The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(7)

“Who’s Thor?” Stack asked stupidly. “Oh. Like in the movie?”

Taylor just looked at him, and then left the room.

“Well played, young man,” Tippen said, impressed.

“I like his style,” Elwood agreed.

Kovac growled a little in his throat, as if to say he wasn’t convinced just yet.

As soon as Taylor was out the door of the interview room, Stack got up and started to pace, holding his stomach, bending over a little.

“Oh man. Oh man,” he muttered.

“I don’t know,” Taylor said, joining the small crowd in the cubicle. “We’ve been at this for two hours already and he hasn’t given us anything useful.”

“Except that he now sounds more like a suspect than a witness,” Elwood said. “Well done.”

Taylor shrugged it off. He had shoulders like the f*cking Rock. No possible way he bought his shirts off the rack.

“Ronnie Stack didn’t stick a knife in a drug dealer—not face-to-face,” he said. “He doesn’t have the balls for murder.”

“No, but I’d say there’s a good chance he knows who did,” Kovac said. “We’ll go back in together. If he knows anything, he’ll tell us now.”

“Can we take a couple of minutes?” Taylor asked as Sam got up from his chair. “The smell in that room is making me nauseous. I think the dude ate a head of cabbage for lunch. Anyhow, I don’t know how much more we can squeeze out of him before he uses the L word.”

“That all depends on what you mean by that,” Elwood said, pointing at the computer screen. “I think he’s about to squeeze out something right now.”

Kovac turned his attention back to the screen. “What the f*ck is he doing?”

Ronnie Stack was hopping from foot to foot as he undid his pants, chanting, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!”

“Oh no!”

“No f*cking way!”

“Aw, MAN!”

Even as they shouted their protests, their interviewee yanked his pants down and squatted over the room’s tiny wastebasket, his ferret face squeezed tight.

“Oooooooh!”

“Not seriously!”

“I’ll call Maintenance,” Taylor said, turning away, looking a little green beneath his tan.

“Good luck with that,” Kovac said. “They’re not coming back after the puke, not the guys on this shift.”

“Welcome to the big leagues, kid,” Tippen said, slapping Taylor on the shoulder. “You scared the shit out of him, you get to clean it up.”

“Noooo, no, no,” Taylor said, shaking his head. “I’m calling in a hazmat crew. I’m ready to puke right now. I’m not going back in there!”

“Somebody better go back in there,” Elwood said, pointing at the screen again.

Stack was crying now, crawling on his hands and knees across the floor, his pants still undone.

“What now?” Kovac asked, watching their person of interest make his way toward the fan. At first he thought Stack was just trying to get away from the smell. Then he picked up the cord of the fan, raised it to his mouth, and tried to bite into it.

“Fuck!” Taylor shouted, bolting for the interview room.

The rest of them watched the action on the screen—Taylor bursting into the room, shouting, yanking the cord of the fan out of the wall before Stack could light himself up like a Christmas tree.

“Oh my God!” Taylor said, reeling at the stench. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

He pursued Stack as the junkie jumped up and stumbled backward, hiking up his pants. “Were you born in a barn? Shitting in the trash can? Seriously? Who does that? We have plumbing here!”

Stack stepped back, stumbled, kicking over the wastebasket and spilling the contents onto the floor. Overwhelmed by the stench, Taylor unloaded his lunch all over their suspect, to the groans and shouts of his fellow detectives.

“The kid gives his all,” Tippen said.

“We’re going to have to burn sage in that room,” Elwood murmured seriously.

Kovac shook his head at the ridiculousness of it all. “I’m getting too old for this shit.”


*



KOVAC THOUGHT ABOUT THAT as he stared into his drink. He wished he was as young as he was the first time he said he was too old. The big five-oh was looming large on the horizon. He was on the steep downhill side of making his thirty years on the job. He had always said he would make his thirty and move to a climate where he could wear bad Hawaiian shirts year round. Now that thirty was looming on the horizon, he had to admit he hated Hawaiian shirts and that the idea of retirement scared the crap out of him.

“Hey, move over, Methuselah. I need a seat and a stiff one,” Liska said.

“But would you like a drink?” Tippen asked.

Liska gave him the finger. Ever the lady.

They had a corner booth at Patrick’s, an Irish bar owned by Swedes, conveniently located halfway between the sheriff’s office and the police department. Any fool trying to rob the bar would have thirty or forty guns drawn on him all at once. The place was always packed with cops—off-duty cops, retired cops, cops just finished with their shifts, cops grabbing a meal before they went to work.

“To what do we owe the pleasure of your company, Ms. Liska?” Elwood asked. “Isn’t it a school night?”