Hideout (Pittsburgh Police) - Softcover

ONE

SATURDAY

 
COMMANDER CHRISTIE SLAPPED DOWN a file folder and got up to look out his office door. It was late on a Saturday in early May and there was nothing going on in Homicide. Some of his detectives were relieved about the slack; others were restless. The few who were in were slogging through paperwork.
It was long past time to go home; he’d put in his shift, set a good example and all that. He left his door open and went back to his desk, as if chaining himself to it might keep up the spirit of his troops.
He wanted to talk to his kids so he dialed his ex’s house. Catherine was just answering, saying, “Oh, it’s you,” when he noticed a flutter of activity outside his door. “Kids aren’t here,” Catherine added.
He tried to see what was happening on the floor. “How come they’re both out?” he asked. It was six thirty. Where would they both go?
“It’s a crime?”
“No.”
“Because I have a date. Shock you?”
“No. No, I’m glad.” While he watched his two detectives—phone, physical movement—he tried to picture Catherine on a date, still battling so much anger. “The kids are where?”
“At my friend’s house.”
“Have a good time.”
She didn’t answer.
He said, “Take care,” and hung up.
Paul Mertz and Irina Alexandratos were fetching their jackets, but Alexandratos was on the phone again as Christie hurried over to them.
“What is it? You got something?”
“We just got a 911. Kid on a sidewalk,” Mertz said hopefully, buttoning his sport coat. “Caller said he looks dead. Probably crack, so we can get there in case—” His raised eyebrows finished the thought. You got crack, you got a potential killer, Mertz always said. It was more or less true. The crack addicts were the worst.
Alexandratos had a hand up to silence him.
“She’s on with the ambulance,” Mertz told Christie.
Alexandratos’s face fell as she hung up. “Nah, he’s still alive,” she said glumly. “Ah, well.” She wagged her head and looked at her deskful of memos and other junk waiting for her attention. “Commander? We’d like to go to the hospital, you know, in case there was any intention or in case he doesn’t make it.”
Christie nodded. It might be something. He hoped the tide was turning and there’d be cases to get their teeth into. Dolan and Greer were due at midnight. Murders didn’t happen on an even schedule. You either had four of them or none. “I’m going home,” Christie told them. “Watch crime on TV.”
*   *   *
JACK RUTTER, DRIVING THE RED TRUCK, had looked for his brother in the usual places. The base house where Ryan bought his rocks looked different today, curtains opened. Jack drove around the corner to East Ohio, where he immediately saw the flashing lights of a police ambulance. He thought, Oh, no, please no. People were standing around. Shit, shit, shit, he breathed. Then he saw through the gaggle of onlookers that his brother’s friend Chester was down on the pavement. Ryan was alive at least, squatting next to Chester in front of an empty barbershop with the windows papered over. Jack put the truck in a NO PARKING space with the motor still running and leapt out and went over to his brother. Two baby-faced medics were trying to talk to Chester, turning him slightly. Chester was big, 250 pounds or more.
“What’d he take?” one of them asked Ryan.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, talk. You want to be responsible for killing him?”
“Crack, I think.”
Jack moved over to Ryan and squatted down beside him.
“We’re getting a heartbeat,” one medic said to the other, who was clapping an oxygen mask on Chester. “His name?” the guy asked Ryan.
“Chester Saunders.”
“Address?”
“I don’t know.”
Jack was trying to get Ryan to stand up when the one EMT man took a call.
They could hear a woman asking, “He’s still alive?”
“Yeah. Barely.” The medic hung up. “Some detective on the prowl,” he said.
Ryan couldn’t stand up at first. He was usually jacked up high after he’d smoked, but he was stunned, scared. Jack lifted him and he slid up the wall. “Come on, man. You got to get out of here.”
One of the medics looked hard at Ryan. “What’s your name?”
“Ryan Brown.”
Brown wasn’t their last name.
“He smoked it?”
“Yeah.”
The EMT men swept Chester onto a stretcher and into the ambulance as Jack dragged his brother away from the wall and toward the truck. The people who were hanging around moved aside to let them through.
Ryan moaned. “He might die.”
“I know,” Jack said. “But we gotta go.” The EMT, hardly older than Jack and Ryan, slammed the door of the ambulance and the driver took off as Jack guided his brother toward the corner. “I left the motor running. Hurry. You can’t hang out here.”
Two dressed-up people holding hands stopped walking to watch Jack helping Ryan into the passenger seat of the truck. Jack said, “What are you looking at? Keep to your own business.” Ryan took a mock swing in their direction through the window of the truck.
Jack drove away from the scene toward a place on Western where he wanted to buy food so they’d have it later when Ryan was able to eat. He kept looking behind him in the rearview mirror. No police were following them.
“Chester is my friend...”
“I know. You feel okay?”
“I feel sick.”
Ryan was the older of the two brothers. There was a point in their childhoods when Ryan took care of Jack. Now it was the other way around most days. “What were you doing on East Ohio?” Jack asked, meaning in front of the barbershop with the FOR SALE sign.
“The other place, the basement place, is being watched.”
The open curtains. That was it. “So you went like, what, ten feet away?”
“Morgan figured how to get in the back way to the barbershop. He’s meeting people there until he can find somewhere else. You think Chester’s going to make it? He did the chicken.”
The chicken was bad. That was the flapping around before everything stopped. “He’s going to make it.”
“I opened the front door and dragged him out and made some guy with a phone call the ambulance.”
“How’d you drag big old Chester?”
“Some other guy helped.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know who he was. He helped and then he booked.”
“Where was Morgan during this?”
“He got out the back way.”
Jack parked the truck and took a deep breath. All day today he had thought about getting away from this scene, even if it meant getting away from Ryan. “You are real bad messed up. This has to end.”
“I know.”
“Where’d you get the money to pay Morgan?”
“Up the hill. Turned out some lady was home.” Chester and Ryan had been laughing about roughing up some old lady. They said they’d leave Jack out of it because he was a pussy and you had to be very persuasive with the old ladies.
“You hurt her?”
“No,” Ryan said vaguely as if not quite sure.
Jack finally went into the shop. He watched out the window to be sure his brother stayed put while he ordered a couple of pieces of pizza and a large cup of coffee. As soon as he put the order in, he returned to the truck with the coffee and leaned in the passenger window. Ryan was drumming on his thighs. The coffee was boiling hot.
“You okay?” Jack said.
“Just chilling.”
They both laughed a little, thinking of the same thing—one of Chester’s stories. Chester once broke into someone’s house, ate their food, drank their wine, popped their prescriptions, then curled up on the sofa and went to sleep. Owner came home, ran out, called the police, the police came. None of it woke Chester. The police had to shake him awake. According to Chester, the police said something like, “Hey, buddy, what’re you doing here?” And Chester gave them a nice big smile and said, “Oh. Just chillin’.” Afterward, the police kept imitating him, joking and laughing. “He was just chillin’.” Even the owner of the house found it funny and didn’t press charges.
Chester was big, sly, always playing, and Ryan admired him.
“Let’s go up to Tanya’s,” Ryan said now.
Chester’s girlfriend had an apartment she’d let them stay in a couple of times when Chester wheedled her into it and they gave up a couple of dollars for the pleasure of sleeping on her floor.
When he figured the pizza slices were ready, Jack went back inside and paid. It felt fantastic to have money in his pocket. He vowed not to tell Ryan how he got it.
“Not hungry,” Ryan said as Jack got in the truck and handed over the box. Ryan put the cardboard box on the floor.
Jack drove up the hill to the clump of bushes where they parked the truck at night and he finished up his coffee. He wondered if Ryan could be a different person if he got away from here, away from Chester and Morgan and the lot of them.
Ryan felt in his pockets for a pack of cigarettes, as if he’d finally remembered what he wanted. Finding a crumpled pack, he scooped out a bent one and lit up. Suddenly his eyes came alive. “Hey. How’d you pay for the pizza? Hey, where the fuck were you all day?”
“Just driv...