The Depth of Darkness (Mitch Tanner #1) (5 page)

She waved me off. “Get off my case.”

“Someone has to be on it, or you’ll be
digging an early grave.”

She went to the kitchen and sat at the
island. I’d set a plate of eggs on it next to her coffee. She held
the mug up to her face, then took a sip.

“Well?” I said.

“It’ll do.”

There, I had my mother’s approval and could
now go about my day.

“Is school closed?” she asked.

“Don’t think so. Let me check.” My laptop was
waiting and ready. The school’s website said that school was on.
This pleased my mother.

“Where are you off to?” she asked as I headed
toward the door.

“Hospital.”

She got a funny look on her face. “Why?”

“To see Sam.”

Her expression changed to worry. “Oh, he’s
not hurt is he?”

I shook my head and offered her a slight
smile. “Nah, someone else.”

“Anyone I know?”

“I hope not, Momma.”

I stepped onto the front porch, stopped to
slide the sofa back to its regular place, and picked up the toys
and magazines that the circling winds from the day before had
strewn about. At that moment I realized that my car was still
parked at the Millers’s. I pushed open the door and called for
Mom.

“I need to borrow your car.”

“No way. I’ve seen cop movies. It’ll come
back demolished.”

“Just for a few hours, Mom. I’ll get Sam to
follow me back as soon as we leave the hospital.”

She shook her head and tossed her keys to me.
“Someday you’ll grow up.”

I ignored the shot and closed the door behind
me. Her car was old, but kept up. When I sat down inside of it, it
smelled like I was deep within a pine forest. The radio was tuned
to the local soul station. Not an easy station to get the dial to
pick up as I recalled. I wasn’t in the mood to shake my money
maker, so I turned the volume down and drove to the hospital in
relative silence. No getting rid of the road noise, though. I
rolled the windows down. The wind rush created a sort of white
noise that drowned out my thoughts.

The roads were empty at six a.m. Perhaps
parents slept in a little later today, hoping that school would be
closed. That would give them a welcome excuse to stay home. Little
Billy and Annie can’t be home alone. Not with all the crazies out
in the world.

If they only knew.

Fifteen minutes after pulling out of my
driveway, I found a parking spot at the hospital. I called Sam on
my cell and met him at the entrance. We showed our badges at every
desk along the way. No one bothered to ask questions, they just
said, “Mornin’ officers,” and, “Go right ahead officers.” That’s a
right good start to a cop’s day. Better than bullets whizzing by.
And water tower ledges.

I recognized Roy’s room by the empty chair
positioned outside the door. That’s where our guy would have been
last night. Question was, had he been there when Roy escaped? I
peeked through the open doorway and saw Huff standing there,
looking out the window.

“Huff?” I said, stopping inside.

“Come on in, guys.” He didn’t look back at
us. There wasn’t much of a view that I could see, so I had no idea
what he was entranced by.

We stood there a minute or two before Huff
finally turned around. He placed his hands on his expanding waist.
He hadn’t dressed for the occasion. He wore dark blue sweatpants
and a hooded sweatshirt with the logo of that rival team just up
I-95. He hadn’t shaved all weekend. I bet the hair on his head
would have been a mess if he had any.

“What’d our guy say, Huff?” Sam asked.

“Said he sat in that chair outside the door
all night. He got here at eleven, pulled double duty with Jennings
till twelve, then took over. He slept a good six or seven hours he
claims, not bothering to watch a single game all day.”

“Who was it?” I asked.

“Ramirez,” Huff said. “Know him?”

I didn’t know any of the new guys these days.
“Nah.”

“Baby-faced kid two months out of the
academy. Got a baby on the way, and he wanted the overtime. Didn’t
react too well to being placed on admin leave.”

“Imagine so,” I said. “You believe him?”

“Doesn’t matter what I believe. Hospital has
security footage, and we’re in the process of procuring that. But
most important to me is what the hell happened to Roy Miller.”

“Me too,” I said.

Huff turned back to the window. He grabbed it
and tugged. It slid open with a tiny squeak. “Hear that?”

“The squeak? Yeah.”

Huff spun around and nodded. He hiked his
thumb over his shoulder a couple times. “Ramirez says he recalled
hearing that a half-dozen times or so. When he checked, Roy was
sound asleep.”

“He attribute it to a mouse or something?”
Sam asked.

Huff shrugged.

“And then he stopped checking,” I said.

“Yup,” Huff said.

“How long did he wait to look?”

“He says right away. Until he stopped.”

“What’s outside that window?” Sam asked.

“Have a look,” Huff replied.

So Sam and I crossed the room and Huff
stepped out of our way. I opened the window wide enough for both of
us to stick our heads out. Though we were three floors up, a fire
escape was bolted to the building. Roy wouldn’t have even had to
drop to reach it. All he would have had to do was stick one leg
out, then the other, and he’d have been on it.

“Someone was out here,” Sam said, pointing at
the painted black metal platform.

I nodded. “They opened and closed the window
to see how Ramirez would react.”

Sam turned around and shook his head,
pointing past the open doorway. “Well, look at that.”

Huff and I followed his gaze and his finger.
Across the hall was a wall of tempered glass. The kind that gives
off a nice reflection.

I said, “Whoever was out there could see
Ramirez’s reaction.”

Sam took three long steps, placing him near
the doorway. He turned and said, “And look, you can’t see out the
window from here.”

“So whoever was out there waited until
Ramirez got complacent, and then left the window open.”

“And Roy Miller climbed out to freedom.”

“Huff, did anyone try to come by and see Roy
at all yesterday?” I asked.

“We’ll find out,” Huff replied.

“Come on, Sam,” I said. “I need to drop my
Momma’s car off at my house.”

Lil’ Debby Walker hated her nickname. She
didn’t mind it so much when she was five, but now that she was
nine, she resented the H E double hockey sticks out of it. She
wasn’t a darn pastry. Speaking of pastries, the Cheese Wagon came
to a stop ten feet in front of her. Since Billy moved away, she was
the only one at the bus stop in the morning. Katy rode the bus
home, but her mom took her to school.

The bus driver looked over at her and nodded.
She checked the street both ways before crossing to the other side.
Good habits ingrained deep. She had lots of them. Her mother told
her she was neurotic, whatever that meant. Her brother teased her
that she was something called oh sea dee. Gibberish. To her ears,
at least.

So Debby looked left, then right, then left
again. She tapped the fingers of her left hand to her thumb twice
each. She counted her steps from the curb to the bus. On the
seventh step, she stopped and looked down to see where her feet
were. If not even with the bus’s front left tire, she’d have to
start over again. The bus driver didn’t like it when she did that,
but he’s not the one who’d have to live the consequences of her
getting this wrong, so she’d start over. The fate of the world
could be at stake.

Lil’ Debby Walker thought so, at least.

Today her feet lined up perfectly. A smile
beamed on her face as she rounded the front of the bus and stopped
in front of the open sliding door. Three steps up, one forward, a
quick smile for the driver, turn left, then the fourth row on the
right. Her seat. Window seat. Lil’ Debby’s seat every year since
kindergarten.

Not today, though. Two boys in the fifth
grade had decided to take her not-so-assigned place on the bus.

“Get up,” she said.

“Go away,” the brown haired one said.

She tucked her blond curls behind her ears
and slung her backpack over her right shoulder. “Get up or I’ll
tell everyone how you wet the bed that weekend my mom watched you.
You remember that, don’t you? It was only two months ago.”

The boy’s friend started laughing, which drew
a punch to the shoulder from the brown haired boy.

“Let her have her stupid seat,” the brown
haired boy said, pushing his friend toward the aisle.

Debby took a step back. She looked over her
shoulder and saw the bus driver watching her and laughing to
himself. He winked and gave her a quick nod.

The brown haired boy bumped her with his
shoulder as he passed and said, “Stupid little freak.”

She didn’t care. She had her seat. She’d won,
as she often did. While she might be neurotic, or oh sea dee, a
stupid little freak, or any other number of things the kids called
her, she was also smarter than them all.

A state certified genius
, her mother
had said.

You mean certifiable,
her brother had
said.

Oh hush, Ronald. Lil’ Debby’s gonna skip two
grades. She might graduate high school before you. Definitely
college.

Ronald had blushed and given her the middle
finger when her mom wasn’t looking.

Debby didn’t like the sound of skipping
grades and going to college at the age of fifteen. She wanted
nothing to do with it. It had been hard enough for her to make
friends with kids her own age. Imagine the way she’d be treated if
she jumped from third to fifth grade. The Boy Who Wets His Pants
would be relentless toward The Stupid Little Freak. And so would
his friends. And probably all the other kids.

So she begged and pleaded to remain where she
was. Her mother agreed, reluctantly, and with the caveat that
they’d revisit the subject after the fourth grade. She didn’t know
the word caveat, but she got the meaning from context. Surely, at
the ripe age of eleven, Debby would be more than mature enough to
skip junior high and go right to high school.

Puh-lease.

The bus turned right into the next
neighborhood. Even at her age, Debby could tell that the houses
were nicer. So were the cars. That meant the parents made more
money than her mom. Not hard to do, she supposed, considering how
little she had. And everything she did have had been given to her
second hand.

Lil’ Debby, charity case.

Seven kids got on the bus. Six walked past
her without so much as a glance. But the seventh stopped, smiled
and tossed his bag to her.

“Hi Beans,” she said.

Bernard “Beans” Holland hated being called
Beans as much as she despised Lil’ Debby. That didn’t stop her from
using his nickname loudly and often.

“Can you at least call me Bernie?” He pushed
his thick glasses up his nose and fell onto the seat.

A cloud of dust shot up and fell back down
through the rays of sunlight that slipped in between the giant two
story houses.

“Glad that storm passed,” she said.

He glanced at her over the rim of his
glasses. “We’re talking about the weather now?”

She gave him a cross look. “What’s that
mean?”

“No idea. Something my mom said to her
boyfriend.” Beans grabbed his bag off her lap and pulled out a tube
of lotion. He squeezed a dime-sized circle on the back of his hand
and rubbed it in.

Debby held out her hands, palms facing down,
in front of him.

“What?” he asked.

“Can I have some?”

“You don’t need it.”

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

“Just because I’m not black doesn’t mean I
don’t like putting your pretty smelling lotion on my hands.”

“I don’t wear pretty smelling lotion,” he
said to a chorus of laughter behind them. “I’ve got dry skin.”

Debby glanced over her shoulder and narrowed
her eyes at the brown-haired boy. A slight shake of her head was
all it took to make him stop. And what he did, the others did. She
kind of relished the power she now had over him.

“Here,” Beans said.

“Why thank you, Bernard,” she said, smiling
at him as he handed the tube over. They were two oddball peas that
had fallen from their original pods and made one of their own out
of the scraps the world threw at them. Without each other, school
would have been a miserable experience. Together, they could take
on anything and anyone.

The bus completed its tour through the fancy
neighborhood and hit the main road to school. Five to ten minutes,
on average, is all they had before being forced to put up with a
day confined behind their desks. To Debby, it was so boring. To
which her mother would respond, skip those grades and you won’t be
bored. On so many levels, Debby was sure that would be the case.
Spending half a day crammed inside one’s own locker had to be a
rush, right?

The old stinky Cheese Wagon clanked to a stop
in front of the gymnasium. Debby and Beans waited their turn and
exited. Once on the sidewalk, they turned right and walked toward
the back of the bus, through an invisible cloud of diesel
fumes.

“That stinks,” Beans said.

“You stink,” Debby said.

He pulled out his inhaler and took a puff.
“It’s not good for my asthma.”

“You say that about
everything
.” And
he did. Running, jumping, climbing, standing, squatting, peeing
(she wasn’t so sure about that one), playing video games. They all
gave him asthma attacks.

“I do not. Those fumes are—” His body lurched
forward. His knees and elbows scraped the pavement. His glasses
flew through the air and landed a few feet in front of him. The
sunlight fractured as it passed through the broken lens and cast
several golden beams of light of varying sizes on the ground.