Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [76]
“We are cooperating with the FBI, so just put your little prick back in your pants. Believe me, your supervisor knows all about it.”
“There goes Brennan!”
And the kid took off, sprinting across the street to where the man had leapt a fence and disappeared.
There were more units now, doors opening, a pair of officers running after Jason.
“Tell them he’s FBI!” I shouted.
The sergeant wet his meaty lips. He had shoulders. Flat up the back of the head. You would not mistake him for a ballet dancer.
“I’m still waiting for you to put those hands out that window.”
He had a job to do.
I could not, up to that point, unclench my fingers from around the steering wheel. I could not offer up my wrists. But he would not tell those bozos they were chasing a federal agent until I did.
“Let’s not make this harder on ourselves.”
“Okay, just don’t mess up my manicure.”
I thrust both fists out the window and immediately the handcuffs ratcheted shut.
“Thomas?” he said into the radio. “This is Pickett. The suspect is secure over here, but her partner is pursuing a rape suspect—”
“—Special Agent Jason Ripley.”
“Special Agent Jason Ripley,” he repeated. “No, that’s the guy from the FBI, genius, help him out.”
An acid ball was rising up from the depths of my gut and expanding until my throat went numb.
Pickett holstered the radio. “Please get out of the car.”
The door opened and I stumbled out. The Santos family was lined up on the curb looking on with glazed expressions as if watching the greatest TV episode of all time. People in the stucco minarets had come out on their balconies. There was intermittent laughter and jeering shouts at the police action in the street.
The sergeant took the weapon from my belt and patted me down.
“We are working a case,” I repeated. “That female adolescent over there may have information—”
“I got to cuff you in the back, turn around.”
I hesitated.
He didn’t.
A sudden jerk on the upper arm twisted my back so it went into a spasm like lightning from hell. The legs went out from under me and I collapsed.
I was proned out, facedown in the gutter. My head turned to rest on a cheek and I caught sight of Jason, now running the other way, gesturing to the sheriff’s officers, who seemed to have finally gotten the picture, jacket open and tie flying as he turned in a disbelieving circle of frustration. His bewildered eyes met mine and I moaned and tried to scrabble to my knees to beg his forgiveness, I don’t know what, but the sergeant flattened me with one hard cut and my nose rebounded off the asphalt as he recuffed the hands behind my back.
A low-rider had gotten past the perimeter and I could feel the vibration in the ground of its hammering bass. Pickett leaned in close, whispering a stream of filthy brutal threats. A nova was exploding in my kidneys and I didn’t care.
Seventeen.
Pickett took a corner fast. Hands cuffed, I slid helplessly along the vinyl bench seat, which stank with an animal stink like fur. We had left the helicopters behind, but the radio still bubbled with confused dispatches from scattered posses chasing the slipstream of Ray Brennan.
“Nice going on the takedown, guys.”
Neither he nor his partner would reply. After a little while I said, “My cop boyfriend came after me. Did you know that before you tried to break my arm?”
“I know that if I were you, I would not make any further statements until I saw my people,” Pickett said in a monotone.
After that we hit the freeway and there was no more talk. I watched as factories and dwellings, streetlights, cranes and billboards, roofs, palm trees and riverines of cars slipped by, passing the window of the sheriff’s car in a smear of black-and-white, a movie shot you’ve seen a thousand times, gaining momentum like a train; leaving behind ten years of work and service to an ideal, until all the constructions that had lined the road blurred into a single run-on image.
The world was lost to me.
When I saw Galloway’s and Rick’s cars parked outside the Sheriff