Signature Kill (5 page)

“He’s not a parole officer,” Jonesy said to his woman. “Who are you and what do you want?”

Behr took in the man’s thick neck. A white-collar geek who made the bad choice of not paying a certain hooker in some hotsheets hotel room would soon be quaking in his loafers upon this man’s arrival.

“I’m here about Kendra Gibbons,” Behr said, omitting an answer to the question of his name.

“Goddamn slut!” the wife spoke from behind Jonesy.

“Shut the fuck up,” the man said to her. “What about Kendra?”

“I’d like to know what you know about her disappearance,” Behr said.

“I don’t know a damn thing ’bout what happened to that slut,” Jonesy said. Behr had to admit that sympathy for a prostitute he’d never met was pretty pathetic, but he didn’t care much for the way Jonesy referred to Kendra Gibbons. He supposed it was either a testament to the mother, Kerry, whom he’d liked a great deal, or a sure sign he was going soft in his middle age.

“It was a long time ago,” Jonesy continued. “Now get the fuck off my front door.” A sense of dismay settled on Behr. He was losing his appetite for dealing with pricks. He ought to have been immune to it by now. It was one of the only parts of being a cop he didn’t miss, but he still had plenty of opportunity for it as an investigator.

“Did you see her the night she went missing?” Behr asked, trying to stay on point.

Jonesy said nothing, but Behr clocked a shrewd spark in the man’s eyes that he couldn’t ignore, and beyond that he was surprised to see some actual, if well-hidden, concern.

“Did she have a problem with anybody? A customer that you got involved with?”

“If she had a problem with a customer and
I
got involved, there wouldn’t be no problem anymore,” Jonesy said, despite himself and his desire to blank Behr completely.

“I can see that,” Behr said, trying to flatter the man’s ego. There was something here worth digging for, he believed. “So no customer messed with her that you know of? What about your other girls, any of them know anything?”

“What ‘other girls,’ douche bag?” Jonesy said, a ridge of flesh on the top of his bald head puckering in anger. “What do you think I do? Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

“A guy who keeps his girls safe—” Behr began.

“Don’t try and stroke me,” Jonesy said, his voice flat. “Plenty of other motherfuckers better than you have tried that con. And it was a fail.”

“Can you just tell me—”

“Only thing I’ll tell you is what I already told you: get the fuck off my front door.” Jonesy bent his knees slightly and leaned to the right, and when he straightened back up he was holding an aluminum baseball bat.

They stared at each other for a long moment before Behr spoke. He was thinking of Gene Sasso, his old training officer on the Indianapolis Police. There were few things about being a cop, and a man, that Gene didn’t know. He spouted long sets of rules pertaining to various situations on the street. He did so with such authority it was hard to tell whether they were written on tablets by the finger of God and handed down, or if he made them up himself. But for a moment like this he’d say: “When a fight’s inevitable, you can’t be too violent too soon.”

“I’ll get off your front door when I’m good and fucking ready,”
Behr said. His voice was flat now too. The dismay was gone. They were now having an entirely different conversation.

“Oh shit,” the wife said from inside the house and Jonesy stepped forward, blasting the screen door open as he came.

Behr had to jump back to let the screen door miss him, and he was off to the side when Jonesy reached the porch. The big man had stepped right past Behr and into the wrong spot. He had no chance of swinging the bat and connecting from this angle. Behr seized the moment before Jonesy turned and readjusted, grabbed him by the shoulder and collar of his canvas jacket, and drove him toward the steps, sweeping the man’s feet as he did so. Jonesy flew through the air and down the two stairs to ground level, where he landed face-first and hard, the air squeezing out of him in a grunt. Behr was right behind him, jamming a knee into his back.

“You had to go and be an asshole,” Behr said.

Jonesy squirmed a bit, but he had no real chance to move as Behr dropped all of his weight on the knee. That’s when things turned into a full-on reality show.

The sound of crying children in the background was issuing from the house, so Behr hadn’t heard the screen door open and shut, or the footsteps, he just felt a mass of soft flesh hurtle into his back and knock him off Jonesy. It was the wife, and the two of them tumbled to the cold dirt of the yard in a heap. This was the concern that police and investigators had when walking into any domestic setting—families stuck together. Countless cops had been shot or stabbed by the very same abused wives and girlfriends they’d been called to protect once they began taking down the husband or boyfriend who had been doing the abusing. As Behr and the wife landed, the woman commenced hitting at him around the face with inconsequential openhanded blows. She began shouting incoherent epithets in a foreign tongue too. Behr swam out from under all that flesh and onto his back to face her, doing a hip escape and sweeping her over easily. He’d gained top position and was preparing to disengage from the woman and stand when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Jonesy was up with his bat. He rotated into a backswing, raising the bat, and at the last moment, Behr
rolled, bringing the wife around on top of him just as Jonesy took a vicious cut.

The blow landed hard across the woman’s upper back, and she let out a moan and went limp. Behr scrambled out from under her, trying to create distance between himself and Jonesy, but Jonesy was less concerned with him than with leaning down and checking on his wife.

“Honeyknees! You okay?” he asked.

That’s when Behr heard a growl and realized the mangy dog had gotten out of the house when the wife opened the door. He turned just in time to see the feral-looking creature coming at him for a piece of the action. Behr swung his leg and connected with a hard, low kick to the dog’s jaw. He reached for the pepper spray in his back pocket, but there was no need. The dog was whimpering, and limped away across the lawn, dragging his head low. Behr turned quickly to see Jonesy standing up and raising the bat.

“You motherfucker,” Jonesy said, coiling and flexing what appeared to be every muscle in his body. Behr rushed him before Jonesy could swing, leaving his feet and closing the distance with a lunging punch. It landed just below Jonesy’s ear, causing the big man to sag, but not go down. Behr dropped the pepper spray, grabbed the jacket collar again, and raised his leg for a stomp-sidekick to the back of Jonesy’s knee. This crumpled the man to the ground, and Behr followed up with a stomp to Jonesy’s floating rib. Behr rolled him over, yanking the felled man’s arm straight, and landed a final stomp to the inside of Jonesy’s shoulder as he ripped the bat free.

Jonesy rolled and writhed, spittle flecking his mouth. Behr straightened, grabbing a breath of air, and tried to decide if he’d wandered into a rerun of
Dog the Bounty Hunter
.

“Now it’s time to talk,
motherfucker
,” Behr said, leaning down and jamming the business end of the baseball bat into Jonesy’s sternum. “Send your woman inside and tell her to bring the dog with her.”

“Honeyknees …” Jonesy said, still curled up in a ball. The common-law wife had risen to her knees and was pawing at her back.

“She’ll be fine,” Behr said.

“Go on in,” Jonesy told her. “Take Banzai with you.”

The woman hobbled over, gathered the dispirited dog by the collar, and went toward the house, pausing only to ask: “Should I call the police?”

“Shut up, and get inside,” Jonesy told her. He tried to sit, but Behr kept him pinned with the bat in his chest.

“Please don’t violate me,” the downed man pleaded.

“I’m not here to violate you,” Behr said. “Now what’s the story with Kendra?”

“Kendra was my good girl, man,” Jonesy said.

“What, were you with her?” Behr asked.

“I’m with all my girls, man, that’s how it works,” Jonesy said, and Behr understood why it was a problem for him to discuss it in front of the common-law wife. “She was a sweet thing. Lots of fucking fun. Called her my little rabbit. She gave it her all. Man, she had a great ten years ahead of her.”

Ten years as a prostitute
, Behr thought, that was the loss the man was lamenting.

“And what happened when she went missing?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Nothing? Did a client rough her up? Did she O.D. and you had to get rid of her body?” Behr pressed the bat along with the inquiry. “Or was it you?” He thought of the hundred grand at the end of it. He thought of an answer for Kerry Gibbons.

“None of that. No. Okay, here’s all I know: A girl—someone else’s girl—this janky-ass bitch thinks she saw Kendra get into a car up on East Tenth Street. She don’t remember if that was the last time she saw Kendra or not, but she thinks it was.”

“What kind of car?” Behr asked.

“She don’t know. A blue one.”

“Two-door? Four? Foreign or American made?”

“She don’t know.”

“What about the driver?”

“White.”

“White? That’s it? Male or female?”

“A dude.”

“A white dude,” Behr said. “How old? Tall or short? Bearded or clean-shaven? Bald?”

“A white dude. She thinks. That’s it. Believe me, I looked into this thing. I spent a month searching for Kendra. I opened whup-ass on every bitch on the walk and every broke-ass pimp that ran ’em, trying to get some info. I looked for this blue-car-white-dude every night, man. Figured I’d find the cocksucker and get my girl back. Or find out where she went if she left, or whatever happened to her. Police didn’t do a damn thing.
I
dogged this bitch through and through and through, because that’s how much it mattered to me. But I came up dry.”

“If she had run off and you’d found her, what would you have done?” Behr asked. He was more curious than anything on this point.

“I’da gone and dragged her ass back. No girl of mine has the right to leave ’less I tell her to go,” Jonesy said, as if it were obvious.

Behr appraised the man on the ground. He was no humanitarian, but he seemed genuine in recounting his efforts to find Kendra, and more so about the warped kernel of feeling he clearly had for her.

“Who’s the girl—the janky-ass one? Is she Samantha Williams?”

“Her name’s Shantae.
Shantae
Williams.”

If she’d given the police her real name, Samantha, but lived as Shantae for a long time, that would explain why Behr hadn’t been able to locate her.

“You seen her lately?” Behr demanded.

“No.”

“You think you can find her again?”

“Think so,” Jonesy said.

“Good.” Behr flung the bat across the yard, where it landed with a clunk in a pile of refuse. He put a knee on Jonesy’s belly and dropped a business card down on him.

“If Shantae sees this guy and this car again, I want her to call you and then I want you to call me,” Behr told him.

Jonesy nodded slowly.

“And if I
ever
have occasion to come talk to you again and you welcome me with a baseball bat, I will break every fucking limb off your body.”

Jonesy just lay there frozen as Behr stood and, to prove his point, went to the refrigerator, opened the door, and ripped it backward off its hinges. Then he picked up his pepper spray and walked away.

Beating up pimps didn’t come cheap, and Behr waited for any one of the countless potential injuries that went along with that kind of activity to announce itself. At his age even winning a fight could result in a blown shoulder, a torn calf, a dislocated wrist or ankle, at best. But this time there seemed to be none. He’d come through his tussle with Jonesy clean. Of course he had tweaked his neck when the woman tackled him, and his foot was sore—bruised but not broken—due to his kick, because fighting a pimp’s wife and dog didn’t come cheap either.