Sudden Exposure by Susan Dunlap Read Free Book Online Page B

thirty-three audible up on College. The alarm that was waking half the neighborhood came from an open door on the roof. I had to climb a hedge to get to the fire ladder. And once I found the damned thing, it still took half an hour to raise the owner to come and reset. After that I had a four-fifteen with the husband and wife screaming louder than the alarm. He’s threatening to bloody her right in front of us. And her, she’ll be back with him in a week. Why do we bother?”
    “You called mental health?”
    “Yeah, they came. They’ve been before.” She shrugged. “You ready to go?”
    “As soon as I finish this.” I pushed up and went to the end of the table to find a second sheet for the Johnson report. “What’s this? J. Smith? I didn’t leave anything here.” I pulled the carton toward me and pawed through the pencils, notepads, clear nail polish, empty Tylenol bottle, three different strengths of sunscreen. It was the stuff I hadn’t been able to get in the first boxes I’d taken out of my office when Brucker moved in. These odds and ends had been in the bottom drawer. “Look what was sitting on top, Connie,” I said, holding up a Tampax box.
    “Right. Very sensitive of Brucker.”
    “Whole thing’s real sensitive. Would it have killed him to leave me a note that he needed the drawer?”
    “Well, come rescue Howard’s papers before he finds them cast out in a box with his boxer shorts on top.”
    I added the last two sentences to the report, deposited it in the team tray for the sergeant to approve and headed downstairs to the tiny office that Howard and I had shared only last week. Then I had kidded him about his upcoming position as patrol sergeant. While he’d race around to check on 415s and car stops in the night, I would take over his old desk and cover it with reports, forms, graphs, and notes and have every item of every homicide case at hand. It would be Homicide in Heaven, I’d told him. If heaven were an eight by twelve institutional green room with one window that never admitted sun. The office was barely big enough for one person. Presumably it would suit Brucker. He’d probably already hung the framed news photo of himself shaking Ronald Reagan’s hand. The accompanying article proclaimed that private citizen Reagan had stopped in Sacramento to encourage the troops. The picture, the talk of the station, would make a change from the notices and memos Howard and I were so familiar with.
    We had had our desks facing opposite walls; when he’d rolled his desk chair out, I’d had to slide mine in. And when we’d both turned around to talk, we’d shifted in choreographed moves perfected after a number of minor crashes. If he’d stretched out his long, long legs—the man is six foot six after all—he’d had to angle them toward the far corner of my desk. It had taken months to get the routine down. We’d both grumbled about the tiny space. But after a week on patrol with not even a desk of my own, I really missed it. I pushed open the door.
    It stuck halfway. I braced my palm against it and shoved.
    The light came on.
    “Surprise!” Connie called out.
    “Welcome to the Wacky World of Patrol,” Paul Murakawa said, grinning. Leonard was there, and Acosta. And of course, Howard, all squeezed into the tiny room.
    “We were going to get you a box of doughnuts and a thermos of coffee, but, well, you know, stuff’s not too fresh this hour of night. So …” Pereira passed me a can of Calistoga water, orange flavored.
    “So how’s it going, Smith?” Leonard, the old man of patrol, who had been on the Telegraph Avenue beat longer than I’d been with the department, had commandeered my old desk chair. I boosted myself onto my old desk—Brucker’s now—next to Paul Murakawa. Connie Pereira had taken “her” seat on the end of Howard’s desk, kicked open the bottom drawer, and propped her feet there. She patted the spot next to her for Acosta, and, I noted, he wasted no time