Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two (20 page)

I wrote it down anyway, just in case it ended up being relevant.

He was another kid of tech-industry parents, according to Jazzy’s friends, which was no surprise. He designed his own games, too, at seventeen. Eric Gordon, but his friends called him “Gecko” apparently, since that was his gaming handle.

When I left, I felt more frustrated than anything.

Kids were really fucking dumb.

It was easy to forget how dumb they were, and how often they lied to adults for stupid reasons. It was also easy to forget how vulnerable that made them, especially in a world that increasingly seemed to view them as prey.

By the end of that conversation, I was on the fence as to whether I should go see my friends at the Seattle PD. I was tempted to stave that off until I resolved this case, just on the off-chance it ended up sucking up a lot of my time. I was a little worried they might want to throw me in a line-up or something, or even hold me overnight.

Irene was the one who settled the question.

I called her to make sure she got the photo I’d sent and to tell her the rest of what I’d learned so she could do some research on the gamer kid, Gecko, along with the hotel where they’d held the modeling show itself. When I called her, she was freaking out because apparently the cops had been by her place, looking for me.

At some point, Gantry took the phone from her hands, and told me I’d better go downtown, and at least answer some questions. He’d talked to a few of his contacts down there, and according to him, they wouldn’t arrest me, but just wanted me for questioning for now. He said he’d smoothed over what he could, and told me his cover story for me while I’d been in Nik’s dimension, which, truthfully, was probably better than what I would have come up with.

He said if I went in now, it would look better.

That was as close to a warning as I’d get from him over the phone.

I knew him well enough to know to take it seriously.

“Where’s Nik?” I asked him then, before I signed off.

“He’s fine,” Gantry said.

“That’s not what he asked.”

“He’s with my people,” Gantry said, clearly still in his cryptic, I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-this-on-the-phone place. “We’ll be here when you get back.”

Sighing a little, I nodded, more to myself than him.

I hung up without bothering with a goodbye.

So yeah, I resigned myself to the fact that I’d be calling on my friends at the Seattle PD today after all. I got Gantry’s reasoning, assuming I was understanding it correctly. He likely figured I should go in now, before it started looking like I was avoiding them...which, of course, is exactly what I’d been planning to do.
 

I knew he was right. Better to be upfront with them now, versus waiting until Razmun did something to get me in even more trouble.

Anyway, I wanted a look at those police sketches they’d gotten from the hotel manager.
 

My friends at the station might help me out in that regard––assuming I asked nice––and even if they wanted to grill me on the Yesler bombing first. I really wanted to compare those sketches to the photo I’d gotten off Laurie’s phone...which apparently she’d never bothered to show them for some reason. Maybe just being able to share the photo itself would be enough to get me a glimpse of the sketches they’d gotten off the hotel manager.
 

After all, I’d be helping them out, too.

I figured I should run the few things I’d pieced together by Jo, P.J. and Ravi anyway. Ideally, I’d love to talk to whoever they had working on the case, see if I could get them to share anything they’d uncovered in the week or so before I got involved.
 

I knew how unlikely that was, but I might get a high-level snapshot from Ravi, at least.

He tended to be the most share-y of the three of them.

I knew the sketch artist had to be Karen, since she did the majority of their work. I’d have to go through Jo or Ravi to get a look at it, however, since Karen was a kind of odd duck and probably wouldn’t let me see it without a warrant or something.

Karen might not be a cop technically, but she was by the book all the way.
 

Getting up from the table as the girls got ready to go, I thought about bringing my friends at the Seattle PD coffee again, too. After all, I was right here.

Nothing greased the wheels like high-octane mochas.

9

Police Sketch and a Pissed Off Cop

A long, low, and strangely ominous whistle greeted me, bare seconds after I pushed my way through the glass doors of the Seattle police station headquarters in downtown Seattle.

As I used my hip to help me open the door, I found myself greeted by the weirdly familiar mixture of stale and fresh air that smelled vaguely of feet. And Lysol. And the tiniest bit of blood, although that may have been purely in my head.

It smelled sort of like a bowling alley, I guess.

“Holy Christ. Look what the cat dragged in...” a familiar voice said.

I paused, still not far from the door. Gripping the tray more tightly in my hand, I glanced around before I took a step deeper into the area behind the main counter.

A few other people looked up at the whistle, some wearing uniforms and some not. More than a few stared at me hard enough that I figured I must look familiar.

It wasn’t exactly an auspicious beginning.

I answered the whistle and the shout-out with a half-smile and a shrug anyway, setting my cardboard tray of whipped-cream and chocolate sprinkle covered mochas, only slightly melted, on the main counter in front of me.

“Does that mean you don’t want these?” I said innocently.

I directed my question to the most familiar face I’d picked out of that group.

Leaning against the edge of the counter so that I was still technically behind the line between police and civilian access, I quirked my eyebrow at Ravi, who’d been the one to first see me and fire off his none-too-kind, if vague, appraisal.

“You’ve got balls, Reyes,” Ravi said, shaking his head and smiling, as if in spite of himself. “Great big dragging-the-ground balls...of iron...”

I still couldn’t help finding it funny when Ravi did the tough guy cop speech. He still had a pretty thick accent from where he grew up in Mumbai.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” another familiar voice said.

That voice pulled off the angry, tough-cop thing a lot better.

I craned my head and neck around the guy doing desk duty in front of me, who was obviously ignoring me since he’d figured out I wasn’t there for him, and saw a pair of dark brown eyes I recognized.

“Hey, Jo...” I began, sing-song.

I was about to recite the rest of our running joke, meaning the one from the Jimi Hendrix song about the guy who shoots his girlfriend, but Jo didn’t give me a chance.

“––Do you
seriously
think you can just waltz in here and offer us fucking
coffee?”
she snapped. “You think
coffee
is the thing that will convince us not to split your head open with the butts of our guns for your damned disappearing act of the last year?”

I flinched, a little taken aback. Glancing around the front desk area, where a handful of uniforms were already watching us, listening to the exchange, I looked back at Jo. Seeing the anger darken her face even more, I blinked at her in surprise.

Then I tried for a smile.
 

“I thought it was worth a try,” I muttered, shrugging.

“You little piece of shit,” she snapped, unamused. “Of all the nerve. A fucking year, and you saunter in here, cracking jokes? You could at least
pretend
you give a shit...”
 

“It wasn’t a year,” I protested, holding up a hand. “Jesus, Jo. Calm down––”

“––Or that we will talk to your pathetic ass at all? At least before you’ve deigned to tell us where the hell you’ve
been
all this time?”

When I didn’t say anything to that, Jo snorted.
 

I heard the anger there, though.
 

It wasn’t put on. It was the real deal.

“You armed, Jo?” I smiled, still trying to lighten the tension I felt building in the room.

“What the fuck do you think?” she snapped, glaring at me again.
 

Jo folded her arms as she stood up from the desk behind Ravi, giving me the slant-hip tough cop pose once she’d reached her feet.
 

“Seriously, Reyes? You must have hit your head pretty damned hard during those eight months, if you think you can just walk in like nothing happened. Those same eight months where we did everything but
dredge the fucking Sound
, looking for your skinny white ass...”

I glanced over my shoulder at my own ass.

“It’s not that skinny,” I said a beat later, as if appraising it for the first time. Looking back at Jo, I grinned at her. “...Or that white, really. Not like you’d know that personally.”

“You’re hilarious,” said Jo. “Where the fuck have you been? Seriously.”

Seeing the continued and clear lack of amusement in her dark brown eyes, I glanced at Ravi, and saw him giving me a pretty hard stare, too. Which was saying something, really. Ravi was usually the mellow, easygoing one of the bunch. Jo was the hard-ass. P.J. was a weird mix of Aspergers and country boy, at least when he wasn’t on the gun range, where he could be kind of a nut. According to Jo, P.J. had a personal collection of quasi-legal assault rifles that might have gotten him flagged as a potential terrorist if he wasn’t already a cop. A little too much time in Iraq, she’d said, pursing her lips with that dry humor of hers.

They were kind of the weirdos of the Seattle PD, I knew.

Weirdos as in, non-white bread, didn’t-really-fit-in with cop culture types.

All three of them were super smart, which probably didn’t help...and which is why Jo got promoted to detective so young, despite her being, in her own words, “difficult to get along with.” I knew them initially through P.J., who served under Gantry for at least one of his tours over in the Middle East, and who I’d also dated briefly. Really briefly...although I suspect it would have been longer if it had been up to P.J.

In addition to our back and forth with me as a P.I. and her as a cop, Jo was also my sparring partner at the gym. A lot of us trained in the same place, including Gantry, P.J., Jo and a bunch of other cops from the headquarters station and the one on the West Side.
 

Jo had been my sparring partner for years...really, right up to the time where I fell through that dimensional portal and disappeared off the face of the Earth for nearly a year.

“Yeah, well,” I said, when the awkward silence stretched. “I thought Gantry filled you in? Family stuff. You know how it is.”

“No, I don’t know how it is,” Jo said, walking around the desk. Without a pause, she marched right up to the counter where I stood, moving so fast I contemplated backing up. She didn’t stop talking, however, or glaring at me. “...Are you seriously going to tell me this is about that fuck-up brother of yours?”

I glanced around me again, nervous at Jo’s expression. Most of the faces I saw looked angry now, though, so that glance wasn’t particularly reassuring. I knew Jo got a lot of respect around here. They might think she was weird, but they knew she was a good cop. Most of those faces looked familiar, too, which meant they likely knew who I was, and who I’d been to Jo, Ravi and P.J. before I disappeared. They also probably knew stuff I didn’t know, like what Jo, Ravi and P.J. had done to try to find me while I was gone.