Requite (2 page)

She looked up from the food she picked at. “Did you like it?”

I smiled. “It was perfect.”

She went back to picking at her peppers. “There’s more. I made a lot so you have leftovers for work.”

“I’m good for now.” Something bothered her. I figured I’d address the situation. I didn’t care for uncomfortable silences. “So what did you want to talk about? It seems like something is wrong?”

My question was met with more of the uncomfortable silence that I’d sat through dinner with.

“Callie?”

She looked up at me from her plate. “Huh?”

“What’s wrong?”

She bit at her lip. “Do you want to get back together with your ex-wife?”

I yanked my head back. “No. Where the hell did that come from?”

“I wasn’t trying to snoop around, but I was putting your clothes away and I noticed you had a bunch of her clothes in one of your dressers. Are you hanging on to it for something?”

“Her clothes in my dresser? Oh, you mean the crap in the TV stand?”

She nodded.

The old dresser that my television sat on was filled with some of Samantha’s clothes. I didn’t clean it out before I moved because I didn’t feel like dealing with it, and didn’t need the drawers for anything.

“Cal, Samantha left a bunch of junk in that old dresser when she left me. I didn’t go through it before I moved it here and haven’t chucked the stuff because I didn’t need the space. I’m not that complex. I’m not holding on to the stuff in hopes that she comes back.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m about as sure as it gets. We can toss the stuff if you want a couple drawers to use.”

She tried to contain a smile, but it showed as she left her chair and came over to me. I slid my chair back, and she sat on my knee. She tossed her arms around my neck.

“Thank you.”

“For what? Use of drawers?”

“For being you.”

“Um, OK I guess.” It looked like I had successfully navigated the muddy waters of women’s emotions for the evening. “What time do you have to go in?”

“About an hour. One more thing while we’re talking.” She looked me dead in the eyes.

I looked back at her. Her face was serious. I thought we had finished
talking
. Perhaps I wasn’t quite out of the woods of emotions yet. “Alright. What’s up?”

She peered at me. The look on her face was familiar. I gave it to people all the time. She wanted to know if I was going to lie to her. I was about to be interrogated.

“Do you think our relationship is going somewhere?”

It was a dangerous question. I needed to buy a little time. “Do you?”

“I asked you first.”

It was the counterpunch to my stall tactic. She’d played this game before. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, I enjoy spending time with you. We have fun. I gave you a key two weeks ago. I just offered you drawer space. So yes, I see this continuing in the direction it’s going.”

She seemed to be processing what I had just said.

“Was that an OK answer? Do you think this is going somewhere?”

She smiled. “I see this going somewhere. Right now, I see it going to the bedroom.”

“OK.” I stood, and lifted her to her feet. It looked like my answer was the one that she sought. I took a couple steps toward the bedroom.

“Wait,” she said. “We’re going to need a garbage bag.”

“Huh?” I asked.

“To toss her clothes.”

I turned back and walked to the kitchen. We had different things in mind.

The taxi pulled into the sports bar’s parking lot at 10:16 p.m. Tom snugged his baseball hat low on his head. “This is good here.”

“You sure? I can take you to the front door.”

“That’s OK. This is fine.”

“No problem, Buddy.”

The cabbie pulled the taxi into a parking spot and checked the meter.

“That will be thirty-five forty.”

Tom tossed the cab driver forty bucks and hopped out. When the cab disappeared he made his way back the way they had just come. He wasn’t out for a night of drinking and watching sports. He planned on making a house call and not one that he could be traced to. A mile walk to the Miller’s house sat before him. It took him the better part of twenty minutes.

The neighborhood was dark and quiet. The only visible light came from the houses themselves and one stray streetlight a few blocks up. Tom squinted at a mailbox as he walked past. “Eight twenty-six, next one,” he said.

He continued past the house and made a left off of the sidewalk into the yard. He stood in the darkness of the trees. A duffel bag hung from his shoulder. As he pulled the gloves over his hands, he caught the light from a television flickering through the side window.

“They’re still up,” he said under his breath.

Tom hugged the tree line as he made his way up the small hill through the yard. Once in the back, he took a minute to find the door for the screened lanai covering the pool. He gave the knob a twist—locked. He knelt down and unzipped his duffel bag. He reached his hand inside and removed a large pocket knife. With a quick wave of his hand, the blade made a confirming click on its lock. He poked the tip of the knife through the screen and cut around the door latch. The blade slid through with ease. He put the knife in his pocket and reached through the cut screen to unlock the door. He lurked around the pool. No light came from the rear windows of the home. The back of the house leading out to the lanai had two sets of glass sliding doors. He walked to the first and cupped his latex gloved hands around his face. He looked inside. A corner of a bed was visible through the blinds. It was the master bedroom.

Tom walked across the cement patio to the next set. He could hear the television from the outside the house. He peered in. The house was an open concept. In front of him was the kitchen, the living room sat to his left. He saw the couple parked in front of the television. A man lay on the couch, spread out with his head on a pillow. He appeared asleep. The back of a woman’s head showed over the chair that sat beside the couch.

Tom dug through the bag and removed the clean room suit he purchased online. He unrolled it and pulled it over his clothes. The zipper was pulled up. From the bag, he pulled out a tire iron. Tom tried to slide the door open.

To his surprise, it was unlocked. The door moved a few inches. His eyes locked on the couple in the living room looking for any kind of movement—they didn’t budge. He pulled the sliding door open the rest of the way as he focused on the couple. They still didn’t move. He sat his duffel bag down on the concrete patio and pushed the hanging blinds to the side. He stepped into the house one foot at a time. Behind his back he slid the glass patio door closed. He waited in the darkness of the kitchen watching the couple. After a few minutes crouched to the side of the door, he was sure they didn’t hear his entrance. The high volume of the television had masked the sound.

He went to the living room. Neither turned around, neither noticed his presence. They were asleep. A few more strides and he stood behind the woman in the chair. Tom raised the tire iron.

His muscles flexed as he put everything he had into bringing the tire iron down into the back of her head. The tire iron hit with an audible crack, followed by a high pitched scream from Margaret Miller. The one blow was not enough. She lifted her hands to her head. Tom raised the tire iron again, giving her another strike that rendered her limp. The man, James Miller, rose from the couch unaware of what just happened—his wife’s scream was enough to startle him from his nap. His eyes caught her fate. She sat hunched over. Blood poured from her head. He looked up and saw Tom towering over the back of the chair. From the waist up, the white clean suit Tom wore was spattered in blood. A little of Tom’s red hair protruded from under the suit’s hood—in his hand hung the bloody tire iron.

James Miller looked at Tom was a mix of panic, disbelief and then recognition. Before his mouth could make a word, Tom lunged across the end table next to the chair and delivered a blow between the eyes. The attack was quick enough that James never had time to defend himself. His eyes rolled back as he fell to his knees, then face down. Tom stood over him, striking him in the back of the head until he was sure he’d never get up again. James Miller lay dead on the living room floor at his wife’s feet.

Tom stood in the living room taking in what he’d done. He reached for the woman’s throat to search for a pulse—none. He did the same for the man, though the damage to the back of his head would confirm it either way.

In the kitchen, Tom slid out a bar stool from the breakfast bar and took a seat. He was out of breath from the attack. Tom took a few minutes to lower his heart rate before he stood and walked to the sink. He turned on the faucet and rinsed the blood from the tire iron. A few stubborn chunks of flesh needed to be persuaded off with his finger. It was time to push forward.

He unzipped the front of his clean suit and reached inside for his pocket knife. The blade flicked open. James Miller was rolled onto his back. Tom sat on his chest and began to carve his message into the man’s forehead. The wife was next. The Millers were the last involved that he found, but the first checked off his list.

We’d been slow in the homicide department for the last few weeks. It was a good thing. With no new homicides to look into, it allowed us to dig into unsolved cases and try to get some closure for the families. Before I could get back to the unsolved cases, I needed to finish my team’s schedule for the month.

Our Homicide Division had been put on nine-nines—nine hour days, nine weekdays straight. I now had weekends and every other Monday off. It helped with having somewhat of a life, though I was always on call unless I put in for vacation. Weekends were covered by myself and another rotating detective. The problem was everyone on the team wanted either Fridays or Mondays off. When figuring in vacation requests and who had to be in court on what days, it was a challenge. The schedule needed to be turned into Captain Bostok by the end of the day. I had it almost wrapped up.

Thunder shook the building and a flash of light came through the windows of my office. Our station, District Three of the Tampa Police Department plunged into darkness. The screen of my laptop went black. The dim lighting of the station’s back up power came online.

“Son of a bitch.” I slapped the top of my desk. I gritted my teeth and rolled my neck from side to side letting out three good cracks.

The station’s power flicked back on. My computer greeted me with a cheerful tune and welcome screen. I stared at it in disdain.

Sergeant Hank Rawlings, for all intents and purposes, my partner, walked through my office door and plopped himself on the couch in the back.

“Just sit in the damn chair.” I pointed at the guest chair across from me at my desk.

Hank shook his head. “Those things suck.”

“Whatever.”

When I purchased my new office chair a few months back there wasn’t a lot left in my budget for fancy guest chairs. I scooped up a couple of cheap ones from the office supply store. The only people that ever sat across from me were the captain and Hank. I never heard a complaint from the captain but Hank reminded me often that he wasn’t a fan.

He flipped a leg up over his knee. I couldn’t help but notice that his socks matched his tie. His dress shoes had pointed tips with a thick buckle that reflected the light from the flickering fluorescents overhead. The shoes looked uncomfortable. His wife Karen must have been dressing him again. Yet, these weren’t the pink or yellow department store clothes that she’d selected for him in the past. He wore a light blue shirt under a navy sport coat and a brown and blue argyle tie. His dark hair was styled. A week old stubble of mustache and beard covered his face. He shaved off his signature police mustache a few weeks prior.

“Something the matter?” he asked.

“Yeah, I just lost everything I’ve been working on for the last three hours.”

“How?”

I pointed to the lights still flickering as they regained power. “Laptop battery crapped out on me a few days ago. Replacement won’t be here until the tail end of the week. When the power goes, so does my work.”

“That sucks. You don’t save it as you go?”

I gave him a look of annoyance.

“What’s with the outfit? Karen get a hold of your credit card?”

“Nah. I signed up with the Box O’ Style.”

He said it in a way that almost sounded like I was supposed to know what he was talking about. I shrugged and held my palms up.

“Box O’ Style. You’ve never heard of it? Really?”

“I can’t say that I have.”

“Oh, well you should check it out. Karen put me on to it. What they…”

“Figures,” I mumbled interrupting.

He paused and held a finger up—the middle one. “Just listen.”

I crossed my arms. “Go on.”

“What they do is assign you a fashion consultant to go over what colors and styles you like. They start by getting a take of where you are at with your level of style. From there they put together a complete outfit, head to toe, and send it to you in a nice wooden box. You get two new outfits a month.”

“So it’s a subscription thing?”

He nodded. “Sort of.”

“How much is it?”

“Well, you set up a budget and they try to work with it.”

“How much is the budget?”

“Not much.”

“What’s not much?”

“I don’t know.”

“So what you are saying is that Karen got it set up and you don’t know what you are paying?”

He sat quiet for a moment. “Whatever. It can’t be that much, couple hundred bucks an outfit maybe.”

I smiled and nodded. “Let me know when you get that bill. So how are the new wheels? Are you getting a lot of miles per electricity?”

Hank just took ownership of a brand new hybrid. The car was an awful shade of green somewhere between baby snot and pea soup. Beside the horrid color, it was so small that when he sat in it his head rubbed against the roof.

“It’s great! I’m averaging around forty miles a gallon.”

“Forty miles a gallon?”

“Yeah, right around there.”