Читать книгу Bending the Rules - Susan Andersen, Susan Andersen - Страница 12

And I’m supposed to be an artist, with an eye for detail. Some eye. Because the whole Cory-being-a-girl thing—I sure didn’t see that one coming!

FOURTEEN-and-three-quarters-year-old Cory Capelli pulled her newsboy cap down low, flipped her father’s battered leather jacket collar up and veered away from the group she’d been hanging with on the Ave in the U district. She liked catching up occasionally with other graffiti artists and taggers to hear the latest gossip about who was doing what and listen to everyone one-up each other’s lies. But she did her best work alone.

It was a policy she should have remembered before she hooked up with Danny G. and Henry Whatshis-name two weeks ago. Danny alone would have been fine. He did some of the best storytelling graffiti around, and Cory considered herself more of an artist than a tagger. She might not style elaborate wall paintings but her tag, CaP, was a work of art in its own right with its fat, two-dimensional, multicolored letters and her trademark cap hanging from the lowercase a. She considered it a world removed from scrawling quick and dirty chicken scratches on bus-stop signs or buildings or messing up someone else’s work. She’d been working on some graphic novel-type illustrations in her sketch pad at home, but she hadn’t worked up the confidence yet to give them a public try. Which was why she’d wanted to team up with Danny G.

Henry, on the other hand, was one of the chicken scratchers. So when he’d attached himself to their plan to cover a block of buildings together, in a neighborhood they weren’t familiar with, she hadn’t known how to say that didn’t work for her.

She definitely needed to learn that, whatchamacallit…assertiveness stuff. Because just look where her silence had gotten her. Could you say busted? The three of them were now scheduled to meet some do-gooder tomorrow morning to paint over what they’d done. Whoop-de-do, Cory thought, spotting a nice wall and melting into the space between the dentist’s office hosting it and the jewelry store next door. Like that was how she wanted to spend her Saturday morning.

Still, it beat getting a record and being sent to juvie, which would just finish the job of Mom’s already broken heart. And Cory got it—she really did—that relatively speaking, she and Danny G. and Henry had lucked out with those people whose buildings they’d tagged. Well, Henry had tagged. He’d managed to scrawl his crap over every workable surface before she or Danny could so much as pull out a can of paint.

Okay, that wasn’t quite true. They’d both had their cans out when the guy from the store across the street had busted them. Henry might have beaten the two of them to the neighborhood but it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been there to do the same thing he had done—if you discounted the talent factor, since even with their dominant hands tied behind their backs, either one of them would have done a helluva better job.

But the point was, they’d still lucked out with those store people. Because while the merchants had called in the cops, they’d refused to press charges until they had a chance to discuss among themselves what to do with her and the boys. So this cleanup gig was better than the alternative.

But not by much.

And the thought of it was putting a heavy-duty crimp in her night. She was bummed out, it was late, and foot traffic from U-Dub students had dwindled everywhere but around the area’s taverns and clubs. That last part was actually a good thing, since it skewed her odds toward the not-getting-caught end of the spectrum. But it felt isolated and lonely and rain clouds were starting to blow across the moon-free sky. In the little bit of light that managed to penetrate between the buildings from the corner streetlamp, she found herself gazing listlessly at the expanse of smooth buttercream paint in front of her.

Giving herself a mental shake, she then shook her aerosol can of Patriot Blue, absorbing the comforting sound of the bead rattling around inside. By rights she oughtta be all pumped up at finding a virgin wall like this one.

Only…

She had zero vision in her head as far as putting a fresh spin on her tag went. Usually she had all kinds of ideas. But she was tired of just doing the same letters over and over again, and she couldn’t drum up a lick of enthusiasm for the project, no matter how rare it was to find a clean wall.

So she might as well go home. In light of the way she’d be spending her Saturday tomorrow, it was pretty dumb to be out here pushing her luck in the first place. Plus Mom would be getting off work in about an hour and she’d freak if she knew Cory was out this late.

The knee-jerk guilt was immediate, but so was the defiance she pushed it away with. Hey, it wasn’t as if she didn’t stay in like a good little Girl Scout dang near every weeknight. She even studied so that she wouldn’t have to see the sad look she’d put on Mom’s face last spring by bringing home a truly in-the-toilet-type report card.

But the weekends were a different matter. They just seemed to stretch without end, what with Mom working two jobs and the fact that they’d only moved here from Philly a couple of months ago. Midyear changes at school sucked—she’d like to see anyone, except maybe one of those so-perky-you-wanted-to-smack-’em cheerleader types, make instant friends. And a girl had to have some fun.

There’d sure been precious little of that since Daddy was killed.

Grief, hard and sharp, sliced through her defenses, and she doubled over, her arms wrapped around her middle. But this wasn’t the place to give in to it and she pulled herself upright. Still, she had to get out of here.

She was slipping out from between the two buildings when she heard glass breaking, so close it made her jump. There was a shout from within the store next door. Then the report of a gunshot. It was a sound that defined her nightmares and she froze in the deep shadow of the dentist’s office doorway, cold sweat trickling down her sides.

A strident alarm started whooping and she made herself move, shimmying up the rough brick that formed a facade at the front of the building. It seemed like an eon but was probably only a few moments before she hooked her elbows over the edge of the one-story office’s cantilevered roof and swung herself over its lip. She lay there on her back for a moment, panting and struggling to slow her heartbeat. Then she slowly rolled onto her stomach and pulled herself by her elbows to the back edge nearest the north-side jewelry store, knowing she should have simply beat feet while the beating was good, but sucked into a bad decision once again by her damn impulsiveness and never-ending curiosity.

From her vantage point she watched kids pour out of the shop’s back door and realized the stories she’d thought a couple of taggers had been making up must be true: there was a youth gang robbing city jewelry stores. Given that most of the kids looked young even to her, she couldn’t imagine they’d come up with the idea on their own.

The thought had no sooner flitted across her mind than a man stepped out behind them, shoving both a gun and what looked like a black hood in the waistband of his slacks. He paused beneath the dim light that shone over the door, but with the brim of his porkpie hat throwing his face in shadow she couldn’t make out his features. And that was just fine with Cory, since the most painful lesson she’d learned in her life was that the wrong kind of knowledge could kill you.

That’s how it had worked with her dad.

“Move your asses,” the man growled, and the kids scattered in six different directions. “Fucking amateurs,” he muttered and lit a cigarette as he pushed away from the door.

And, oh, crap. The flame of his Zippo briefly illuminated his face.

She knew him. Well, she didn’t know-him know him, but she recognized who he was. She’d overheard someone saying he was, like, the muscle for some local crime boss whose name she couldn’t recall. But she knew he had a bad reputation. And she really, really didn’t want to bring herself to the attention of the top dawg or his henchman. Not when it was obvious the Hench had just shot someone.

But she must have made some sort of noise or moved without realizing it, because even as Muscle Boy was stalking purposefully down the passageway between the two buildings toward the street, he looked up.

Straight at her.

Cory’s heart stopped and for a moment she merely gawped. Seeing his hand go for the gun in his waistband, however, unfroze her but quick and, scuttling backward, she scrambled to her feet and raced across the rooftop, leaping up onto the roof of the south-side building with strides long and sure even as her mind screamed in panic. Her daddy had been a track star way back in his high-school years, and he’d taught her to run practically from the time she could walk. He used to say she was the son he’d never had and the daughter he’d always wanted.

But she couldn’t think about that now because it made her knees weak. Shoving all thoughts of her family aside, she sprinted across the second building and up onto a third. This one had a working roof with heat or air shafts or whatever they were sticking out, and a little shedlike structure with a door that led to the building. She came to an abrupt halt. She couldn’t simply keep going—at least not without trying to think it through. The Hench hadn’t come up onto the dentist’s roof after her, so he was no doubt headed straight for the last building to await her descent. At least she hoped that was what he would do. Because her plan was to bail midblock. She sped over to the door and reached for the knob.

It was locked. But there was a fire escape going down the back of the building. Cautiously, she approached it and peered over.

And damn near wet her pants. In the millisecond before she jerked back again she glimpsed Muscle Boy—a big, ugly boogeyman of a guy—pointing his gun at her in a two-handed grip.

A gun that he’d already proved he wasn’t shy about using. The crack of it discharging at her in the next second sounded louder than thunder.

Almost simultaneous with the report, the bullet hit high on the air vent thingie behind her and ricocheted off. She managed to bite back the girlish scream bulging the back of her throat, but it was a close thing. She’d learned a long time ago to dress like a boy when she went out tagging. It was just safer and even with the cops and the store owners who’d busted her two weeks ago, she’d stayed in character. She hadn’t claimed to be a boy, but she was tall and she knew how to walk and talk like one when she needed to. Plus Cory was one of those names that could belong to a boy or a girl and hers even had the more boylike spelling.

If she got out of this tonight, hopefully that would stand her in good stead, since it would be way harder to track down a boy tagger than a girl.

She was already hauling ass when she heard the fire escape rattle beneath the bad guy’s weight, but the adrenaline that spiked through her bloodstream at the sound acted like a turbo boost as she raced back the way she had come. She jumped down the three-foot drop to the next building, raced across that roof, then dropped another couple feet to the dentist’s office roof. Reaching the edge, she plopped onto her butt, rolled, grasped the rim of the roof and dropped, bending her knees to soften the impact when she hit ground.

She still had to put a hand down to catch herself on the tiny patch of grass fronting the office and her feet scrambled in the dormant flower border before she gained some purchase and sprinted like a bat out of hell toward Forty-fifth. Reaching the main east-west arterial, she cut across a gas station lot, then slowed down and eased into a shadow as the wail of a cop siren split the night. A second later a blue-and-white flashed past, red lights swirling.

Passing only two students weaving unsteadily down the sidewalk, she left the shopping district behind, casting glances over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t being followed. She slid through the neighborhood, jumping fences and cutting through yards. It wasn’t until she was blocks away that she slowed down and tried to collect herself so she could make a plan to get back home. She had to arrive before her mother, or Mom would go ballistic. And not just about her being out on her own this time of night, but over her disguise.

Which brought back the way she’d misrepresented herself to the shop-owner people, which in turn made her stomach drop. She didn’t even know why she’d stayed in guy character, except that it was a form of protection. Girls were more vulnerable on the street. So if Danny G. and Henry found out, her cover was blown.

And, okay, she admitted that maybe she’d hoped the whole thing would just go away and nobody would ever have to know the difference.

But of course it hadn’t, so now she had to show up tomorrow as herself. Because it was one thing to pull off acting like a guy for short periods of time in dim lighting. It was something else again to try it in broad daylight for God knew how long. The woman who had contacted her about making reparation said to plan on being at her beck and call for as long as she deemed fit.

So it presented a problem—the guys were going to find out she was a girl. She had a hunch that Danny G. maybe already knew, but he was a quiet, self-contained guy who mostly kept to himself, so she didn’t fear him talking. Henry, on the other hand, would probably shoot his mouth off all over town. Soon everybody would know that her alter ego CaP, assumed to be a guy, wasn’t. And that would blow her one ace card: the fact that the henchman wouldn’t be looking for a female.

Hell, if he was even still looking for anybody at all. Maybe she was worrying over nothing. Maybe he’d come to the right conclusion—that she was too smart, not to mention scared, to tell anyone what she had seen.

But a shiver rippled down her spine and she shuddered. Because that was a lot of maybes.

And she had a bad feeling this wasn’t going to go away that easily.

UP ON THE Ave, Bruno Arturo was pulling his cell phone from his leather jacket pocket as he strode toward Diamond Parking to retrieve his car. He punched in an auto number, then stopped on the sidewalk for a second, rubbing his free hand over his jaw as the phone rang on the other end.

It was picked up on the second ring. “Schultz.”

“We got trouble, boss.”

“Those aren’t words I like to hear, Arturo. What kind of trouble?”

“There was an old man in the store when we got inside.”

Schultz’s voice grew cold. “Is he going to be able to tell the cops about the kids? Identify anyone?”

“Not now.”

“Then I don’t see where we have a problem.”

“There was also a kid up on the roof next door. A tagger, I think.” He’d seen several in the neighborhood as he’d made his way back to his car. “I think he saw my face.” He pulled out a smoke and fired it up. Sucked in harsh smoke, then let it drift from his nostrils. “I know damn well he saw my gun, since I was pointing it right at him.”

Schultz snorted. “How old, you think?”

“I dunno. Young. Still had that gawky all-arms-and-legs thing going. Fast little sonuvabitch, though. Ran like the wind.”

“Then forget about him. He’s probably scared shitless—he’s not going to bring attention to himself by talking and we don’t want to do it by launching some big boy-hunt. Wait a few days. If we don’t hear anything about the cops looking for a kiddie gang, just let it go.”

“Ya think?”

“Yes, Bruno, I do.” Schultz’s voice got that cold you-questioning-me? inflection that anyone who worked for him knew was a warning that they were treading on thin ice.

“Okay, then.”

They hung up a few minutes later and Bruno continued to his Escalade. But as he unlocked it and climbed in a short while later, he was already making plans.

Because it was all fine and mofo’n dandy for the boss to say wait to make sure we’re not tipping our hands. But if the kid walked into a cop shop and sat down with a sketch artist, it wasn’t gonna be Schultz’s ass that was hung out to dry. It’d be his.

And that didn’t make him real anxious to just “let it go.”

THE SEATTLE PD robbery unit augmented patrol by listening to the police scanner at all times. If they heard of a bank robbery in progress, they answered the call alongside patrol. The call that came over the scanner early Saturday morning had nothing to do with a bank. But a coworker called Jase anyhow.

“I’m off duty, slick,” he growled into the receiver as he pulled into his parking slot at his apartment house.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Hohn said. “But I thought you’d wanna know. Another jewelry store heist just came over the scanner. I’m heading there now.”

Jase swore. “Where?”

“U district.” Hohn gave him the address and instructed him to park around back.

“Meet you in ten.” Jase snapped his phone shut, backed out of his slot and was slapping the rotating LED beacon on his car roof as he hit the arterial at Greenwood.

He arrived with a couple of minutes to spare and found an EMT wagon just pulling away and a patrol car with its lights swirling and radio squawking parked in one of the two spaces behind the jewelry store. He pulled into the other and climbed out of his car at the same time Hohn pulled in behind him. Jase hung his badge from his jacket’s breast pocket as he went to greet the other detective. Together they approached the back door.

“Robbery,” Hohn called into the interior.

“In here, Detective.” An Asian-American patrolman crossed the room to them. “I’m Greg Vuong.” He indicated another patrolman just entering the work area from the showroom. “That’s my partner, Mark Nelson.”

Jase gave Vuong a quick once-over. Kid looked barely out of the academy but had a nice steady gaze. “What have we got, Officer?” They moved deeper into the room.

“The alarm company called us at twelve-fourteen. We arrived at twelve-twenty-six. We found the back door open and a man we assume to be the owner on the floor with a gunshot wound.”

“The meat wagon was leaving as I got here. The owner gonna make it?”

“He’s alive, but I don’t know for how long. The paramedics said he was in bad shape.”

“Any idea yet what was taken?”

“There’s a loose diamond on the floor. If more were out when the robbers broke in they might have taken them,” Vuong said, then looked at his partner.

“The cases in the store are empty.” Nelson picked up the report. “But they’re not smashed, so I’m guessing the owner probably empties them into the safe at night.” He indicated a tall, industrial-strength model bolted into the corner of the workroom. “Or it’s possible the robber forced him to open the cases out front before he shot him.”

Jase squatted behind the workbench. He inspected the overturned stool and the bloodstains on the floor without touching either, then turned to examine the bench itself. “He had this drawer half open and there’s a thirty-eight special inside. Looks to me like he was shot where he sat before he could get to it. My guess is whoever did this intended a smash-and-grab and didn’t expect to find anyone still in the store at this hour. Are there any security cameras?”

Nelson nodded. “Two in the retail area. None back here.”

“We’ll need to check them out—see if there’s anything on them.”

The lab boys arrived and started searching for trace evidence and setting up to dust for prints. While Hohn organized the patrolmen to try to unearth information on the victim in order to contact the next of kin, Jase went outside to see what he could find.

In the high-powered beam cast by the Maglite he’d collected from the passenger seat of his car, he found a fairly fresh-looking Double Bubble gum wrapper that may or may not have been recently dropped where the parking area met the narrow alley. He bagged it up. The flashlight beam picked up what looked like a long drift of ash in the through-way between the store and the building next door, and when he crouched down he discovered a cigarette that looked as if it had been lit only to be tossed aside. He slid the filter into another baggie and duckwalked down the passage toward the street one step at a time, sweeping the light from his Mag over every inch before he moved a leg forward.

The front of the jewelry store was pristine and untouched as far as he could tell, the sidewalk clean and the groomed dirt that would probably be overflowing with flowers in another month or so in the narrow garden boxes on either side of the stubby walkway just beginning to sprout a few early shoots.

There wasn’t much to be gleaned here and he turned to head back the way he had come to broaden his search of the alley. His Maglite, which he’d lowered when he’d hit the lighted street, flashed over the small patch of landscaping fronting the building next door, and he had taken two steps down the passageway before what he’d seen registered. Then he backpedaled and swung his flashlight at the ground in front of what turned out to be a dentist’s office.

This flower bed was all chewed up and a can of spray paint lay on its side on the postage stamp-size patch of grass. He carefully picked it up, using only a thumbnail beneath its bottom rim and the very edge of a fingertip upon its blue cap. He turned it toward the streetlight.

It was a can of Krylon, a brand that could be found at any hardware store in town. But putting a slideshow of impressions together, he thought he was beginning to see a picture.

It looked like there might have been a witness to tonight’s robbery. Maybe a graffiti artist or a tagger. Not exactly a huge break in the case, considering there must be dozens if not hundreds of them in the city.

Still, maybe they had their territories. And at the very least, it was a place to start.