Assume Nothing by Gar Anthony Haywood Read Free Book Online Page A

in his late twenties who had eyes like a squirrel and the build of a weekend marathoner determined to run himself straight into the grave; there was more fat and muscle on one of Reddick’s fingers than there was on the arms that stuck out of Hart’s ubiquitous short-sleeve shirts. His emaciated appearance and perpetually foul attitude made for an asshole Reddick could hardly stand to be in the same room with without wanting to throw a chair out the window.
    ‘Tell me you’ve got something for me this time,’ Hart said.
    They were up in his office on the eighth floor of City Hall East, surrounded by photos of Hart crossing various finish lines in near-death triumph, and he was bouncing the tip of a pen on his desk with an impatience no meeting only thirty seconds old should have warranted.
    Reddick said, ‘He’s a bowler.’
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘You know. A ball with holes in it. Ten pins at the end of a long stretch of hardwood. Bowling. He likes to bowl.’
    Hart tapped the pen two, three more times, then stopped. Catching on. ‘With his right arm?’
    ‘With his right arm.’
    ‘And you have video?’
    ‘I have video.’
    Hart nodded and grinned. It was the grin of a shark with capped teeth and a bad need for braces. ‘I knew it. I knew this one was bullshit.’
    Hart thought every excessive force case brought against the LAPD was bullshit, especially when the charges were coming from somebody of color, but Reddick didn’t bother to point this out. Hart thought he was doing the Lord’s work, and anyone who questioned his impartiality was just a bleeding heart looking for employment elsewhere.
    ‘How soon can I see it? The video?’
    ‘I’ll work on it over the weekend and have something for you by Monday,’ Reddick said. In truth, he could have come to today’s meeting with a copy of the video in hand, but he liked making Hart wait. It was one of the few ways he had of punishing the asshole for replacing the man who had originally hired Reddick five years ago. Compared to Hart, whom Reddick had been enduring now for a little less than a year, Ed Flores had been a goddamn candidate for sainthood.
    ‘OK. Stay on him in the meantime,’ Hart said. ‘Until I see that video, I want as much physical evidence of his bogus incapacity as we can gather.’
    He stood up and opened his office door. He’d heard all he needed to hear and lacked the common courtesy to offer a simple goodbye.
    Reddick smiled, choosing amusement over some other emotion that might have moved him to change the position of Hart’s nose on his face, and walked out.
    ‘Finola, what are you doing?’ Finola Winn asked herself out loud. She’d been doing a lot of that lately, holding conversations with herself like a crazy homeless person, and it worried her a little. She let the wrong person hear her do it, a Northeast watch commander or news reporter, say, and the brass would have her on administrative leave before she even knew what hit her.
    But there was no one around to hear her today. She was alone, wasting her lunch hour wandering the cement bed of the Los Angeles River, working a John Doe case that in all probability wasn’t even a homicide. Her partner, Norm Lerner, had refused to join her in this exercise, choosing instead to do what sane people did between the hours of twelve and one p.m. and eat. Norm thought Finola was nuts, doing legwork on a case they’d only caught the day before, and one he was sure was going to turn out to be some bizarre form of LA suicide rather than murder, at that, and Finola couldn’t really argue with him. This was nuts, which was why she was behaving like a lunatic off her meds and talking to herself now.
    Something about the body they’d found in a storm drain down here yesterday wouldn’t leave her be. A fully clothed white man spread out on his back in a pool of black water, ripe as a rotten cantaloupe and crawling with maggots after what the coroner’s tech guessed had been maybe