the rearview mirror, but there was no other sign that the car had been occupied. The front end of the SUV had crumpled on impact, and the seat had been pushed all the way up against the console, leaving little space for a body. Anyone sitting there would have been crushed on impact if they hadn’t gotten thrown free of the wreckage first.

  I blinked, partly because of the smoke and partly out of sheer confusion. The windshield was cracked but intact, so the driver hadn’t been thrown out that way. They hadn’t gone out the driver’s side, or I would have stepped on them. I planted my hands more carefully this time as I leaned into the car, but still managed to stick one of them smack into a wet stain on the seat, invisible against the dark fabric interior. Ugh. I wiped my hand on the belly of my shirt, but that did little good, and it stung like hell. I’d cut myself badly on the sedan window. Now the blood coating my hands was interspersed with darker streaks of whatever the hell was on that seat. Peachy.

  As little as I wanted to, I had to look again. I planted my hand more carefully the second time, but my stomach still churned with disgust. I scanned the passenger cab again, paying extra attention to the floor. Still no driver. Where could they have gone? I’d gotten out the door in two minutes tops, and I hadn’t noticed anybody fleeing the site. Sirens wailed in the distance, and I really wasn’t thrilled about turning over an accident scene missing one of the drivers. Especially when the missing one was clearly at fault.

  Under these circumstances, I would have thought it a hit and run, but I was having a tough time believing the driver up and ran from a crash of this magnitude. From the looks of the windshield, he had to have cracked his head pretty good. And runners tend to leave the door open when they make a break for it; they don’t stop to close it all nice and neat.

  I tried to
open the door anyway, just to see if it was possible. It was stuck tight. Jammed, maybe, by the compression of the front end. If the driver had climbed out, it would have been through the window, but I’d cleared out the glass when I looked for him—I wouldn’t have missed a smear of blood on it, and he probably would have broken most of those pieces loose as he wormed his way out the window. I looked over the debris anyway, just in case, but didn’t notice anything unusual.

  As I thought it over, I made a circle of the cars, looking to see what I’d missed. Maybe the SUV driver had somehow been ejected through a side window and rolled under one of the vehicles. It didn’t really make sense given the trajectories involved, but I’d seen stranger things happen. The smoke was dark and thick, but at least the flames had stopped. Jenn had emptied the entire fire extinguisher onto the car, and now she wisely stood back and out of the way. As I approached her, she gave me a questioning look.

  “Can I do anything? Is he…?” she trailed off as she looked at the sedan, unable to say the word.

  “Yeah.” I patted her on the shoulder as I passed. Jenn was a tough woman, but she wasn’t used to dealing with dead things on a regular basis. Her temperament was better suited to the diva actors. I’d heard plenty of the stories about the stunts they pulled—demanding special treatment, ripping off completed costumes because they didn’t like the color, and so on—and I preferred the dead things. I took a moment to wave to Leah, who waited on her front porch with the phone in her hand.

  “Ambulance should be here any minute,” she called.

  “Thanks,” I replied, not pausing in my search.

  I crouched down to look under the cars from a variety of angles. I looked for footprints in the slush, which would have been easier if the street around the cars hadn’t already been so churned up. As the first ambulance rolled up, I’d began to walk a spiral, widening the search pattern. It wasn’t like the car had driven itself, so where had the driver gone?