Desperate Souls by Gregory Lamberson Read Free Book Online

countenance pressed against his window, bulbous and unblinking eyes staring at him from leathery gray skin.
    He jumped in his seat.
Jesus!
    As a cop in SNAP he had seen many drug addicts up close, and as a homicide detective he had seen murder victims even closer. The emaciated woman standing before him fell somewhere between the two. The look in her eyes was a mixture of fear and desperate drug lust. Her hot pants and belly shirt hung like rags on her bony frame.
    Jake could not roll down his window without starting the engine and alerting the corner boys to his presence, so, with his heart still beating fast and his eyes locked on the woman leaning over him, he switched off the dome light, then opened the door a crack.
    “Yeah?” he said in an impatient tone. He knew better than to show any weakness to a creature like this, who was a predator as much as she was a victim.
    “You want a blow job?” she said in a raspy voice.
    Jake’s nostrils flared, and he gagged as her stench enveloped him. He did not know the exact source of the foul odor and had no desire to learn it. “No. But I’ll give you twenty bucks to walk away and forget you saw me.”
    She looked him up and down. She reminded him of a life-sized puppet more than a human being.
    He pulled a twenty-dollar bill from the empty second cup holder by the stick shift, and he slid it up the window.
    Her eyes dilated into wide black saucers, and when the twenty came within her reach, she snatched it with the speed of a bird. Then she scampered toward the corner.
    Closing the door again, Jake raised the camera and zoomed out wide enough to capture the wretched prostitute in the frame, then followed her progress to the boys.
    The dealers formed a triangular pattern facing her, with Do-Rag on point and the Hoodies flanking him. She gesticulated with the twenty, and Do-Rag nodded. The Hoodie on the left took a step forward, grabbed the twenty from her, and returned to his position. Then the Hoodie Jake suspected might be Louis walked forward, reached into his jacket pocket, and took out something too small to see, which he deposited in the hooker’s open palm. Even before he returned to his spot, she hurried down the sidewalk, moving in and out of the pools of light provided by the streetlights, and disappeared around a high wooden fence.
    My cover’s safe until her high wears off,
Jake thought. Not that it mattered: he had already decided to introduce himself to his subjects of investigation.
    He took a roll of black gaffer’s tape from the glove compartment, tore two strips from it, and secured the camera to the dashboard. He adjusted the camera so it recorded the corner from a wide angle. Then he opened the car door, stepped out into the night, and shut the door hard enough that the sound carried across the street. Reassured by the feeling of his Glock in its shoulder holster pressed against the left side of his rib cage, he followed the pothole-riddled pavement toward the corner, walking neither fast nor slow but with deliberate purpose.
    The three young men turned to him in unison, their hands at their sides. Do-rag had a deep scar on the right side of his face, and a milky sheen covered his eyes. At first Jake thought the dealer suffered from blindness, but those sickening orbs locked onto him and did not waver.
    Jake’s own eyes shifted to the Hoodie on the left, who also seemed to be plagued by cataracts, and then to the Hoodie on the right, whose face did indeed resemble that of the boy in the photo Carmen had given him. Something was
off
about all three figures, no doubt about it. They stood as still as statues, and when they did move, it was with machinelike efficiency. He felt their eyes on him, which caused his blood to curdle.
    What’s wrong with these guys?
    Focusing his attention on The Boy Who Might Be Louis, he said, “Louis Rodriguez?”
    The boy’s sunken eyes did not blink, but his cracked lips parted.
    It is him. No surprise there. Just means