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The Knight and the Pawn
“Sis…” she started to say into the silence waiting on the line, but was interrupted by her sister, sounding hoarse. “He’s gone. They came and, and…they took him. Oh God…I think they’re still in the house.” Instantly regretting her long night spent with Alexi and his new Finnish boyfriend, Toivo, who she kept drunkenly calling “Tivo”, Carrie sat up quickly and swung her feet to the floor. Bending down with an audible grunt to grope among the clothes strewn around the room, she wondered how long had it been since she’d bothered to clean up her apartment.
Finding a pair of only slightly wrinkled jeans, and holding her phone with one hand while awkwardly trying to get dressed, she began to attempt to piece together what her sister Olivia was calling her for at that ungodly hour. “Okay, Liv, you’re not really making any sense. Slow down, okay?” she muttered, trying to find her keys in the wreckage of the previous night. “Jamie…” Olivia hissed, letting out her breath in a loud hiccup. “They took my Jamie,” she repeated.
Carrie found the bundle of keys buried in a pile of unopened mail and cursed at the sight of her obviously past-due utility bill. Mistaking her sister’s outburst for something else, Olivia continued to whisper urgently into the phone, sounding to Carrie like she was speaking into a tin can from inside a larger can. “Where the hell are you?” She was starting to lose her patience with her sister.
She calculated how long it would take to make the drive out to the beach where Liv had her condo. “Listen,” Carrie barked, trying to be heard over Olivia’s now almost incoherent babbling, whose voice had taken on a pleading tone, as if she were begging for her older sister’s help. That’s a first, Carrie thought. She began to wonder if her sister wasn’t really in trouble and not just having another one of her typical drug-fueled drama-fests.
“I’ll be there in twenty if the traffic is light, so just…try to calm down. I’m on my way now.” Ending the call before anything else could be said, Carrie made her way to her building’s garage and in the light early-morning traffic, got to Olivia’s sooner than she expected. Parking along the street in front of the split-level condo building, now fully awake and conscious of something having gone very wrong, Carrie was on edge.
She dialed her sister’s number, which rang through to voicemail. Frowning, she reached into the car’s center console and removed a Beretta .25ACP Model 21 Bobcat. Admittedly, although at less than a pound it was a nice compact piece that could be easily hidden if necessary, it was also a ridiculously small caliber, low-impact weapon, and no match against more serious firepower. But, she figured, it was better than going into some situations totally unarmed.
The door to Olivia’s place was unlocked, so Carrie nudged it open. Thankfully, it swung back on noiseless hinges, and she eased into the silent foyer. She’d only been there once before…she didn’t exactly have what anyone would call a close relationship with her only sister, so it’s not as if there were backyard barbeques every weekend. They mostly confined their interaction to activities involving Olivia’s young son Jamie, who Carrie was quite fond of, despite the less than warm feelings she harbored toward her younger sister.
She did a quick check of the downstairs rooms and made her way up the stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor. It was still early, but she could hear the sounds of the neighbors leaving for work. The condo was silent, and a quick search of the upper rooms proved that the place was empty.
As Carrie reached the bottom of the stairs, now even more confused than before, she was stopped by the sound of the key in the lock of the front door. Her sister came in with her keys in one hand, staring at her phone in the other, apparently oblivious that there was someone standing in her condo holding a gun. “Olivia, what exactly is going on?” Startled, Olivia yelped and her phone fell from her hand, clattering on the tile floor of the entryway. She stared at Carrie for a moment, her palm clutching a handful of the front of her blouse, mouth moving in a silent pantomime of words that she couldn’t quite give voice to.
“What the hell are you doing in my house?” was the question Olivia finally managed after regaining her composure. Carrie, who hadn’t moved, scowled at her sister.
“You called me! You said someone had taken Jamie. I flew over here, and…”
“What? I didn’t call you. Jamie’s fine – I just dropped him off at school. Have you been drinking again?” Olivia bent to pick up her phone, turning it over in her hand to check for damage. She stared accusingly at her sister. “Damn it Care, this is a brand new phone!”
“What do you mean, you didn’t call me? I got a call from you, from your number.”
“Let me see”, Olivia demanded, holding out her hand for her sister’s phone. Carrie stepped forward and brought up her call log. Olivia sighed.
“Someone’s screwing with you. I lost my phone a few days ago. I went out and got a new one, and got a new number. I bet whoever this was found my old phone and called pretending to be me.” She handed her sister the cell phone back, obviously proud of her deductive reasoning, from the smug look on her face.
“But they mentioned Jamie. And it sounded like your voice.” Carrie stared at her phone, all cylinders of her brain firing, as her sister went on to say that they had probably found cell phone pictures labeled with his name on her phone, and decided to play a prank.
Not convinced, Carrie looked her sister in the eye and asked, very deliberately, “So you had nothing whatsoever to do with this?” Olivia rolled her eyes and snorted derisively. “Don’t be stupid. Why would I do something so lame? I mean, it is kind of funny, but no way. You have some serious trust issues.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve got a calendar shoot this morning and I need to get ready.”
Without saying goodbye, Carrie walked back out to her car. She stopped short, her hand on the driver’s side door, glancing along her sister’s now deserted street. She didn’t believe for a moment that this was some kind of harmless prank. Had she been followed? Was she being watched? Her mind raced through a list of people who might be capable of something like this. Getting behind the wheel, she admitted to herself that it was all so far-fetched; if it hadn’t just happened even she wouldn’t have believed it.
Pulling up to her building, Carrie was surprised to see flashing reds and blues. She recognized a couple of the uniforms milling around on the sidewalk out front, and gave a taciturn wave as she walked toward them. “’Sup, Matheson?” she asked, nodding to a burly officer with dark hair. He put his hand out to stop her, lowering his voice as he said “Lieutenant’s up there. Best to stay down here until they’re done.”
Carrie frowned. What was up with today? Nothing was making much sense. “Done? Done with what?” She tried to step past Matheson, but he grabbed her arm firmly and leaned in closer to her. “We got a call saying something was going on over here. The caller gave your address, and when we got here, your apartment door was open and the place looked like it’d been turned over. They’re doing the preliminaries now. Lieutenant’ll wanna get a statement.”
Twisting out of the burly cop’s grip, Carrie took the stairs up to her floor two at a time. She was furious. Now she understood everything. The call, the missing cell phone…it had all been a set-up. Someone had wanted her out of her apartment. And what better way to accomplish that than to lure her across town with a little fairytale involving a missing nephew and a distraught sister. There was an officer stationed at the door of her unit. He glanced over his shoulder at the detectives inside as Carrie approached, and seemed to consider asking her to stop before thinking better of it. Instead, he shifted his body slightly to more fully block the open doorway.
She craned her neck to look past him and spotted Lieutenant Graves. It pissed her off to see him standing there, as if nothing had happened, as if he had some right to be there in her apartment, of all places. She glanced at the piles of books that had been dumped onto the floor, the dirt spilling out of the upended potted palm in the corner of the living room. Surfaces were covered in dark smudges where the techs had dusted for prints. What a mess this day was turning into, on so many levels. The Lieutenant looked up, and their eyes locked for just a moment.
Carrie wanted to scream, to hurl insults at the man whose behavior had resulted in her suspension. It was his fault she was on leave, had spent too many days over the course of the last few weeks in an alcoholic haze, trying to drown the sense of anger and futility with booze. He walked toward her, and she found herself clenching and unclenching her hands, just to give the pent-up energy somewhere to go. He smiled coldly as he addressed her. “Baker. I’m going to need a word with you, if you’d be so kind.”
She stepped aside quickly to give more distance between them as the man who had been her mentor passed her in the doorway and went out into the corridor. She was overwhelmed by a sudden and very violent urge to push him down some stairs. Just breathing the same air made her feel dirty, his presence tainting the atmosphere. “Find what you were looking for, sir?” she asked archly. He let the obvious dig pass. “Unfortunately, it looks like whoever did this didn’t leave any traces. Probably wore gloves. Did you keep any valuables out in the open?” He stared at her, waiting for some kind of response.
“It’s not here” she replied. “There was no reason for this. I can’t prove you did this, and maybe it wasn’t you yourself, maybe you sent in one of your dumb goons, but I know you had something to do with this. According to Stephens, IA is almost finished with their investigation. I look forward to their report, and my full exoneration. Of course, my reputation has been blasted to shit, and I can’t get that back. But it’ll be worth the satisfaction of you being outed as the liar you are.”
Carrie folded her arms across her chest. She hadn’t meant to say any of that. She’d wanted him to sweat a little more. The fact that he, or someone acting on his orders, had broken into and ransacked her apartment meant that he wasn’t nearly as secure in the Internal Affairs review coming out in his favor as he’d been trying to convey. She knew he was a bastard, but she hadn’t fully realized how far he’d go to get his hands on the evidence that she was relying to be her trump card in getting her job back.
Of course, he obviously thought she was dumb enough to keep something as important as the emails he’d sent her in her apartment. Except she wasn’t that careless, she had almost expected something like this. Once again, she thought to herself, Tom Massey’s hubris got the better of him and he’d proven himself a very poor judge of her character, so his little ruse had netted him nothing but paperwork on a fictitious B&E.
“A little advice, if I may? Always remember which closets you put what skeletons into. Sir.” She turned and left her former boss, someone she’d once considered a friend, standing on the landing outside her trashed apartment. Walking slowly down the steps, she dialed her phone. “Alexi” she said with relief when her friend answered, “it’s me. Do you have plans for tonight? I really need a drink…"
1 comment:
a cop drama with the arch-heroine as an alcoholic, talk about upending stereotypes!!!
it reads like a script, like it should be a film or something. the mystery keeps the thing going good.
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