Sendoff for a Snitch (12 page)

Chapter 11

W
ater continued to rush through the streets, but it wasn’t topping the curbs anymore. Bits of debris made landfall in the wheelchair cuts at the corners.

The new boots from Mandy’s ex weren’t soaked through. That was a unique and welcome sensation. They were leather, like my work boots, but even when I waded across the streets, they stayed fairly dry inside. They must have some kind of waterproofing finish.

I was pleasantly warm in the clothes she’d given me, and the rain poncho was very effective at keeping me dry. Who cared if I looked like a walking tent?

Staying long-term at Kelly’s place didn’t seem to be a viable option. We weren’t getting along well enough.

I’d told her that I was heading out to check on my apartment, but I was pretty sure everything would be a soggy mess. Since it was a basement located downhill from here, it might still have a few feet of water in it. A discouraging thought.

How soon would Mandy and Nicole be leaving on their trip? Then I’d have a place to stay for a little while, at least. I didn’t want to ask them if I could move into the carriage house until they gave me a date.

I could never come up with the deposit for a new apartment. And as long as Quality Steel was shut down, I wasn’t earning any money. What money I had would be pretty much eaten up by parole expenses when I reported this week. Although, maybe the parole office would be closed. That was a basement, too.

Open for appointments or not, they’d want their money for this week anyhow, so I’d better make sure I had it.

As I approached the intersection where I’d been turned back last time, I could see that the saw horses were still there, but they were moved off to the side of the street. The tape attached to them was torn and flapped in the wind. It didn’t extend across the road anymore. The tape was yellow with black lettering—“Caution: Do Not Enter.” No one was manning the barrier anymore, so I slipped past.

As I rounded the corner to my street, emergency lights lit up the drab brick walls and glistened off the wet surfaces. Several patrol cars and a fire engine. What now?

They seemed to be gathered around my building.

I stopped and tried to focus through the dim light and rain.

They seemed to be gathered around my stairwell.

My throat started to close, and I had to fight down the urge to turn and run. That might attract attention, and somebody might decide to investigate. Instead, I hugged the dirty brick walls until I came to the recessed entry of an abandoned shoe repair shop. I slipped in and positioned myself so I could observe the situation without being readily seen.

Beyond the patrol cars and the fire engine, an ambulance was parked haphazardly, blocking the street. In the best of times, there wasn’t much traffic to worry about. This certainly wasn’t the best of times.

The vehicles sat in flowing water that came up a few inches on their tires. The firefighters, wearing their boots and yellow turn-out coats, were sloshing around with impunity, but the cops and the medics hunched in the rain.

The water flowed from the street down into the stairwell, which seemed to be pretty full.

Great. If the water was that high in the stairwell, I could just imagine how deep it was in my apartment. I was probably too late to save the mattress. Not that I was about to go wading through all those emergency responders to get anywhere near the place.

The medics took a gurney from the back of the ambulance and lowered the wheels. They pushed it through the water all the way over to the railing around the stairs. Two firefighters waded down a few steps, and another positioned himself at the top. Something was floating in the water. Something big. They maneuvered it near to the head of the stairs.

When it got straightened around, they lifted it out of the water and toward the gurney. It looked like a human body.

In spite of the cold, sweat dripped down my neck. Somebody floating in my stairwell. Could the person be alive? At a time like this, with the whole city in disarray, they wouldn’t have wasted all those resources on somebody they already knew was dead, would they?

They lifted the person onto the gurney. One of the hands flopped off the side and hung there. Someone adjusted a spotlight so the medics could work.

The light caught bright orange. With purple stars. The vest was wet and flattened, but I recognized that expensive down vest.

Pounding in my chest made my lungs ache. Benji?

How could Benji be there again? Even with all the emergencies they were dealing with, surely no social service employee would have lost track of Benji enough to let him get back here.

But the body they were strapping onto the gurney was too tall to be Benji.

Hadn’t Benji mentioned that Aaron had bought both of them orange vests with purple stars? Was it Aaron?

And if it was, what was he doing floating in my stairwell?

Maybe he was unconscious and would be able to explain when he came around.

One of the medics went to the back of the ambulance and came back with a blanket or something. He lifted the dangling arm and settled it next to the rest of the still form. Then he covered the entire thing. Including the face.

It was a dead body.

The dead body was probably Aaron.

Aaron had been found dead in my stairwell? What was he doing there?

I tried to convince myself that there was a good possibility that they would find out he’d drowned. But why would he have been in the water?

Or knowing his history, maybe he’d ODed.

Just so it didn’t turn out that he’d been murdered and left in my stairwell.

Guess who would be the first suspect.

Even if there were any possibility that somebody would answer any questions, I wasn’t waiting around to find out.

I slipped out of the store entryway and walked as sedately as I could manage toward the end of the block. After I turned the corner, I picked up the pace a bit and turned down an alley where I wouldn’t easily be noticed by anyone in a passing vehicle. I didn’t think I had to worry too much about people on foot—with the rain, anybody who was out walking would be in a hurry to get to their destination. Including me.

That sounded like a good idea, but I was having trouble coming up with a destination. I couldn’t go home—even if I waited until the emergency crews left, my apartment was flooded.

I’d mooched off Mandy and Nicole enough. The body in the stairwell changed everything. Before I went to see them, I’d have to figure out a way to tell them I might not be able to house sit for them. If I got picked up for questioning about Aaron, there was an excellent possibility I’d be held for a parole violation. Or worse. Despite trying to keep the jail population down during the emergency, they could always make room. That would solve the immediate dilemma of where I would be staying, but I didn’t really welcome that solution.

Maybe Aaron’s death wasn’t murder, I tried to tell myself. He could have died a natural death. Well, maybe not a natural death. But an OD or something that wouldn’t implicate me.

Fat chance.

After the little run-in with Diffy, I really didn’t want to head to the high school. I might not be welcome there.

Which brought me to Kelly. Would she have settled down by now? If she had, she might let me stay there for a little while.

She might even have rethought her opposition to the food bank and soup kitchen. We could take the kids for a hot meal there.

The fire engine trundled by the entrance to the alley, followed by the ambulance. No need for the siren or flashing lights to clear the way to the morgue.

It didn’t look like Benji was going to be left with Aaron ever again. I wondered if Social Services had managed to track down his mother. Now they had bad news for her about her other son.

Benji was probably in an emergency foster home. Not great, but at least he’d be someplace warm and dry, with food available.

Staying in the limited shelter of the alley to give the emergency vehicles some time to get away from the area, I tried to think it through.

Whenever they caught up with me, the police would want to question me about Aaron’s death, I was sure. Even if they could identify the cause of death and could tell I had nothing to do with it, they’d want to know what he’d been doing in my stairwell. They might not go looking too hard for me until things were back to normal, but it was something I’d have to deal with sooner or later.

I would have no answers to give them. What was he—or his body—doing in my stairwell?

Or suppose I was wrong and it wasn’t him? The body was the right size and shape, the vest matched the one Benji wore, but it was possible it wasn’t Aaron, wasn’t it?

Okay, if it wasn’t Aaron, who was it? And what was he doing in my stairwell? That might not be any better.

Despite the warm jacket, I shivered. Water was dripping off the edge of the poncho and soaking the lined blue jeans. Cautiously, I walked to the entry to the alley and peered down the street.

The flood of water that had been hugging the curbs was expanding again, meeting in the middle of the road. This wasn’t a good place to stay.

I left the alley and went to the corner, just to see if the coast was clear at my apartment. It wasn’t. The patrol cars were still there. As I watched, one of the cops unrolled some crime scene tape and strung it along the railing by the stairwell.

So much for natural death theories. They might be too busy with the current flood emergency to put a lot of time into investigation at this point, but they’d get to it soon enough.

Turning back toward the center of town, which stood on higher ground, I felt a wave of exhaustion. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Maybe I should just go to the police station and turn myself in. It wasn’t that far a walk. Save everybody a lot of grief.

That was probably not a good idea. First thing they’d wonder would be how I knew about Aaron. Then they’d almost have to lock me up, even if they were trying to keep the jail population down until the crisis passed. Any brownie points I earned by surrendering so they didn’t have to look for me wouldn’t be particularly useful if I picked up a conviction on Aaron’s death. The minimum I could expect for a second homicide conviction was a life sentence. Probably life without parole.

Turning myself in would mean I lost any control I had in what happened to me. If I could think this through and come up with what might have happened to Aaron, at least some of the cops would listen.

And there was the little fact that I hated being locked up. I wasn’t about to voluntarily give up the freedom I had, even with all the hassles that came with it.

I passed by the sunken entrance to the parole office and felt a grim satisfaction when I realized that it, too, was filled with water. The grungy waiting room would be even grungier.

Why couldn’t Aaron’s—or whoever’s—body have been found in that stairwell? That would have saved me from a lot of the grief I was sure was coming my way as soon as a detective was assigned to the case.

I had a horrible feeling I knew who that would be. In a small city police force where everyone had to be flexible, Detective Belkins had seniority and was the most experienced homicide detective they had. And he hated my guts.

Walking past the library and the other county buildings, I peered at the windows and doors. Except for the police station and the jail, they were all dark.

The one church was still closed, and the other was well lit and showed a lot of activity, but I gave it wide berth.

I continued downtown. The stores and restaurants were all closed. The streets weren’t entirely deserted, but the occasional vehicle was mostly a utility crew truck or some other type of emergency responder.

Was it too soon to head back to Kelly’s? My gut twisted at the thought of the kids sitting there listening to our little spat. They deserved a hell of a lot better. Maybe I should just ease myself out of Kelly’s life, before they got too attached to me. They’d had more than their share of losses already—their parents were divorced, none too amicably. Their father insisted on his visitation with them and was trying to get custody, but it was because he was trying to put the screws to Kelly, rather than because he cared about them. When he was supposed to have time with them, he mostly left them with his mother and aunt, neither one of them in particularly good health right now. And he’d recently been in a DUI accident with them in the car.

Not that Kelly didn’t drink. Look at last night and this morning. She hadn’t been able to take care of the kids. Chris tried hard, but an eight-year-old shouldn’t be left taking care of himself, much less a six-year-old sister who wet the bed and hid in the closet.

Was I making things better or worse for them by sticking around?

It wasn’t like I hadn’t realized that adjustment to life on the street was going to be hard. But who knew how a woman and a couple of kids could grab my soul and tear it into pieces?

Or that I’d have to think all the time? In prison, I’d had few choices and little control over anything. This whole making decisions was more difficult than I had ever imagined.

All the problems that would be solved if I were locked up again. That distinctive clang of a cell door shutting behind me would mean I didn’t have to worry about anything anymore. Maybe for the rest of my life.

When I knocked on Kelly’s front door, she opened it. Even without hot water, she’d cleaned herself up. Her hair was redone in a neat braid. She was dressed in regular clothes, but she was wearing a thick hoodie over them. And boots.

The house was cold.

She stepped aside so I could come in.