to play. The officer leans in close to the open driver’s window and says to his partner, I think I smell marijuana, do you smell that? The partner knows the game and says he does. Then you cuff the driver and tear the car apart. Sometimes you find something, sometimes you don’t, but you always have a good time looking. And you were always safe doing it. If you found something, you could make an arrest or not. If you didn’t find anything, you sent that bastard on his way and never heard anything about it.
“This isn’t that kind of deal,” Mickey said, giving Jimmy the long stare.
“Shit, Chief, I’m just saying. It’s a way to get the guy off the street. If he’s a murderer, you can’t feel guilty about bending the rules.”
Mickey thought it through. It had a certain appeal, but arresting someone for murder drew a lot more attention than shaking down a couple of teenagers on a roadside at night. If you were wrong about the teenagers, they were just happy to be let go. If you were wrong about arresting a guy for murder in front of his coworkers, you had yourself a serious lawsuit. Especially if you knew the evidence you were using was wrongfully obtained. But he could lie about that. Maybe he had looked in the window. Maybe he had seen the bloody bat on the floor.
Mickey shook his head, thinking it through. But there was no way. He couldn’t lie about it. Not because of some moral obligation to tell the truth, but because a good lawyer would tear the lie to shreds. Mickey had seen the bat up close. So had Dr. Kramer. It was clean except for a dark crust embedded in the cracks. A dark crust that even Dr. Kramer was hesitant to call dried blood until it underwent testing.
Mickey could practically see a lawyer standing in front of a jury, waving the bat in front of them: And Sheriff, wouldn’t you say the bat, on the floor of the truck, was about as far away from you as it is from the jury right now? And you say that you could see the blood from there? You say you knew it was blood? But you heard Dr. Kramer testify that he couldn’t tell if it was blood when he examined it under a microscope, isn’t that right? And you have no medical or scientific training, isn’t that right, Sheriff? But you could see from a distance of several feet, through a dirty truck window, what a trained physician could not identify under a microscope, in a laboratory? Is that what you’re telling us, Sheriff? And all the while, the jurors would be staring at the bat, unable to see any blood at all.
It would not be pretty, and the already strained city budget would be driven into bankruptcy. Mickey couldn’t lie about how he found the bat. Not because it was the wrong thing to do, but because there was no way he could get away with it.
“I know, Jimmy,” he finally said. “But even if Grimaldi is the killer, he’s not dangerous right now. He has no idea we’re onto him. He’s at work, at least until later today. So he’ll be easy enough to keep track of until we know something. All we’ve got to do is watch him.”
Jimmy nodded, appreciating the plan. “Makes sense,” he said. “You want me to go out there?”
“I’ll do it.” Mickey unsnapped the holster on his nine millimeter and withdrew it, feeling the grip in his hand. “You stay here. And I mean don’t leave. I told Dr. Kramer to call here as soon as he knows anything. If there’s any blood on the bat, he’s going to try to match the blood type to the body.”
Mickey pulled the slide back on the gun, slowly, smoothly. He could feel the soft thud of the bullet popping up from the clip. He could hear the click. Then he let the slide go and it snapped back, feeding the round into the chamber with solid, mechanical precision. He cocked it, clicked the safety, and snapped the gun back in the holster.
He smiled at Jimmy. “You radio me as soon as Kramer calls. I’ll stay by the radio and keep an eye on the guy until I hear from you.”
Jimmy nodded, sat back on the stool, and picked up his novel. There was nothing more to say. Jimmy reclined against the wall