Читать книгу The Memory Killer - J. Kerley A. - Страница 15

The locale was strip malls and free-standing shops, a laundromat on the corner, a pizzeria across the street. A light breeze coaxed tree-line palms into a green hula against a cerulean sky. Down the block was a fortune teller, a second-hand clothier, a storefront tacquería, a muffler shop and a uniform store. The little shops were there because the transitional nature of the street – straddling between slums and gentrification – meant low rents, but the street was a four-lane thoroughfare in and out of downtown, with ample traffic to attract customers.

Centering the block was Gary’s Fantasy World, the brightest structure on the street, freshly painted and as white as snow. A broad front window beamed with neon signage pulsing New and Vintage Comics and Video Games and Collectors Welcome. There were two upstairs windows, both with closed curtains.

Lonnie Canseco, a senior colleague, was a block behind. He’d assembled a unit of two more FCLE dicks and alerted Miami-Dade, who’d provided four patrol cars with two-man teams. Also, as a precaution, a SWAT unit was a block away. We could have gone with a major-league assault, but it was my call, and I preferred surgical strikes to carpet bombing. If that failed, I was fine with Bombs Away.

I radioed Canseco to pull down the alley behind Ocampo’s shop in case the guy bolted out the back. My phone rang, Roy. “You’re clear, bud,” he said. “The AG says it’s fine. Nail the fucker, but be careful, right?”

Gary’s Fantasy World reminded me of an old-school record store, except the wooden bins held glassine-sleeved comic books instead of vinyl albums. Hand-lettered signs hung above bins, denoting Superman, Batman, Fantastic Four and so forth. A far wall held video games. Two glass counters in the rear held more comics. I took it they were the crème de la crème, priced from two hundred and fifty to over two thousand dollars.

“Two grand for a freakin’ comic?” Gershwin whispered.

I heard a rustle and spun to see a young male enter from a door behind the counter, early twenties, skinny as a rail, with the bleached pallor that comes from junk food and avoidance of sunlight. There was a single tattoo inside his right arm: Spider-Man in lavish color. Per current trend he affected a knit woolen hat of thick yarn, black, pulled almost to his eyebrows. Unwashed brown hair poured several inches from the hat, ending in jagged spikes.

The kid’s brown eyes stared at us without saying a word. I doubt we resembled the typical comic-book purchaser, though what did I know?

“We need to see Mr Ocampo,” Gershwin said.

“He’s not in.”

I pulled the badge, evoking puzzlement from the kid. “Where is he?” I asked. “Mr Ocampo.”

The kid looked toward the ceiling. Or maybe heaven. “Upstairs.”

“Can you call him down here?”

“Gary don’t come down here a whole lot.”

A voice appeared in the air, wheezy and almost breathless. “This is Gary Ocampo. What do you want?”

My eyes went to the corners, the front door, back. No one.

“Where are you?” I said.

“Jonathan just told you: I’m upstairs.”

He was talking through speakers. I looked around but couldn’t see the camera. “We need to talk to you, now, Mr Ocampo,” I said. “We need you downstairs.”

“I can’t,” the disembodied voice said. “Have Jonathan take you to the elevator.”

I pulled the clerk close, figuring the store was thick with microphones. “Ocampo,” I whispered. “Is he armed, Jonathan?”

“Hunh?”

“Don’t lie to me, kid. Is Ocampo sitting on a stack of guns up there?”

The clerk looked at me like I’d started making chicken sounds. “Fuck no. Gary usually ain’t even sitting.”

“What’s that mean?” Gershwin said.

The clerk rolled his eyes and waved us through the door behind the counter and into a room of inventory, boxes of magazines and games in various stages of sorting and packaging. The kid pointed to a grated opening in the corner. “The elevator. Push ‘up’ and guess what … it takes you up.”

The scene was less threatening than odd. I keyed my mic and told Canseco and the unit we were heading upstairs, then stepped into the elevator. It wasn’t a freight elevator, but not one of those house-sized lifts either; a meter and a half square or so, big enough to carry a large fridge with a couple guys beside it. It groaned between floors and stopped behind a gray panel. Gershwin and I were pressed to the sides and had our weapons at our sides, just in case.

I slid the gray panel aside, finding a room so dark we were momentarily blinded. All I could see, backlit against the vertical bands of light between the blinds, was a pale hill constructed on a low table and for a split-second my mind showed me Richard Dreyfuss creating the mud tower in Close Encounters. At the base of the hill, against the wall, was a pair of flat-screen televisions, the screens dead.

Was the rapist hiding behind the mound … aiming a weapon at our heads?

Someone sneezed. “Ocampo?” I said, crouching in the elevator. “Where are you?”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” sighed a whining voice. “Stop your dawdling and come in.”

Stepping into the room was like entering a fog made from body stink, stale air and, for some reason, a background smell of onions. Drawing closer, the mound resolved into a rounded blue sheet atop not a low table, but a large bed. The apex of the sheet fell like a ski slope to a pudgy roll of chin. The chin rounded up into a head atop fluffy pillows.

I stepped closer and heard a whirring sound as the head began to ascend, the bed mechanically inclining. Curious blue beads of iris watched me as Ocampo rose to sitting position.

“What do you think I’ve done that you enter my home with drawn weapons?” His voice was angry.

“May I see your hands please, Mr Ocampo?” I instructed.

“You think I have a gun? Is that it?”

“Hands in sight, dammit.”

He sighed and produced two fat hands, the fingers like pink overstuffed sausages. He wiggled them. “See a gun anywhere? What on earth do you want?”

“We’re interested in where you were this morning,” Gershwin said.

Ocampo’s eyes squinted tight in what I took as anger but instead exploded in a huge sneeze. He scrabbled for a tissue from a box beside his pillow. He blew his nose, rolled the tissue in a ball and dropped it in a basket beside the bed frame, almost full of used tissue. I was getting a bad feeling about this bust.

“What did you say?” Ocampo demanded, his eyes red and wet.

“This morning,” Gershwin repeated. “About daybreak. Can you tell me where you were?”

Ocampo stared in what seemed disbelief. He snapped the plump fingers, making a thub sound. “Oh, now I remember. I was running a marathon.”

“Be serious, Mr Ocampo.”

“Then I seriously assure you I was right here. Why?”

“We’ll ask the questions, Mr Ocampo,” I said, studying the mass beneath the sheet. His body couldn’t be that large. It had to be a ruse.

“What is your mobility, sir?” I asked as my hand crept toward the edge of the sheet.

Again the stare of disbelief. “My mobility?”

“It’s important.”

“I walk around the block when weather permits. Sometimes two or three times a week.” He sneezed again, repeated the motion with the tissue.

I reached out and snapped away Ocampo’s sheet, expecting to find the body of a football linesman padded out with pillows. Instead I saw a vast landscape of naked flesh, folded and dimpled and lolling, the man’s breasts drowsing down his sides like deflated porpoise heads, his genitals hidden under rumpled pouches of pimpled overhang. Several wadded tissues tumbled to the floor.

“YOU SWINE!” Ocampo screeched, scrabbling to cover himself as his face reddened. “You filthy PERVERT! You SCUM!”

I shot Gershwin a glance. Something was hideously awry. I returned the edge of the sheet to Ocampo’s hand and he yanked it back in place.

“You NAZI FILTH!” he railed. “My lawyers will destroy you!”

Gershwin nodded me to the corner of the room. “This guy couldn’t assault a box turtle, Big Ryde,” he whispered. “He’d never catch it.”

“What are you talking about over there?” Ocampo railed. “What are you plotting?”

I nodded. No matter how dangerous or desperate Ocampo’s inclinations, he would be too slowed by his volume to abduct anyone. As for slyly doping someone’s drink, the floor would shake with his approach, as surreptitious as a tractor.

“Somewhere along the way the DNA got messed up, Zigs.”

“What do we do?”

“Do you hear me you, you … fascists?”

I shot a glance at Ocampo, his face equal measures of anger and humiliation. “First, we try to mollify him. If this hits the headlines, Roy’ll tear his hair out.”

“It’s harassment, pure and simple! Storm troopers!”

We both shot glances at the huge man, scrabbling through a tabletop of crumpled tissues and allergy meds and finding an iPhone. He brandished it like a scimitar. “I’m phoning my lawyers. Then I’m calling every news station in town.”

My mind raced. Ocampo was taking photos of us, grist for his lawyer, no doubt. “I’m gonna call the lab and give them hell,” I whispered. “Get ready.”

“What lab? Who?” Gershwin said. Then, “Oh.”

I retreated to the elevator and fake-dialed my cell. “Give me fucking Pedersen,” I growled, tapping my toe impatiently. When I saw Ocampo’s eyes move to me, the act began.

“YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOT,” I howled. “We’re at Ocampo’s house now. GARY-FUCKING-OCAMPO. IT’S NOT HIM! Never mind why, you asshole … It was your goddamn lab that ID’d this poor man as the perp. NO FUCKING EXCUSES. We embarrassed an innocent man and MADE OURSELVES LOOK LIKE A PAIR OF HORSES’ ASSES IN THE BARGAIN.”

“What’s he doing?” Ocampo demanded of Gershwin. “Who’s he talking to?”

“Some lab moron whose ass he’s personally gonna kick when we leave here, sir,” Gershwin said.

“I should drag you over here to apologize to Mr Ocampo in person,” I snarled. “You will?” I held my hand over the cell and turned to Ocampo. “Excuse me, sir, would it help if we had the guy responsible for this—” I pulled the phone to my mouth “AMAZING FUCK-UP”, then re-aimed it at Ocampo – “come over here and apologize to you in person?”

Ocampo looked confused. The invaders had become the protectors. “I’d prefer if you let me in on what was going on.”

“We’ll talk later, Pedersen,” I hissed into the empty phone and went to Ocampo, my face set on full contrite. The phone call had been an act, the contrition wasn’t. I saw a heavy wooden chair beneath a table in a dining alcove between the main room and kitchen.

“May I sit, Mr Ocampo?”

He nodded and I pulled the chair to the bedside. Gershwin leaned against the wall.

“There have been two recent sexual assaults, sir. The assailant left his DNA, which, it seems, was mistakenly identified as yours.”

Puzzlement on the round face. “How do you have my DNA?”

“It seems you consented to have it tested two years back, sir. You were part of a university medical study, correct?”

“I remember signing several consent forms, one having to do with DNA.”

“All DNA samples can be evaluated as part of a national database, sir. Somehow yours was obviously screwed up somewhere along the line.”

He sneezed again and grabbed a wad of tissue, blowing his nose and hawking mucus into the cloth. He wadded the tissue in a fat palm, put his left hand over the right like a foul shot and tossed the wad toward a can beside his bed, a meter to my right. The shot went wide and the ball of tissue rolled to the floor. I shot a downward glance at the tissue thinking a fresh DNA reading might not be a bad thing.

“Are you all right, Mr Ocampo?” I asked.

“Allergies. It’s hay fever season.” I looked to the window, closed tight against pollen, I assumed. Ocampo’s frown morphed into a face fighting a sneeze and losing. He grabbed another wad of tissues from the box and wiped the fleshy plains of his face and cheeks. I reached out a toe and nudged the tissue closer.

“Look, Mr Ocampo, can you accept our apology? Given the DNA indication, well, we had to check you out. We had no idea you were, uh …”

“Too fat to move much farther than the toilet? It’s OK, Detective. I’m quite aware of my body mass. I’m also aware that it makes me a poor criminal.”

Ocampo’s anger was draining away as, hopefully, were headlines saying, FCLE Arrests Bedridden Man for Violent Assaults.

When Ocampo turned away to catch another wet sneeze, I reached to the floor and snapped up the wadded tissue with my fingertips, slipping it into my pocket.

“Then I think we’re set to go,” I said. “We’re truly sorry, Mr Ocampo.”

Ocampo nodded quietly. It seemed a good exit note, hoping my ass-reaming of an unconnected phone and our gestures of kinship might keep Ocampo from contacting his lawyer.