Missed Part 1? Read it here.
It must have been a joke. Molly must have started calling in just to yank my chain and pull this dirty little stunt on me. She’d gotten me pretty shaken up though, so I put on an Iron Maiden CD and let it run over the air while I stepped out of the studio for a cigarette.
My bones rattled by the curb, the wind blowing so hard it was a feat just to get my lighter to cough up a flame. I don’t know who I can trust to tell this. What a fucking scam. The sky was bleeding into a slowly thinning charcoal with the first light of dawn, and before I even thought it over I started booking it toward Grove Street.
When I got there, Grove was as dead as the Ramones. My lungs felt like they were full of sulfur, and I started cursing Molly for having me run around that goddamn neighborhood without ever giving me an address or anything I could’ve actually used to help her.
The shadows danced up ahead, playing tricks on my eyes, and I figured maybe I’d gone too far between the running, sleep deprivation and bourbon. Colors started flashing across the pavement, and soon enough I saw siren lights cruise silently onto the street. If they were here, it meant I was too late.
I was standing in the middle of the road, and they came right toward me. Even when they beamed a spotlight into my face, I just moved off to the sidewalk trying not to give them a reason to give me a second glance. They kept the light on my face as they went by, the passenger never taking his eyes off me from behind his mustache. I was only able to catch my breath again once they passed me.
It never even crossed my mind to call the police. I guess all that "Another Brick in the Wall," "We’re Not Gonna Take It" noise got through to me after all. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway; someone beat me to it and it seemed like they had more to go off of than I did.
I watched the police car stop about six blocks down. The officers got out and approached some colonial with a fresh coat of white paint. I snuck down along the tree-line, posting up behind a patchy hedge across the street so I could watch what happened.
The driver was a tiny white-haired old man who looked like he was trying on his daddy’s uniform. His partner, Officer Mustache, was a giant, oozing overcompensation with each jackbooted step. He banged loudly on the door three times, but when no one came Rumpelstiltskin turned the knob as if he’d known the door was unlocked all along. They went inside.
My sweat froze to my hair as I waited in the bush. I was going to die if I waited there all night, but in a matter of minutes Mustache came charging out of the house so fast that I dived into a pile of mulch. He went straight to his car, though, and started barking at his radio.
Twenty minutes later, four more cars arrived, and blue uniforms began to mob the scene. The front lawn became a circus; all the officers moving in different directions trying to give each other orders, unrolling tape, setting markers and one officer even leading a German shepherd around. It was making my head spin.
I sat there trying to rip the roots of the hedge out of the ground, waiting for them to wheel out a sheet-covered body. Instead, the little old man came out, straining himself to pat the shoulder of a much taller girl beside him who was crying into her chest.
She looked like something off of a surf calendar with long straightened hair and legs like stilts. I suspected she had quite a tab at L.A. Tan. She sat down on the front steps in an enormous sweater and shorts, alternating between crying and flipping a curtain of hair out of her face while the old man took notes. This was supposed to be Molly?
Suddenly, an angry beam of light blinded me from the right.
“Don’t move, kid!”
To be continued next week.