Bending the Rules (8 page)

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.

U
P 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.”

T
HE
S
EATTLE
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.

CHAPTER SIX

Okay, I have to admit it, today was different. Usually the kids I teach want to be here.

S
ATURDAY MORNING
, on the north side of Jerry Harvey’s shop, Poppy faced three kids who stared back at her sullenly, their postures a study of teenage defiance. She turned to give Jason a brief glance, then concentrated her full attention on the teens. “My name is Poppy Calloway,” she said genially. “You will refer to me as Ms. Calloway. This is Detective de Sanges.” She looked at the lone girl in the group. “Are you Danny or Cory?”

“Cory.” The red lipstick, the heavily mascaraed blue eyes beneath the long, black bangs of an otherwise short, spiky hairdo gave her attitude. But a wash of color upon her fair, fair skin hinted at nerves.

“You’re a surprise.” There was an understatement, but she buried her astonishment in a calm tone. “Lot of people thought you were a boy.”

“No shit,” the scrawnier of the two boys muttered.

Poppy turned to him. “And you are?”