Street Rules by Baxter Clare Read Free Book Online Page B

Anything.”
    Frank hadn’t expected to find a smoking gun, but she’d needed to see for herself where Luis Estrella had been. She’d half walked, half slid down the angled hillside, and from the surprisingly accurate LASD notes, found the exact location of the body. Searching for the anomaly in the scenery, she’d spent a couple hours crawling through prickly-leaved shrubs and poison oak.
    But for a small assortment of the usual litter, it was a surprisingly clean canyon. Frank had cleared some duff to bare soil and nestled herself against a large boulder. She’d let the mild sun play over her face. Closing her eyes against it, she’d shut out the scenery and gradually deafened herself to the birdsong and bustle in the underbrush.
    She’d concentrated on Luis Estrella’s face, the proud picture of his tats. She imagined him in his room, at the kitchen table with his family, driving in his beat-up car. Working hard at becoming him, she’d absorbed everything she knew about him — his heroin habit, his limp, his ill health, his easy-go-lucky clownishness. She put herself in his tennis shoes and sweatshirt, on the dirty bed in the garage, scratching himself, picking at his sores.
    Frank didn’t have to shoot up to know the effects of horse. She’d grown up around the drug and been surrounded by it throughout her career. When a junkie was happy, he shot up. When he was sad, he shot up. When he was breathing, he shot up. A gutter-hype like Luis lived for only one thing, and that was to dip steel. The only thing that mattered to him was scoring and using. A junkie on the nod couldn’t be provoked into the rage necessary to waste an entire family. A crashing junkie could be angered, but his rage would be focused on finding his next hit. Nothing else mattered to him. The horse obviated any other needs; food, sex, shelter — it all paled compared to the craving for that next hit.
    Sitting in her patch of sunshine, Frank had tried to feel how a hope-to-die junkie could muster the wherewithal to efficiently and cold-bloodedly kill six people. And his dog. The dog that slept in the garage with him, on his own bed. Johnnie was right. It didn’t make sense.
    She repeated that to Noah, who just shook his head. She couldn’t blame him. With a case load like theirs, a detective had to take the most obvious leads and run with them. In a few days, sometimes a few hours, another call would come in and his already heavy load would have to be shifted to accommodate the new burden. The ninety-third didn’t have the luxury of chasing wild hairs and shaky leads. If the evidence pointed north, a detective went north, even if his gut screamed south. The detective could only indulge his gravitational pull if and when the opposite course had been proved a misdirection.
    Rather than arguing when they both had more pressing demands, Frank conceded, “We’ll see what the lab comes up with.”
    Long after Noah had typed up his 60-day report and gone home, Frank could almost see the top of her desk again. She was satisfied with the progress she’d made on the reams of budget projections and overtime justifications, payroll forms and vacation requests, multi-jurisdictional faxes and memos, 60Ds and preliminary reports, plus dozens of warrants, weapons registrations, rap sheets, DMV printouts … and still there was a pile. Determined to return to an empty desktop Monday morning, Frank crammed the remaining papers and photos into her briefcase. She palmed the light switch, leaving the squad room dark behind her.
    On her way out she asked Officer Heisdaeck about his upcoming back surgery and swapped quips with a B&E artist in the holding tank. He’d been on the streets since Frank had been a boot. A few weeks back his 13 month-old grandson had been grazed by a .22 meant for the boy’s Crip father and she asked how he was doing.
    “He be awright. Ain’t nuttin’ but a scratch. Got his first taste a Blood, dat’s wha’ da was. He gone be