Something Like a Criminal: Part 5
Frankie plays a game with the police and plans her revenge.
In the previous chapter, Frankie discovered the identity of the snitch.
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I think being on a bike helped me evade the cops. The cops were looking for a woman in a van, a van that’s clearly labeled with the name of said woman’s business. (That woman is me, in case you forgot.) However, I knew eventually my luck would run out. Having red hair, and being reasonably attractive, I was bound to get picked up at some point.
I’d hoped I could at least make it to a motel and get some sleep. The best I did was make it to the bus stop. I noticed, too late, a cop car at the nearest intersection. Unlike the other cop cars that had been following me around, this one was clearly marked with the RPD logo. The cop had set up for a left turn, saw me, turned on the lights, and cut across traffic to pick me up.
I thought back to the advice I’d given Parker’s little kid. It basically held true for adults, too: Keep your mouth shut. Don’t run. Don’t resist. And above all, don’t hit them, no matter how much they smile their smug cop smiles.
The cop crammed his hands into a pair of blue nitrile gloves and gave me a pat-down. Trace once told me that you can tell a lot about a cop by the pat-down technique. If that’s true, then I would call this guy efficient and I’m not sure what else. He was oddly reluctant to hit certain areas, the places other cops usually didn’t have any problem touching.
Afterward, as instructed, I squeezed into the back seat of the cop car.
That wire screen is real close to the back seat, by the way. I had to spread my legs uncomfortably, and I’m not even that tall. I had on cuffs, so my hands were jammed into the small of my back. At least he kept the engine running and the AC pumped out sweet cold air.
He dumped the contents of my bag on the hood of his car and picked through them. He looked, puzzled, at the crayons, markers, hair clips, and other “helpful” items that Parker’s daughter had added to my stuff. He took photos of the contents.
He threw my pack onto the passenger’s seat, then got in, or more accurately fell onto the driver’s seat, and slammed the driver’s door behind him. Without a word, he did cop stuff on his cop computer and cop phone and absently scratched his cop armpit.
I decided to make the first move and try to set the tone for what would come next.
“Flame-retardant,” I said.
“What?” he said, without looking up from the laptop mounted between the front seats.
“Chemicals they put in the uniforms,” I said. “Makes them itchy.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sucks if you’ve got sensitive skin.” He turned partially sideways to see me better and pointed to his close-cropped hair. “As a fellow redhead, I’m sure you understand.”
“Don’t even get me started on the heat rash,” I said.
He laughed quietly and tapped a few keys. I imagined what he might be reading about me: records sealed, evidence not admissible, charges dropped. Though I mostly stayed out of trouble, there had been a few times I’d appeared before a judge. Would that appear in my record?
“OK,” he said, seemingly having found what he needed. “Do you know why we’ve been looking for you, Francesca?”
This could go a few ways, I thought. I could go silent, which would end at the station. I could get up in his face, which would also end at the station. Neither approach would get me any information about what they wanted from me. Some girls, at this point, might put themselves on the menu, as my buddy Trace would put it, but I never had the style to make it work. Parker had the style. I think she’d even dated a cop once.
I decided to play dumb and innocent. I don’t understand it myself, but there’s a game that guys like to play with me where they know I’m not dumb and innocent, but I play dumb and innocent, and we both know it’s a game, and somehow that works in my favor. I wiggled my nose in a useless attempt to scratch it and blew a stray strand of hair away from my eyes, which immediately fell back into the same spot.
“Call me Frankie,” I said.
“Frankie it is. So, do you know why we’re looking for you?”
“No clue.” Maybe this cop didn’t play the dumb-and-innocent-girl game. I decided to try pushing a different button. This would take more effort. Judging by the miles on his face, the cop was staring down forty in the mirror every morning. His wedding ring had a patina on it so he was someone who’d been married a while. Long enough to have kids, I’d assume.
“No idea at all?” he said.
I thought back to the pat-down he’d given me and the very cautious, almost respectful, way he’d done it. The guy had to be twenty years older than me, which put me in range to be his daughter’s age. And with the red hair… maybe his daughter had red hair, too?
I let out a big sigh. I focused really hard on my dad, how much I missed him since he’d passed away, the last time I saw him, stuff like that. I was going for lost and despondent and maybe went a bit too far; my eyes watered up and a few tears ran down my cheeks. “Sorry, officer,” I said quietly, sniffed, and tried to wipe my face on my shoulder. “It’s been pretty rough lately.”
“Stuff going on at home?” the cop said.
“It’s my dad.”
“Did you guys have a fight?”
“No… he’s…. He died a couple of years ago.”
That broke his concentration.
“On a business trip,” I added. “We never got to say goodbye.”
The cop thought for a while. He took the backpack from the passenger seat and went through the pockets again. The crayons, the markers, all that. “Do you have a daughter? Or are you a nanny?”
“I work as a nanny sometimes,” I lied. “That friendship bracelet. My dad gave me that. I like to keep it around because it reminds me of him.”
He picked up the friendship bracelet and turned it over in his fingers, thinking.
“Listen,” he said, packing everything back up. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but we’re working on several leads related to something big that went down a few days ago. A big job at a jewelry store. You know those places. They have all kinds of surveillance cameras and alarms. Funny thing is, whoever did the job somehow evaded all the cameras.”
“Hm.”
“We got a tip that you may be connected with that. I mean, it’s kind of interesting that you own a business that installs alarms and security systems.”
He was exaggerating. I own a van with equipment and have a few customers. It’s not like I had major contracts. Those all went away after my dad died.
I sniffed again.
“We executed a search warrant at your house earlier today. Is there anything you might want to mention? Want to talk about anything we found?”
I made a little groan, hopefully sounding pathetic, and looked up at the roof of the car to hide my reaction. That damn Parker really did a number on me by turning me in. The cops must’ve been after her for something interesting. If they were, could I blame her for narc’ing on me? Rochester is a big city for Upstate New York, but it’s not like there’s a huge criminal population. Mouse barely counted unless you needed someone to get lit and spray graffiti on your ex-boyfriend’s car. From Parker’s point of view, the obvious choices were Trace, Shay, and me. We all had records, but Trace and Shay had found decent jobs. Trace had her warehouse gig. Shay worked help desk at a hospital. That left… me.
On top of that, Parker didn’t have any family in Rochester anymore. If she got pinched, her little girl goes into Social Services.
Back to me, though. I lowered my head, facing forward again, and caught a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror: sweaty, matted red hair, pouting lips, cheeks wet with tears.
“Frankie, kiddo, can you get a hold of yourself for a sec?”
“I’m really trying,” I said with a bit of a whine. “It’s been so hard, you know? I don’t really get along with my mom. She’s in and out of rehab. The whole time they were married, she basically treated him like an ATM. I wish I could… could talk to him right now…”
If he was telling the truth about the search warrant, he wouldn’t have found anything right away. They’d have to do a forensic search of my computers and accounts, and they wouldn’t get results from that for weeks, if they even bothered. Unfortunately, on top of trying to finish a job for Mr. Allcaps, now I had to worry about the cops getting into my accounts. Somehow, handcuffed in the back seat of a cop car, I had to stop them.
He turned back to me, his face in profile. “Sure, Frankie. I get it. Believe it or not, I have a daughter. She’s a little younger than you, basically a sweet kid… though lately….” His voice faded. He cleared his throat. The cop tapped his fingers on the steering wheel like he was running through his own list of options. “So here’s the deal, Frankie. I can make all this go away, including your Grand Theft Bicycle,” he pointed to the bike I’d borrowed, leaning against one side of the bus stop shelter. “As a member of the redhead tribe, I’d like to extend you a little grace. How do you feel about that?”
At this point, I really had gone too far with the acting. Whatever memories I’d dragged up to set my mood refused to go back into the bag that I’d stuffed them into years ago. They hung out there, fighting for freedom like a cat, all claws and teeth. If my hands had been free, I would’ve buried my face in them. I saw my face in the mirror, my eyes puffy and red, face glistening. I felt snot running down my upper lip, sniffed hard, and tried to wipe my face on my shoulder again.
“Frankie,” he said calmly, using his dad voice, “kiddo, it’s going to be OK, if you cooperate.”
“I would really appreciate anything you could do,” I said, using my very quiet daughter voice.
“Do you know the rule of three?” he said.
I’d heard Trace mention it. Trace had a few more run-ins with the cops that I’d had at that point. I thought she’d been kidding.
“No,” I said, blinking away tears.
“I’m willing to overlook the charges, today, if you give me names of three people that are into something more interesting than what we’ve got on you.”
OK. Then that’s my way out. I made a visible effort of thinking, jiggling my leg, biting my lower lip, the whole act. I gave him three names of people I knew had recently been active. The cop ran the names through his computer. He liked two of them but balked at the third. Not good enough.
Now I had a problem. I didn’t really have anyone else. I didn’t want to hand over Mr. Allcaps because I needed the money from the job. I couldn’t hand him over anyway since I had no idea who he was or where he lived. I certainly wasn’t going to hand over Mouse, Trace, or Shay. Especially Trace, who’d been clean for a long time and had made a good run at going straight.
Parker wasn’t an option. If they pinched her, then the kid was going to wind up at Social Services. And man, you do not want to wind up there. As much as I was pissed off at Parker, I couldn’t put her little girl through what I’d been through.
Then it hit me.
“There’s a guy,” I said. “I’m not sure what his name is. It’s Tony. Tony, like Tony Megapony.”
“His name is Megapony?” the cop said, wrinkling his eyebrows.
“No, I’m saying his name rhymes with Megapony.”
He shook his head.
“Go on,” I said. “Boop your laptop there. I know you can do a search by sounds-like. At least give it a try.”
He punched the name into the computer with his index finger. I actually didn’t know if they could search phonetically. While he tapped away, I studied the various menus and screens, curious about the processor speed, network connectivity, operating system, and making mental notes for another day. After about a minute, the computer displayed a set of potential matches. He read through the list, tracing each name on the screen.
“Murgatone?” he said.
“That’s the one.”
He laughed. “I guess it does sound like Megapony. All right. What’s his deal?”
I gave him the description, told him about the gun, and let the cop fill in the blanks. “It’s gotta be something big,” I said. “Maybe even related to that jewel heist. It can’t be drugs. Trace’s kid brother OD’d and Trace has been clean as long as I’ve known her. It’s got to have something to do with the jewels.”
The little cop gears were slowly turning in his head. He sent a few texts and waited for a response. I checked the time displayed on the laptop, and I knew that Trace would be at her shift at the warehouse. Whatever went down, Megapony would be home by himself.
The cop read the responses to his texts and grunted. He put the car in gear and merged with traffic.
“Good?” I said.
“If it checks out, then it’s good,” he said.
So there you go. Like I’d said to Trace earlier, some people need to get into buildings and some need to keep people out. In this case, some people need to punish others, and some people need to escape punishment. Whatever you need, Frankie’s got you covered.
I said, “Where are we going?”
“The station. I need to put you in holding in case this doesn’t check out.”
“Can’t you just take me home?” I said, using my daughter voice again.
“Sorry, kiddo. Don’t worry though. I’ll make sure you’re comfortable. It won’t be bad.”
I could imagine the lecture I would get from Trace after this was over. I looked at it as a win, assuming I got my stuff back untouched. In the worst case, another of her useless boyfriends would wind up in prison. In the best case, it would be another nudge to help her stay out of trouble.
Stay tuned for the last chapter!
If you enjoy Frankie in this short story, check out the first novel in the Rossi/Lopez series, The Good Killers (ad), where she plays a pivotal role.
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