Payback (14 page)

The trolley car swayed again, and the rumble of the wheels softened. The train was slowing down.

I stood and moved toward the door, stepping over the silent Latino as I crossed the car. His filthy dick, flaccid now, was still poking through his fly, and I felt sorry for the autopsy guy who would have to examine the damn thing. I held my hand to my cheek to staunch the blood still flowing down my neck from the cut on my cheek. There was no pain. I was too excited to feel pain.

With a jerk, the trolley bumped to a stop, the door slid open, and I stepped out into the dark. I didn’t know where the hell I was, but it didn’t matter. I could always catch a cab home. It didn’t seem advisable to be taking any more trolley rides tonight.

With no one on the landing to step inside the car and find the dead body I had left behind, I breathed a sigh of relief and walked quickly, but not too quickly, away from the tracks, my baseball cap pulled low across my face in case there were any hidden security cameras. I jogged down a flight of stairs and found myself in the business district of San Ysidro. Suddenly I knew where I was.

Walking six blocks to the main drag, I hailed the first taxi I spotted.

As I rode home, the Somalian driver, attuned to the night shift, apparently, hummed a tuneless song to keep himself awake. I looked down at my hands as the passing streetlights strobed through the taxi window.

My hands did not shake. There was not a tremor in them.

I studied my hands all the way home, amazed by their steadiness. Where was the fear? Where was the adrenaline? Why wasn’t I freaking out?

I caught a glimpse of myself in the driver’s rearview mirror. My face was as calm as my hands. No smile twisted my lips, but there was no fear on my face either. I wiped the continuing seep of blood from my cheek with my shirt cuff and tucked my hand back inside the backpack. The pistol was still warm. Once again, with the gun in my hand, I felt safe.

With that reassuring metal heat pressed comfortingly into the palm of my hand, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

I thought of Detective Martin the rest of the way home. The dead man on the floor of the trolley barely rippled my memory.

It took me a few miles to realize the driver was humming the theme song to
Leave it to Beaver
.

I remembered back over some of the episodes. Beaver’s mom was a hoot. Always dressed to the nines. Didn’t she ever just strip herself down to nothing, throw her tits in the air, and ride Ward’s boner like a proper slut? I would have. Ward was hot.

I smiled in the darkness as the miles rolled away beneath me.

By the time I arrived home, the gun was once again cool to the touch.

T
HE
NEXT
evening, the murder of the man on the Blue Line to San Ysidro warranted only a begrudging thirty-second mention on the local news. Not only did he have outstanding warrants for burglary and assault, he was also undocumented, HIV-positive, and proclaimed a person of interest in a series of rapes in the North County in which two women had been unlucky enough to contract the disease. Had he been tried and found guilty, the dead man on the trolley floor would also have been charged with two counts of attempted murder.

So basically I saved the creep from a lifetime behind bars where he would have no doubt infected half the inmates around him, not to mention all the innocent victims he might have raped before he ever got there.

While there were reportedly few clues to his murderer’s identity—nothing but the caliber of the gun used and a grainy security tape of a medium-sized man with a baseball cap pulled low over his face and a backpack on his shoulder—the police also seemed less than committed to expending untold man-hours in their search for the killer’s whereabouts. The unspoken attitude seemed to be that the man who took out Hector Gutierrez, lowlife extraordinaire, had done the city a service. Why not leave the guy alone and chase down the criminals that matter? At least that’s what I hoped the cops were thinking. And as little else was reported about the crime in the coming days, I began to think that was indeed the police’s attitude.

For my part, all I could do was try to forget about it. Or at least that was what I
told
myself I was doing. While I began to feel twinges of guilt over what I’d done, it certainly wasn’t enough guilt to put me in a blubbering fetal position. The guy truly was a first-rate scumbag, after all. He might have had nothing to do with Spence’s death, but he had most certainly hurt other people. He deserved what he got. He had also tried his sexual shenanigans on me, not to mention cutting me with his fucking knife. Surely, in a pinch, I would be able to plead self-defense. Although it might be a little harder to explain why I was carrying on my person an illegal and unregistered firearm.

The biggest worry I had about the episode was the cut on my cheek. While I knew it was probably a million-to-one shot against the virus being transferred from the creep’s blade, I still made a visit to a random doctor and had an AIDS test done. If the guy let his cock get as filthy as he did without cleaning it, God knows what was on the end of that knife. A day later the test results came back negative.

And life went on.

To prove to myself I wasn’t completely heartless (and brainless), I decided to put a halt to my foray into vigilantism and retire from the field of battle. In other words, I took the backpack holding the loaded gun down to the basement and stuffed it in the crawlspace behind the furnace. Not because I thought the police wouldn’t find it there if they came looking, but because I knew it would be harder for me to access on the spur of the moment in case I took it into my head to go hunting again. I wasn’t stupid. I knew I had lucked out. If the police learned I was the one responsible for the trolley death, they would most certainly nail my ass to the wall. And it would be no less than I deserved.

So I put the gun away. And in doing that, I tried to put the memory of what I had done away as well. But still, I felt only the faintest twinges of guilt over what had happened. And perhaps that worried me most of all.

A few days later, Detective Martin came to my door in the middle of the morning. I had just stepped out of the shower and was still in my bathrobe.

The detective had finally been to see a barber, and the barber had almost scalped him. His near buzz cut left his face more angular than it had looked with a full head of hair—and more handsome. His honey brown eyes were big and bright in his narrow face, the long lashes surrounding them even more pronounced. His proud straight nose jutted out from his face, hovering over lush lips and a strong chin with just the hint of a dimple in it. As always, his jawline was smudged with the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow. Apparently, Detective Martin was one of those unfortunate people who need to shave twice a day.

But that haircut!

He saw my amused look the moment I opened the door. Blushing a deep crimson, he ran his hand over what used to be a full head of hair, and said, “I know. My cousin did it. She’s in beauty school.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Still a freshman, I take it?”

Chris glowered and reached under his jacket. “Don’t make me shoot you.”

I laughed and ushered him inside.

He seemed amazed to see me laugh. He scoped me out from head to toe as I stood there in front of him, still dripping from the shower. He scoped me out so thoroughly, I felt a need to pull the bathrobe a bit tighter around my waist, which caused him to blush again.

Suddenly I knew I didn’t have to ask. I was pretty sure the question I had entertained about Chris’s sexual orientation had just been answered. Detective Christian Martin was as gay as I was. But his next words knocked that realization right out of my head.

“We have a suspect, Tyler. I want you to come downtown to see if you can pick him out of a lineup.”

I was speechless for all of five seconds. “If you have a suspect, why can’t I just see him? Why do we need a lineup?”

“If you ID him, it carries more weight in court if you pull him from a lineup. We’re not sure this is one of your attackers, mind you. But he’s a scumbag, he has no alibi for the day you were attacked, and his physical description matches yours, to a point.”

“The fat guy?” I asked. My anger was returning in a rush. For the first time in days I felt cold drops of sweat skidding down my rib cage. My pulse was pounding in my head. Even my injured hand began to ache as if I had plunged it into a bucket of ice water. “Is that the one? Did you find the fat guy with the mole?”

Again, Chris scraped his hand through what little hair his cousin had left on his head. He looked uncomfortable. “I don’t want to tell you any more. I want you to attend the lineup with no preconceived ideas. It’s SOP, Tyler. We always do it this way.”

“SOP?”

“Yeah. Standard operating procedure.”

“I know what SOP means.” I took a deep, shuddering breath. “Well, good then,” I said. “Let me go get dressed.”

He nodded. I felt his eyes on me as I left the room. Because I was feeling rebellious, and because I was furious once again about Spence’s death, I let the bathrobe fall from my back just as I stepped through the door to the hall, giving Chris a glimpse of my naked back and ass. I wasn’t sure why I did it. I just did. I did not turn to see the detective’s reaction, nor did I hear him make a sound when I did what I did. I simply left the room and stepped naked into my bedroom to dress.

I had slipped on nothing but a blue dress shirt when I heard a noise behind me and turned to see Chris leaning in the doorway watching me. With my cock flopping around beneath the tail of my shirt I turned to face him, still feeling rebellious. And maybe even a little turned on.

“You cut yourself,” he said, tapping his own cheek to indicate where my injury was. “You okay?”

I groped for a lie to explain what the man on the trolley had done to me. I groped a little too long.

Chris’s eyes narrowed as he watched me. “You’re about to lie. Why would you think you have to do that, Tyler? I’m not accusing you of anything. I just wondered how you cut yourself.”

“How did you know I was about to lie?”

“I’m a homicide detective. I get lied to all the time. After a while you start seeing it coming before the perp ever opens his mouth.”

My heart stuttered in my chest. “Is that what I am? A perp?”

That seemed to take him aback. “No. Of course not. Oh, never mind. If you don’t want to tell me how you did it, don’t tell me.”

He made no move to leave the room. His eyes were on my body again. At least I imagined they were. I finished dressing without once turning my back to him. If he wanted to watch, I was determined to let him watch. And I still wasn’t sure why. At least that’s what I told myself.

As I was tying my shoes, I finally dredged up a lie to go with the cut on my cheek. If he chose not to believe it, that wasn’t my fault.

“I got drunk the other night and fell off the back porch. That’s how I cut my cheek. I was embarrassed to tell you the truth, so I guess my hesitation was what made you think I was going to lie.” I chuckled. “Which I guess I really was about to do before you caught me at it.”

I studied his face to gauge his reaction. He appeared satisfied. All he did was cluck his tongue and say, “You have to be careful. Drinking yourself into oblivion isn’t going to solve anything.”

“Neither is falling on my head,” I joked.

And to my relief, he smiled. “No, neither is that.”

He insisted on driving me downtown in his unmarked car. When I started to climb into the backseat, he laughed and motioned for me to sit up front. “Jeez, Tyler. You’re not under arrest. Sit up front like a human.”

The car was a mess. Coke cans and sandwich wrappers littered the floor. He had to scrape up a mountain of paperwork off the passenger seat and toss it in the back before I could sit down. He drove with a lead foot. His long legs sprawled wide and his big competent hands maneuvered the steering wheel with graceful ease. I found myself watching him, not unlike he had been watching me back at the house.

He glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. “Fucking haircut,” he muttered.

“Actually, Detective, it looks pretty good. You’re a handsome guy without all that hair flopping around on top your head.”

“Thanks, but I
liked
all that hair flopping around on top my head,” he grumped.

I smiled. “Sorry I spoke.”

He gave me a glance, then apparently decided to get back to business. “Don’t worry about the suspect being able to see you. You’ll be behind a two-way mirror. He’ll know you’re out there, but all he’ll see will be his own reflection.”

“Do you really think it’s him?” I asked. “Spence’s… killer?”

Chris looked uncomfortable at that. “No. Probably not. But it’s a shot. And just to warn you, I’ll probably be arranging a few more of these lineups for you to attend. It’s the only way to get your input on IDing a suspect since our mug shots didn’t give us any leads.”

I twisted toward him as far as my seatbelt would allow. “I appreciate your diligence, Chris. I do. And I know you must be working other cases at the same time.”

He shrugged. “It’s always that way. Usually on any given day, I have four or five open cases I’m working on. It’s the same for everybody in homicide.” He turned his eyes to me. “That’s not to say that I can’t give the proper time to your case, Tyler. I hope you know that.”

I nodded. “I know.” Then the words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. “I saw on the news about the guy being gunned down on the trolley. Is that one of your cases?”

He shook his head. “No. And thank God it isn’t. The guy was such a ratfuck piece of shit I think I might find it a little hard to dredge up a good work ethic trying to find his killer. As far as I’m concerned, the shooter did us all a favor.”

I didn’t answer. All I could do was hope the detective who
did
get the case felt the same way.

We pulled into the downtown station on Fifteenth Street a few minutes later. Chris parked in the back and led me into the building through a door off the parking lot. We took an elevator to the fourth floor.