What Doesn't Kill Us--A McKenzie Novel by David Housewright (most read books txt) 📗

telling herself that there must be a very good reason why this man that she didn’t know, who had asked to speak to her, was being rude to her in her own place while her husband was in a coma in the hospital.

Nina eased into the chair.

“It’s terrible what happened to McKenzie,” the man said, although his tone of voice suggested that it wasn’t terrible at all.

“Yes, it is,” Nina said.

“Maybe now he’ll learn his lesson.”

“Lesson?”

“Not to fuck around in someone else’s business.”

“Who are you?”

“He was warned and now you’re being warned—keep your big mouth shut.”

Nina smiled. At least she told me that she smiled; I have a hard time believing it myself.

“Warned about what?” she asked. “Be specific.”

“Don’t make the same mistake he did, or you’re going to end up just like him. Do you understand, bitch?”

What happened next happened so fast that Nina told me later that she didn’t even think about it. “Just boom,” she said.

The boom was her curling her right hand into a tight fist and punching the man in the mouth just as hard as she could.

The blow spun the man out of his chair. He rose to his feet with his hand covering his lower face. Nina told me she could see blood.

“Are you crazy?” he said.

Nina was also on her feet and holding her arm.

She had felt the shock of the blow surge through her fingers, through her wrist, and into her elbow. She was convinced that she had hurt herself more than she had hurt the man.

“Who are you?” she shouted.

The man backed away.

“You come into my place and threaten me? Who are you?”

The man spun and moved quickly toward the door.

“You’re nuts, lady,” he said.

Nina gave chase even as she tried to shake the pain from her arm.

“Who are you?” she repeated. “Why are you threatening me?”

The man made it to the door and pulled it shut behind him. Nina yanked on the handle and felt a lightning strike of pain ripple through her arm.

She stepped back and shook it some more.

Through the window she could see the man running toward the street. A car stopped for him. She couldn’t identify the make or model; she didn’t know cars, she told Bobby later. Besides, all cars looked the same these days, she said. She also said she had been unable to read the license plate as the car sped away.

She spun to face the bar. Her staff and all of her early afternoon customers were staring at her with expressions ranging from amusement to terror. Nina wanted to say something but didn’t know what.

“I know you would have had some smartass remark to make,” she told me. “It’s one of my life’s great disappointments I couldn’t think of a thing.”

Instead, she went to her office and called Bobby.

Dave Deese was startled when his office phone rang. Usually his secretary screened his calls; for one to get through unannounced meant the caller was among the small handful of people who had his private number.

“Hello, this is David,” he spoke into the receiver.

A female’s voice said, “Hello, Dee Dee.”

A surge of adrenaline nearly knocked him out of his chair.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“Who do you think?”

Deese rose to his feet even though his legs wobbled beneath him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Jeezus, David. It’s T.”

“T?”

“Your sister T, goddammit.”

“What do you want?”

“What do I—I want to talk. Come over.”

“To your office?”

“To the house. Tonight. I’ll make something for dinner. David, it’s time we had a private conversation.”

“About what?”

“What the fuck do you think? What we should have been talking about two goddamn weeks ago—Dee Dee.”

Deese said he’d be there. T hung up the phone and Deese thought, She would never have spoken like that in front of our father.

Shipman was jealous. Eddie Hilger and Sarah Frisco, the detectives that Bobby had given the biker case to, burst noisily into the large office that housed all of the detectives working Homicide and Robbery in Major Crimes. They were so very pleased with themselves. It turned out that while Shipman was wasting her time reviewing my notes, they were busy scooping up one of the bikers who had assaulted the bouncer at Haven. The detectives discovered him on the stoop in front of his house, wearing his gang colors. He had been waiting for the police with two handguns and a blackjack in his pocket. The detectives couldn’t help but notice the guns and suggested that the biker move away from them very carefully. He said he had a permit to carry his guns. Sarah said, “Funny, so do I.” They stared at each other for a few beats like gunfighters waiting for the other to make the first move. The biker must have decided he didn’t like his chances against Sarah, especially with Eddie and a couple of uniforms backing her up, because he rose slowly to his feet, leaving both guns on the stoop; his empty hands in the air.

“For a moment there, I thought things might go sideways,” Sarah said.

Shipman repeated the words under her breath in that catty tone of hers—“For a moment there, I thought things might go sideways”—and looked away. She and Sarah were the only women working as detectives in Major Crimes. You’d think that alone would create a sense of camaraderie between the two, only it didn’t. Maybe it was because Shipman’s desk was toward the back of the room closest to Bobby’s office while Sarah’s was nearest the door, but what do I know?

After the biker was taken into custody, he was tag-teamed by both Sarah and Eddie, yet refused to identify the other men involved in the fight at Haven and eventually refused to answer their questions without a lawyer present. Once he was taken to the Ramsey County Adult Detention Center, though, he demanded to make a phone call. He called his ex-wife. Even though a taped message told him that his call was being recorded and could be used against him in