Page 67 of Deja Who
“You’re half right,” he retorted, managing to drive steadily out of pure force of will.
“—which will not be at all good for your career. And honestly, Detective, aren’t you tired of being afraid of not knowing? You’ve been worrying for years that you feel guilty because you were a killer of some kind. Well, you weren’t. Don’t you want to know who was? There’s a reason you’re a homicide detective instead of a cable repairman.”
“That’s not relevant to your mother’s murder.”
“Of course it isn’t.” He sighed, possibly in relief. “Except for the whole false arrest debacle.” He groaned, probably not in relief.
“I don’t want to discuss this.”
“But it’s a long dull drive.” She guessed. She had no idea which precinct/ideal body dump site he was taking her to. “And Idowant to discuss it.”
“Change of subject.”
“But it’s so foolish, especially when you consider how close you are to putting the nightmares of your childhood behind you.”
“Change of subjectright now.”
“You’re right. There is one more option.”You realize you’re antagonizing a grown man with a gun, yes? Have you considered the fact that he might be your killer?Leah ignored her inner voice, which often made cowardly suppositions. Here was a man who had a problem she could assist him with. If he was her killer, so be it. At least she wouldn’t wonder anymore.
Oh but Archer...
She shoved that thought away. “You could go the other way, I guess.”
“Miss Nazir, I do not fucking want to talk about this!”
Hearing a sworn officer of the law shriek in a closed vehicle as she sulked in the backseat with her hands cuffed behind her was a definite first. Oh, the colleagues she loathed wouldadorethis. Perhaps she would embellish the story for them: “And then he perpetrated police brutality all over my head and shoulders which stung horribly.” Mmmm... better not. In addition to being illegal, false allegations of police brutality were impolite, and sometimes led to murderous misunderstandings.
“All right,” she said after a long moment in which a) she was intrigued and b) Detective Preston was grateful. “I only have one thing to add—stop that,” she scolded as Preston banged his head on the steering wheel. It was fortunate they were at a red light. And that the horn was located elsewhere in the vehicle. “You’ll kill us both, or give yourself a nasty headache, or both, or you’ll only kill you, or you’ll only kill me. All those results are unacceptable.”
“I. Am. Begging. You.”
“My last comment on the subject under discussion—”
“It’s not! Under discussion, I mean.”
“—is that none of it was your fault. I implied as much because I’m a bitch, for which I have apologized.”
“You didn’t, actually. Oh my Christ, we’re still talking about this.”
“Hmm.” That brought Leah up short. “Well, I meant to apologize. It was on my list of things I meant to discuss. But as I was saying, none of it was your fault; it was all on Albert DeSalvo.”
True to her word, she dropped the subject and contented herself with looking out the window and humming “No Light, No Light” under her breath. Florence and the Machine was one of the more vastly underrated musical acts in the history of music. She wondered if Detective Preston took requests.
At the station she had been booked, which was a series of paperwork, followed by her mug shot, and then her fingerprints were taken (no ink required in the twenty-first century and she was a bit let down, having been looking forward to the drama of ink-stained fingertips), scanned, and put into the System, which, as an Insighter, was redundant, as upon licensing all Insighters were routinely printed and photographed, new photos required every five years.
Then she had been escorted to a spotless, well-lit holding cell
(does television geteverythingwrong?)
populated by half a dozen other women of various ages, conventional attractiveness, skin color, and clothing choices. Per television, they should all be prostitutes and/or meth addicts.
Only one of them looked like a prostitute (Leah did not approve of tube tops on anyone, never mind an overweight, sallow-skinned woman in her late thirties) and she was the shoplifter. The others were:
1) Karen the Boyfriend Beater. Karen was a gorgeous young lady (“Young lady? Jeez. I’m twenty-nine, okay, and when I was fourteen, I helped my uncle set the Piggly Wiggly on fire, so ‘lady’ is off, too.”) with skin so dark it had mahogany undertones. She tolerated her boyfriend’s gambling habit, his inability to keep a steady job (which was hilarious, as he was a temp worker, so his steady job was to not keep a steady job), and his unfortunate propensity for anal sex. (“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Renee the Shoplifter said. “Onlyanal sex.” “Oh.”)
Karen worked both her jobs with an often-throbbing backside, but when she objected to his $1,000 wager on the outcome of an upcoming Cubs game, he backhanded her. Karen’s response to this was to hoist a knee into his testicles and, while he writhed and sniveled on the kitchen tile, beat him repeatedly in the face with a container of Clorox wipes. In true douchebag fashion, he called the police.
“That makes so much sense,” Leah decided after hearing the lurid and hilarious tale.
