Austin Glass Starring in: Screwed Without Orgasm
An hour later, Luis and I waited in a cramped room with the boxes of evidence from Alvarado’s house. We had sorted out the small and large baggies containing papers, passports, IDs and money, leaving the rest—weaponry, drugs and paraphernalia—in the evidence lockup. Peter, Darryl and my father were meeting with the officers investigating the fires in a separate interrogation room.
It was just me and my partner, quietly going over evidence and giving wide berth to the elephant in the room. The elephant being the large number of rancid stares I had received as we entered, along with the large plastic rat that someone had planted on my desk. No one, not even Luis, who knew I was coming in, had hid that from my sight.
“On a scale of one-to-ten, how screwed am I?” I lifted a bag, pretending to stare at the contents. I couldn’t concentrate on it. Couldn’t care less whose passport I held.
“A hundred,” Luis grunted.
I kept my smile, forced though it was, and lifted another baggy. “That’ll be my first hundred since high school biology.”
Luis slammed down a stack of papers. “What the fuck are you doing with your life?”
“Dating hookers, learning the gay, housing criminals, pissing off my fellow cops, and taking in what everyone says is a cat, but which I’m definitely sure is not a cat. I’m undecided on its actual species. I think it’s a cross between a rat and some kind of alien life—”
“It’s all a big joke to you?”
“No.” I sighed. “It’s all a big fucked up, confusing mess to me. What do you want me to do? Cry? Rant?”
“How is this for funny. Del and Marco are looking into your connection to Alvarado’s murder.”
“Now that is funny,” I murmured, no smile on my face now. If they wanted to connect me, there wasn’t much I could do. There wasn’t any evidence of my guilt, but I also had no proof of innocence.
“You bring this on yourself with the shit you’re pulling.” Luis rubbed his forehead with his palm and dropped his hand hard onto the table.
“Yeah, well, now I’m in too deep, Luis. There’s no way out. Even if I wanted one. Which I don’t. I’ll make peace with the end of my career. Some day. But I’m not on the wrong side here.”
“You are so sure of this that you take me down with you? I trusted you, and you let your dick drag us both down into the sewer.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with my dick,” I shouted, knocking the chair back as I stood and barely feeling the resulting pain. I was finally filthy fucking pissed off. “It’s about right and wrong and a sixteen-year-old kid who was raped for hours by a drug-dealing pimp. Even if Cai is guilty, I’m on his side.”
“Sit down.” Luis glowered and leaned back in his chair. I obeyed the order, but not without petulantly scraping the chair hard against the concrete floor. Luis pushed both hands through his hair. “It’s always these kids with you. I should have expected it. But look, I get the money you give them, and the calls to DHS, and I even get you shelling out for this kid’s lawyer. But all three of them living with you? Kids of men we work to put away? One of those kids is a killer; maybe they all are.”
I crossed my arms over the table and leaned forward, my voice a loud, angry growl. “You’re not listening to me. For once in my fucking life, I’m not looking for a criminal. I don’t care if he did it. Get that? I don’t give a fucking shit. And if I lose everything because of this, so be it. I’m doing what’s ri—” I trailed off as I lost Luis’s interest. He was looking to my right. Peter, Darryl and my father stood in the doorway.
Desmond Glass cast a disapproving curl of his lip at me. Darryl had the opposite kind of grin. And Peter? Peter’s smile held the sadness and despair I felt, and something else, too. I didn’t know what it meant, but it elicited a profound warmth in my chest.
Career Plague
The table spanned the majority of the room, and the evidence lay in piles covering almost every inch of it. Peter and Darryl were reaching left and right, exchanging items to be looked at and discarded.
We were tightly slotted into our cookie package, three on one side—if my father could be counted as being on a ‘side’—and two on the other. Peter was to my left, Desmond in the corner to Peter’s left, and Darryl and Luis across from us. Elbow room was nonexistent, which was unfortunate because Peter’s kept brushing up against mine, drawing attention to his pale, freckled arm and making me lose track of why we were there. I kept wanting to trace through the soft copper hair dusting from elbow to wrist.