House of Smoke
| House of Smoke |
| JF Freedman |
| USA |
| (1996) |
years ago, Kate Blanchard and her partner failed to stop a tragedy.
When a man killed his family and then himself, Kate didn’t even fire a
shot. Two years later, Kate is divorced, and trying to make it as a
private detective.
hires Kate to look into the suspicious death of her lover, a marijuana
smuggler who committed suicide in jail. As Kate gets sucked into the
darkness of the Sparks family, she learns that the rich and powerful can
be just as dangerous as a madman with a gun.
J. F. Freedman
TO MY MOTHER, GLADYS S. FREEDMAN (1914–1989),
AND TO MY SISTER, SARA FREEDMAN:
TWO FORMIDABLE WOMEN
Prologue OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, 1993
Santa Barbara, California 1995: TWO YEARS LATER
11 TWO WHITE CHICKS SITTING AROUND
16 MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, 1993
INSIDE THE HOTHOUSE
“M
R. LOSARIO, WOULD YOU
point that gun down, please?” Kate’s underarms were soaking wet. “Just point it away from Loretta and Mrs. Losario, okay? Would you, please?”
For the umpteenth time already she’d made this request, trying to make it sound as reasonable as asking him to pass the goddamn butter. The screaming was all inside her head:
Put the fucking gun down, you crazy-ass fucker, you’re going to kill us by fucking accident, I don’t want to die from some fucking accident!
Not the kind of language that should be going on inside a proper lady’s head, as if she’d ever been one. Her mother was still alive, though, and had standards that had to be met. Her mother hated that she was a cop, her dreams for this daughter had been so much grander.
The man was deranged. You have to talk respectfully, be deferential. He’s the king, in his own house especially.
Her voice sounded foreign to her, distant, like it was coming out of a tinny tape recorder across the room and she was a third party listening to it. A voice belonging to a woman trying like hell not to sound like she was scared out of her mind, but not quite succeeding.
“Nobody wants you to put it down—just don’t point right in her face, okay?”
That was an outrageous lie, of course, which she didn’t believe and didn’t expect him to, either. Putting the gun down was the entire point of all this: disarming a crazy person without anyone getting killed.
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Dirty Harriet?” His laugh at his own childish joke was short and mirthless, a barking har-har-har.
She had her blue-wool-covered butt parked firmly on the edge of the practically brand-new-out-of-the-carton brown-tufted La-Z-Boy, trying as mightily as she could to maintain steady eye contact with Mr. Losario, who talked like a rational human being but had gone completely round the bend. A rational human being doesn’t hold a locked and loaded pistol on his wife and daughter.
She was trying to apply what she’d been taught several years before in the police academy, when she’d taken the three-day training seminar in dealing with a hostage situation. Make the offender look at you, keep your look locked with his. Whatever it takes, keep that eye contact. She’d take her clothes off if she had to, to keep him looking at her.
Her own gun, a regulation-issue .40 S&W, was on the floor, in the corner. No help to her. Ray’s, too. Neither of them could do a fucking thing. She hated this feeling of powerlessness. He’d blow them both away before they could take two steps. Or even worse—do the woman and kid. He was crazy. The problem was, he didn’t know that and he never would, not even if—strike that,
when
,
if
could not be part of this equation—they somehow managed to overpower him or talk him into voluntarily giving up the gun, either way, so that the paramedics could take him out of here in a straitjacket. He could spend the rest of his life in a padded cell on the heaviest medications in the world and he’d still be crazy.
He was sweating. Flop sweat. His armpits were stained under his shirt, large moist circles. The odor permeated the room. He was overweight, flabby, way out of shape. The sparse hair on the top of his head was also wet, plastered down across his pale blotchy scalp.
“Mr. Losario?”
He was looking at her but he wasn’t seeing her. She was afraid of that. Was he not hearing her as well? Was he off somewhere, in some private world of his own, shut off from her?
“Mr. Losario?”
“What?” he asked, with the petty tyrant’s perpetual impatience. “What do you want?”
“To make sure we’re still all here together,” she answered, remembering to smile at him. Nothing suggestive, a professional smile, nonjudgmental.
“Looks like it to me.” He glanced around the room, from his wife to his daughter, to Ray, who was sitting on the other chair, his hands on his knees, to her. “Looks like we’re all here. One nigger cop”—Ray breathed in deeply but didn’t move a muscle—“one pussy cop, Miss Teenage Prom Queen, the missus, and me, myself, and I.”
He’d never use that kind of language ordinarily, she thought. “Nigger.” “Pussy.” He wasn’t the type. Scared to death of women, yes, but not bigoted, racist. It was the time and place, his need to show mastery. And that made this worse, because he was in waters for which he had no charts.
Losario pushed back a section of the oval throw rug with his toe. “Anybody else here? No? Good.” He stared at her. “All present and accounted for. Satisfied?” A sardonic sneer, a cheap knockoff from a B-movie heavy.
“Thank you,” she said. Trying to keep the rage from her voice. Little Mary Sunshine, that’s what she had to be. A small, powerless object; what a man like this demanded in a woman. All women, his wife and daughter most importantly.
She and Ray Burgess, her partner of five months, had only been out of the Academy six weeks when they’d been teamed up. Her old partner, Sam “The Man” Gonzalez, had retired on three-quarters disability from a car crash while on duty in the pursuit of a fleeing suspect—the fact that he’d been drunk out of his gourd and was on his way home alone was conveniently swept under the rug at the discharge hearing. Burgess and she had taken the call.
Investigate a domestic quarrel. In cop language, a 415F, the “F” for “family.”
She’d handled dozens of family feuds over the years. Occasionally there would be some heavy-duty physical action, injuries from kitchen knives or blunt objects—hammers, ashtrays—that required a trip to the emergency room; but mostly it was blusters, threats. She herself had never been hurt, not a scratch, knock on wood, but still, her stomach would tie up in a knot every time a 415F came over the car’s speaker, because you never knew. A family blowup could turn violent in a heartbeat. Some of the strongest passions and most tragic behavior come out of husband-wife fights.
This had been the one.
The phone rang across the room. She almost jumped out of her skin from the sudden jolt of the sound.
“May I?” she asked. Her heart was pounding like a jackhammer.
“Be my guest.” He gestured towards it with the gun, his voice sour with anger and resentment. “It’s for you, anyways.”
This was true—all normal communication into the house had been cut. The only line to the world outside was a digital patch-in that connected them to the car phone of her captain, Phil Albright, who was standing in the street, less than fifty yards away.
She crossed the room, taking a peek at the television set in the corner. They were on TV, a live feed. The cameras were right outside the front door. Half the block was lit up like a baseball diamond, a cluster of spotlights beaming down on them. At the moment the camera was shifting from the house and was panning the street and sidewalk. Christ, she realized, there must be over a hundred people out there—cops, press, ordinary citizens behind the police lines. Ghouls. It was turning into a full-blown media circus.
“Hello?” She spoke tentatively, even though she knew who was on the other end.
“How’re you holding up, Kate?” Captain Albright’s voice was down-home, laconic. A cop’s voice, trained to eliminate the highs and lows.
“Still here,” she replied, trying to keep her voice as neutral as possible, keeping her eyes on Mr. Losario, who was watching her keenly.
“How’s the squirrel? Still as squirrelly?”
“More or less.” She didn’t want to say anything Losario could misunderstand, use as an excuse.
“Things are getting kind of antsy out here,” he said. “The damn TV people have blown this up into a first-class clusterfuck. I sure would like an opportunity to sneak a sharpshooter around the back of the house, see if we could get a shot through a side window, end it fast.”
“Not a good idea, sir,” she responded with alarm. “I think that would be …”; she didn’t know what word to use that wouldn’t maybe inflame the man with the gun.
“Counterproductive?” he finished for her.
“Exactly, sir. I mean
very
,” she added, to make sure he fully understood her position. He was the captain and she was a patrolman, but she was in here. It was her life and her partner’s and the family’s on the line here, no one else’s.
There was a pause from his end. She could hear the wheels turning inside his head.
“It’s your call to make,” he said finally. “For now. As long as it isn’t going anywhere nasty.” He paused. “The natives are getting restless.”
She knew the debate that was going on: the press, the politicians, the police brass. All players, all with their own agendas. She glanced outside, through the crack in the curtains. Dozens of officers were lining the street, dressed in full riot gear, holding their heavy artillery at port arms. Ready to storm the house if given the command.
There were two factions out there: One wants to wait them out, the other wants to storm the place. Somewhere the powers that be were discussing the pros and cons. On the one hand was what happened when they moved on David Koresh. On the other hand, this man inside had disarmed two officers. He was crazy. He needed to be neutralized.
A broad and a rookie.
That’s what some of the men out there were saying to each other, she could almost hear their voices, dripping with contempt.
What did you expect?
It looked like all of the media in the whole Bay Area was on this street. A lot of movement, cameras pointed right at this window. They couldn’t see her; maybe a shadow. She didn’t want to be seen. Being a celebrity wasn’t her style, she was hating all this. Go away, you parasitic bastards, she thought. She knew there was no chance of that, but she wished it anyway. They were news in the making, the genuine article.
“I can believe that, sir,” she answered Captain Albright, getting back to the matter at hand. A shitload more than any of you, she thought to herself, glancing at Ray, her partner, whose thoughts she was reading like they were her own.
“Check back with you in a little while.”
“Good. Thank you, sir.”
The phone went dead in her hand. She set it down in the cradle, moved back towards the center of the room.