Shattered Glass(16)

“Why don’t you go ahead and write down a list of his numbers and places he’d go,” Luis said, holding out his notepad and pencil to her. “Friends. Relatives. Anyone or anyplace you can think of.”

“I don’t know his friends.” She ignored the tablet, crossed her arms and scratched her elbow. I winced and unconsciously took a step back as a scab pulled off and blood bubbled out.

“Do you think going downtown might help you remember a couple of his friends?” I said. “While social services comes and gets your kids? Wonder how big your check would be with them in foster care.” My threat produced a more cooperative Rhonda. She grabbed the pad and commenced scribbling an info-dump on it.

Except for the TV, the whole house was silent while Rhonda scrawled on the notepad. Likewise, aside from a few small actions, the kids had barely moved since we had arrived. The ones not in diapers were wearing jeans with massive stains. The curly haired girl wore a threadbare dress over hers. I’d heard foster homes were bad, but they had to be better than what these kids were living in.

And then the whole situation, the kid’s emotionless eyes, the mother’s profession, the rank stench of tobacco—all of it made me think of Peter.

This was his future, looking forty at the age of twenty-three with nothing but a string of arrests and lovers who would either steal his money or pimp him out. The sad part was that I had been a cop long enough to know it was probably too late for him. One glimpse of Rhonda’s bony clavicle and I decided I was going to try and change the trajectory of Peter’s life.

“He visit them boys on the Platte,” Rhonda said, meaning the Platte River which ran through the city. Certain underpasses in the warehouse district near the river were notorious for hooker traffic of the ‘different’ kind: young boys, transvestites, transsexuals. The kind of people less wary about cops because cops were busy with the drug trade and the sea of hookers working on the main street. “He be there three, four times a night before Prisc. Now his boy in jail, he probably go back and shake down them boys for quick cash. They don’t make no fuss.” She handed the pad to Luis. I leaned over to see her writing. Every 'i' had a heart over it.

We left with a list of names and places to check out, most of which would probably not be worth our time.

The very second I stepped foot outside, I took a cleansing breath and pressed my cell phone to my ear. Luis said nothing as I contacted the Division of Child Welfare Services on our way across the street to the car. I took his silence as approval.

“I want to wait until they get here,” I told him once we were seated in the car.

Luis’s brown skin dotted with sweat within seconds. “Could be hours,” he said before switching on the car just long enough to roll the windows down and light a cigarette.

“If we had arrested her, we could have put the kids in custody immediately,” I pointed out, leaning toward my open window and waving the smoke out.

He wasn’t going to argue the point. We both knew arresting her would have been a mistake. If we had arrested her, she would have clammed up; she wouldn't have had anything left to lose.

“An hour,” Luis said and maneuvered out of his blazer. I did the same, throwing both our coats across the seat divider.

“Or until the social worker comes.”

“An hour.”

“Or—”

“One. Hour.”

Our wait turned out to be a lot less. But it wasn’t social services that got our asses moving.

Twenty-five minutes into becoming two slabs of broiled cop-steak, Prisc Alvarado parked in front of Rhonda’s house.

The fact that he was out on bail so soon set my hackles up. “Why do they even call it a justice system? They should call it a motel with mildly restrictive checkout requirements.”

“Lawyers,” Luis grunted in response.

Alvarado jogged up the path and rang her bell. There was an animated conversation in which Rhonda shook her head a few times, arms flailing with fingers clutching a cell phone. Two seconds later, she dialed a number and spoke into the phone. When she hung up, she said something to Alvarado, something that lit a fire under his ass. He rushed back to his car.

“Hour’s up,” Luis said, twisting the car on and making a U-turn to follow Alvarado’s black SUV.

“This is why you should always listen to my instincts,” I grinned. “If we’d left earlier…”

“Your instincts? As in the 4th Street Deli?”

“Hey, we both tested negative for hepatitis.”

“The ‘strange’ looking guys at the grocery store on Racine Street?”