House of Smoke (3 page)

“Go ahead if you’ve got to go. I’ve seen women go pee-pee, it doesn’t turn me on.”

The hell it doesn’t, you piece of shit.

She had no choice. She couldn’t hold it any longer, and she wasn’t going to pee in her pants. Dropping her trousers and panties—pink with lace trim, incongruous with her uniform but she needed the femininity of the ladylike touch; now the vulnerable girlish gesture made her blush as much as being naked in front of this man—she let her water flow.

Ray had the decency to avert his look. Thank God for that, they couldn’t have remained partners if he had looked. They wouldn’t be partners anymore, anyway. He hadn’t been a cop very long, he’d leave the force after this. Who could blame him?

Losario watched her. Bullshit it wasn’t turning him on. What did that wife of his have to put up with? And his daughter, too.

She should know. More than she wanted to admit, she should know.

She turned her back to him to wipe, pulled up her undies and pants. Then Loretta went, and the father’s eyes were as much on her as they’d been on Kate.

“What about you?” Losario asked Ray.

“I can’t go when people are watching,” Ray said, hangdog.

Kate almost groaned in sympathy. You poor bastard, what have I gotten you into?

“Close your eyes, ladies,” Losario commanded. The women turned away from Ray; they didn’t want to see this any more than the young patrolman wanted to be seen. “Go ahead, stud.”

“It’s when guys watch.” His voice actually cracked.

“You can turn your back, but I’m not letting any of you out of my sight.”

The women looked away as the young officer turned away from his tormentor and unzipped his fly. There was a slight dribbling sound.

Losario marched them back into the living room. Kate glanced at Ray, who turned away from her.

It had gotten dark outside, which meant they had been in here for at least five hours. Losario had turned on the lights.

“Mr. Losario,” she began again. They had been sitting there for over an hour now, watching the television, which cut back and forth between the house and different people speaking on camera.

“Shut up.”

“Let your daughter go,” she begged. “You can keep my partner and me and Mrs. Losario, but let Loretta go.”

“You’ve got to be crazy,” he said.

“You’re the one who’s crazy!” Loretta spat at him.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” He grabbed her by the hair, the barrel of the gun hard against her temple.

“Please, Mr. Losario,” Kate said, as calmly as she could muster, “let her go.”

“And you shut the fuck up, too!”

But it worked. He shoved Loretta away from him, towards her mother. The two clung to each other.

“Keep your mouth shut,” the father ordered his daughter. “And the rest of you, too.”

The air escaped from Kate’s lungs; she was unaware of how long she’d been holding her breath.

“Mr. Losario,” she tried again. She had to get him to talk, there was no other way of them getting out of here alive.

“What did I just say?”

“I’m not talking about blame or anything else,” she went on, keeping her voice low, “but please, listen to me. You don’t have to do anything but listen, that’s all I ask.”

“Listen to what? You think you’re going to talk me out of it?”

“Out of what?”

“Whatever I want.”

“I don’t know what you want.”

“I don’t either, but whatever it is, you can’t get it for me, so what’s the point of talking?”

“Maybe I can.”

“How can you if you don’t know what it is?”

“Maybe you can tell me.”

“I just said I don’t know.”

“Well, maybe we can talk about it and figure it out together.”

“I don’t see that.”

“Why don’t we give it a try?”

“What for?”

Circles. Keep him talking, no matter how mundane and stupid. Maybe he’ll bore himself to sleep.

“Because I don’t want to sit here forever watching you holding a gun on your wife and daughter. Someone might get hurt. It could be you.”

“I’ve got the gun, so I don’t think it’s going to be me.”

“If you hurt them, it will hurt you. You know that.”

“I don’t know that.”

She breathed in and out, deep cleansing breaths.

“Put the gun away, Daddy.”

They both turned towards Loretta.

“How many times do I have to tell you to shut up before you obey me?” he asked. “Or do you want me to use this on you?”

“Put the gun down, you bastard, you lousy shit!” she screamed, tears and snot running down her face. “Nobody ever did anything to you, why don’t you just leave us alone?”

Kate stepped between them, literally putting her body between father and daughter. This was ratcheting up way too high and too fast.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said quickly, soothingly. “We’re all under tension here. Let me do this, please,” she asked Loretta, practically begging the girl. “I’m trained for it.”

“He’s been doing this our whole lives, it’s not fair!” the girl cried out.

“Not fair? Not fair? I’ll tell what’s not fair!” He too was screaming now, so loudly that his face was turning purple from the constrictions in his neck. “I’ll tell you what’s not fair!”

He stopped. Like a plug suddenly pulled from a wall, a dead stop.

Kate waited a moment. They were all frozen in expectation.

“What’s not fair, Mr. Losario?” she ventured, keeping her own voice down, barely above a whisper.

“Ah, fuck it. Fuck the whole …” He stopped talking, slumped into a chair.

“What’s not fair?” she repeated. Maybe she could finally get to something specific, something she could attack and defuse.

“I’m hungry,” the man said, abruptly changing gears. He turned to his wife. “What’ve we got to eat? I’m starving.”

“I could make spaghetti,” she said through her cracked lips, a difficult task for a woman with a jaw that was obviously broken. “With oil and herbs.”

“And salad,” he said. “And garlic bread.”

“I’ll help,” Kate volunteered quickly. Be feminine, show him he’s king of the house.

“You don’t know where anything is,” Mrs. Losario spoke, her language slurred and slow. “Better I do it. He’s picky.”

That’s the understatement of the evening, Kate thought.

“You’re crazy,” Loretta told her mother, her voice full of teenage disdainful know-it-all. “You’re going to cook him dinner so he can kill us on a full stomach?”

“It won’t take very long,” the wife went on, looking at the cops. Despite her broken jaw she spoke in the ingrained peppy voice of a housewife in a television commercial for detergent. To Kate and Ray: “Is spaghetti all right with you? I’ve maybe got something in the freezer I could microwave or …”

“Spaghetti’s fine for them,” Mr. Losario said, impatiently cutting her off. “They can eat what I eat or they don’t have to eat anything.”

“Spaghetti’s fine,” Kate assured Mrs. Losario. “Spaghetti’s great.”

“Fine,” echoed Ray. His voice was dull, no timbre, a robot’s voice.

Ray had thrown in the towel. He was no longer a functioning police officer. All he wanted now was to get out alive. Kate, looking over at him—miserable, impotent, full of self-pity and fear—had known the same feeling herself, had known it much of this day, but right now she couldn’t give in to it. In this immediate situation she had to find a way out, for all of them. She was the only one who could.

Maybe she could distract Losario when he was eating. He looked like the kind of person who used both hands to eat his spaghetti.

From the kitchen, Mrs. Losario blandly announced, “We’re out of spaghetti.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Losario groaned. He turned to Kate. “Can you believe that? You see the conditions I’ve got to live with? Every single day, it’s one thing or the other.”

Kate looked away. She knew this song-and-dance, she could sing all the stanzas by heart.

“I could make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” Mrs. Losario offered. “Or tuna melts.””

“For dinner? What are you, nuts?”

“I want pizza,” Loretta piped up.

“We’re out,” her mother informed her. “You ate the last frozen one over the weekend, you and your girlfriends, when you were watching that video.”

“Duh, Ma.” The girl regarded her mother as a relic, a dinosaur. “We could send out. Like they do deliver, in case you didn’t know.”

“Pizza’s a good idea,” Losario declared, foreshortening the discussion. “Call Domino’s.”

“I
hate
Domino’s,” Loretta whined. “Their crust tastes like cardboard. Can’t we order from Luigi’s?”

“Luigi’s doesn’t deliver, Sis, in case you’ve forgotten, and right now leaving the house to pick it up is not an option.” He looked over at Kate and grinned, as if he’d cracked a joke worthy of Jay Leno. “Anyway, I like Domino’s, and they get it here quick.”

Kate watched him, slack-jawed.

“Anybody doesn’t like pepperoni?” Losario queried.

“Just cheese for me,” from Mrs. Losario.

“I want Hawaiian,” Loretta spoke up, her voice firm. “With Hormel bacon, not Canadian.”

“You’d better write this down,” Losario instructed Kate.

Kate felt like an utter fool as she spoke into the telephone. She could almost hear the derisive laughter of the troops posted outside.

“Yes, sir, that’s what he wants.” She glanced at Losario, who was staring at her. “What we all want,” she added quickly. “Could you patch me through, please?” She paused, listening. “Yes, Captain. I appreciate that. Ray, too.”

She ordered two large pizzas and a large Italian salad, no meat. Garlic bread for four and a six-pack of Pepsis, because they didn’t carry Coke

“I’m timing them,” Losario announced as she hung up, glancing at his digital Seiko. “If it’s more than thirty minutes we get it free.”

“Duh, Daddy. Like the delivery man’s gonna have it real easy getting through all those police cars blocking up the street,” Loretta jibed.

“Don’t worry about that,” Kate assured him, thinking if Loretta didn’t put a button on her mouth real quick she could fuck this up righteously. Teenage girls—she knew about them. “We’re buying,” she said. “The department.”

“Another example of why we’re paying through the nose on taxes,” Losario groused.

They could hear the whap-whap-whapping sounds of the helicopters hovering overhead outside the house. One belonged to her people, its powerful light shining up and down the street, lighting up the windows like a sudden lightning storm. The others were the media’s; by now this could be on CNN, live from coast to coast.

Dead or alive, they were going to be celebrities.

To Losario’s chagrin, the Domino’s delivery truck pulled up in front of the house exactly twenty-eight minutes and forty seconds later, accompanied by a lights-flashing-sirens-wailing police escort. As she watched this on the television set—they were all watching the tube, prisoners at their own spectacle—Kate knew this image would be the lead story on every TV news show tonight and tomorrow morning. What a revoltin’ mess you’ve landed us in this time, she thought, not knowing if she was more angry, frightened, or embarrassed.

On the screen the camera was panning the delivery man—a boy, no older than eighteen—up the front walk. He was alone; the shot was wide enough to reveal that, which had been her major demand when she’d spoken to Albright to relay the pizza request.

“No funny stuff with the pizza man,” she’d told him with trembling voice.

“Not to worry,” he’d assured her. Reading her thoughts: “He’ll be a real pizza delivery man, and it’ll be pizza in the boxes, not scatter guns.”

“Get the door,” Losario commanded Kate with a wave of his gun, “and no funny stuff. Open it and step back.”

Kate crossed to the door, her eyes darting back and forth between the room and the television set, and as she opened the door it was like passing through a solid wall that becomes a hologram, and suddenly the force of the lights shining down on the house hit her full in the face and she was stunned. She jerked back reflexively, covering her face with a forearm.

“Here’s your pizzas, ma’am,” the boy told her, extending his arms towards her, two large pizza boxes balanced on his palms. His voice was shaking with fear. He stood a good three steps back from the door, as if he could get sucked in if he got too close. “The Pepsis and salad are in this bag.”

They were taking her picture. The faceless mob. She’d be plastered all over the press tomorrow. She could see the cover of
Time
magazine: a disarmed woman police officer awkwardly juggling two Domino’s pizza boxes in the glare of a hundred police car lights and five hundred pairs of eyes.

“How much do I owe you?” was all she could think to say

“That’s okay, ma’am, I mean officer, it’s on Domino’s.”

“Enough of the jabbering,” Losario called from inside. “Get your butt back in here.”

Slowly, making no sudden movements, she backed into the house, her arms laden with food. Losario slammed the door behind her, and they were in the box again.

Mrs. Losario put dishes on the table. The salad sat in its container in the middle of the table. Kate recognized the utensils from Crate and Barrel; she had an identical set in her own kitchen. That specific irony raised the level of bile sloshing around in her stomach.

Everybody helped themselves to slices; despite the tension, they were all starving.

“I’m going to have a glass of wine,” Losario stated. “There’s an open bottle of chablis” (he pronounced the
s
, Kate noticed) “in the refrigerator,” he informed his daughter. “Pour me out a glass.”

“Please, don’t,” Kate implored him. That’s all they needed, a lunatic with booze in his system.

He ignored her.

“Get it yourself,” Loretta spat at him. Then she mouthed, “fuck you.”

The pistol cold-cocked her across her jaw. She fell off her chair onto the floor.

“Jesus, man.” Ray had found his voice, albeit involuntarily.

Losario spun on him. “You get it, houseboy. A nice tall glass.”

Loretta was lying on the linoleum floor, curled up in a ball, holding her jaw, whimpering.

“You broke it! You bastard. Mean, cruel bastard!” Her legs started kicking of their own accord, like a dog scratching fleas in his sleep.