When I hit building three, I felt the change in climate as I went through the door. It was more run-down than the other apartments. Some fresh graffiti marked an interior wall. More of the doors had double dead bolts on them. The carpet was old and stained. The pane of a window had been broken out and replaced with a piece of wood. The whole place screamed that unpleasant sorts were lurking about, making the building’s super reluctant to maintain the halls and foyer, maybe forcing him to continue dealing with problems and damage over and over again.
I couldn’t hear any music.
That’s unusual in buildings like that one, mostly inhabited by students. Kids love their music, however mind-numbing or ear-rending it might be, and you can almost always hear at least a beat thumping somewhere nearby.
Not here, though.
I kept my eyes open, tried to grow a new pair for the back of my head, and started knocking on doors.
“NO,” LIED A small, fragile-looking woman who said her name was Maria, a resident of the third floor. She hadn’t opened the door more than the security chain allowed. “I didn’t hear or see anything.”
I tried to make my smile reassuring. “Ma’am, the way this usually works is that I ask you a question, and then you tell me a lie. If you give me a dishonest answer before I have the chance to ask the question, it offends my sense of propriety.”
Her head shook in quick, jerky spasms as her eyes widened. “N-no. I’m not lying. I don’t know anything.”
Maria tried to shut the door. I got my boot into it first. “You’re lying,” I said, gently. “You’re scared. I get that. I’ve gotten the same treatment from almost everyone in the building.”
She looked away from me, as if seeking an escape route. “I’ll c-call the police.”
“I am the police,” I said. Which was technically true. They hadn’t fired me yet.
“Oh, God,” she said. She shook her head more and more, desperation in the gesture. “I don’t want to be . . . I can’t be seen talking to you. Go away.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Ma’am, please. If you’re in trouble . . .”
I wasn’t sure she’d even heard me. I’d seen women like her often enough to know the look. She was terrified of something, probably a husband or boyfriend or a string of husbands and boyfriends, and maybe a father before that. She was living scared, and she’d been doing it for a long time. Fear had ground away at her, and the only way she’d been able to survive was by capitulating.
Maria was damaged goods. She shook her head, sobbing, and just started pushing at the door. I was about to pull my foot out and go away. You can’t force someone to accept your help.
“Is there some kind of problem here?” asked a booze-roughened voice.
I turned to face a wooly mammoth of a man. He was well over six feet tall and probably weighed three of me, though more of it was mass than muscle. He wore a white undershirt that showed off his belly, and a button-down shirt with the name RAY embroidered on one breast.
He looked at me and at the apartment door and scowled. “Mary, you got some kind of problem?”
Maria had gone still, like a rabbit that suspects a predator is nearby. “No, Ray,” she whispered. “It’s nothing.”
“Sure as hell don’t sound like nothing,” Ray said. He folded his arms. “I’m trying to get the city out here to fix the lights on the street and the fuse box, and you’re making enough noise to fuck up my conversation all the way down the hall.”
“I’m sorry, Ray,” Maria whispered.
Something flickered behind Ray’s eyes, an ugly little light. “Jesus, I give you all that extra time to pay off on the rent, and you treat me like this?”
Maria sounded as though someone were strangling her. “It was an accident. It won’t happen again.”
“We’ll talk,” he said.
Maria flinched as if the words had smeared her with grime.
My hand clenched into a fist.
Well, dammit.
I’d seen Ray’s type before, too—bullies who never managed to outgrow the playground; people who liked having power over others and who controlled them through fear. He was big, and he thought that made him more powerful than everyone else. The worm probably had a record, probably had done some time, probably for something fairly gutless. For guys like Ray, sometimes prison only convinces them what dangerous badasses they are,