High Road

Chapter 2
Not a Bug

Chapter Description: LaCrone gets a taste of his case, a taste of some metal, and a taste of the carpet.

It was two hours past midnight, and it had been more than once today that LaCrone had wished he was back at the coffee shop, and considered morosely that his choice not to procure a coffee of his own was coming back to haunt him. The penny he used as a tracking device had long since subsided into dull lifelessness, as it ran for a solid six hours on the watch battery, but simmered out after that. Fair enough. It was, at least, enough time, to trail Coel to her apartment, which was still lit up well into the night. LaCrone noted that there was no crying coming from the apartment, so he wondered what would bring a single mother, supposedly wracked by grief (though LaCrone knew better), who had to support herself would care to stay up so late. It then occurred to him that she had collected quite a sum from Mr. Coel’s life insurance policy: enough to support her for quite some time.

Peter briefly considered the penny with which he tracked Coel. There were certainly very strict applications, in his book, as to just what qualified as a type of espionage item, such as a wire or bug. In his expressed opinion, Peter simply couldn’t bring himself to qualify the penny as such a unit. After all, its primary purpose was not to spy on auditory clues, but rather to track locations, otherwise the miniature microphone would have to be much higher in quality. It seemed that the transfer of nearby voices with the signal, used to track, was merely an added bonus. No, his “penny” was by no means a “bug”. He’d need something bigger.

LaCrone frowned again. He wasn’t smoking, nor did he smoke at all. He considered briefly whether or not a good detective should smoke, and began to weigh the pros against the cons when he shook himself out of it. For a “prodigy” and “master detective”, he realized somewhat abashedly that he was easily distractible by his own mind. He glanced back up, just in time to see a shadow move past the window of his target apartment for the third time in ten minutes.

He couldn’t be sure, but this didn’t seem normal. “Perhaps she suspects something...” he muttered to himself, quietly. He shook his head: that would be most undesirable, as his plans were to plant a bug during daylight hours tomorrow. He glanced away from the window and looked down at the hood of his vehicle and thought he noticed a glint in the forward right corner. Quietly, he emerged from his car and investigated the shimmer. It was a small, red, reflective strip, and he realized that the porch lights of the apartments were illuminating it. It had not been there when he went into the Caf?, he remembered shooing a bird away who had tried to use the hood as a perch... was it there after? He couldn’t remember. He was too busy following. He grinned to himself, looking up just in time to see the shadow move out of the window again. It was low tech, but the mark certainly suspected him and had tricked him into being tracked. That sticker proved that he had been following her all day.

The cogs began to tear at each other in his mind as the gears of his internal machine spun silently. Leave for the night and she’d be gone in the morning: there’s no doubt she was up to something up there, because if she wanted legitimate protection, police officers would be tapping on his window. “Fine,” he muttered, “I won’t use a bug.” He turned from the hood of his car and glanced at the window. No shadow lurked beyond its glassy film.

He returned to his car, already wearing a stereotypical overcoat, and dawned his fedora. If you’re going to do it Doyle style, you might as well go the whole way, right? He considered completing the look with sunglasses, then sighed at himself getting worked up again. “Giddy as the first ridiculous day on the job”, he thought to himself. “If you don’t act serious, you’ll get in trouble,” said his more reasonable side, but another part of him wanted nothing to do with logic and just wanted to make a boring case interesting. Deciding to compromise with his two inner monologues (which refused to become a dialog), he acknowledged the case would probably be a bore anyway, after he sorted this lead out, but tossed his fedora back in the car anyway. An overcoat could be justified, based on the chilled weather, at least.

Keeping an eye on the window until he was parallel, then past it, on his way to the stairs, he did not see the shadow again. He planned on confronting her at the door anyway, not sneaking in, so it didn’t really matter. He calmed his mind and took a breath to steady his lungs, and knocked. In seconds, a muffled voice was inquiring who he was and what he wanted in the middle of the damn night. Responding casually, LaCrone related that he thought it was a fine night, not a damned one, but more to the point he merely had a few questions to ask her. When she turned the fact that he could have asked her any time this afternoon, he pointed out that he was far too busy trying to follow her around while she tried to lose him. Grunting in approval, as if bemused by his response, Mrs. Coel swung her door open.

“You are right, of course. I should have introduced myself immediately from the beginning, but it is part of my job to try and get to know something about people before I ask them questions, you understand?” he tried, sincerely, but only received a, “Not really, since I don’t know what your job is.”

“Allow me to introduce myself then! I am Mr. LaCrone, and I am here to assess how you are taking care of your adopted son. The new social worker rules say that we should try and observe you ahead of time, if possible, and I’d really like a raise, so I try hard.”

The woman just gave him a dry stare, “If you were from Social, you wouldn’t be here at two in the morning, you wouldn’t be a new social worker, and you sure as Hell wouldn’t care half as much as you seem to. The social workers have very low standards.”

Undeterred, Peter flashed a license, which showed him to be from Social Services, and then revealed paperwork that needed his signature, as well as Mrs. Coel’s, regarding her adopted son. “I assure you ma’am, we are doing are best to raise standards of American child care wherever we can, and I apologize for the late hour. Would you mind if I come in? I’d like to see Stephen.”

The woman seemed to growl at first, then gave him a stare that read, “How do you know my son’s name?” but finally gave way to a shrug that read, “I guess he really is a Social Worker.” She led him into the living room-kitchen of the three room apartment, and he could see from his vantage point that the other two rooms were a child’s room, and her own bedroom. Walking to the fridge, having closed the door, she questioned, “Want a drink?” He politely declined, looking around the room. “You mind if I look at your son’s room?” She returned, almost angrily, “Go on then, it’s through there.” He almost considered making low marks on his clipboard, but decided that the act shouldn’t need to also press his luck. He stepped into the child’s room and glanced around. It looked designed for a child much younger than two, and it resembled a nursery more than anything. Sure, it wasn’t unusual for a child to wear diapers at two, but it did seem somewhat off... the entire room was the kind of thing you’d expect to see around a baby only a few months old, right down to the baby monitor next to the crib. As LaCrone made an about face, he heard a curious noise from above, and his head shot up, and noticed a penny bouncing off the ceiling, making a familiar metallic ringing: curious, but not relevant.

The tragic result, however, is that he was distracted enough that he could look down in time to see metal buried in his intestines. A knife now jutted from his stomach, and he briefly considered why she had not chosen to strike his chest. Nonetheless, he gazed up at Coel, seemingly unphased, and stood there, not reacting, just staring, for a full two seconds, which was enough to make Coel, no longer holding the knife, stumble backwards clumsily, shocked at his seeming indifference to what should be a killing blow.

LaCrone’s body was full of adrenaline, and it sharpened his mind to a razor edge. He knew he was in shock: he had never been stabbed before. He’d been shot in the leg, he’d been shot at, he’d seen plenty of people die, but he’d never felt his own sinews and muscle being ripped apart in one brutish display of strength. A knife was not precise like a bullet, which is what made it all the more shocking. Using his mind’s disbelief and his body’s shocked numbness to his advantage, LaCrone’s right hand retreated into the left hand side of his overcoat, withdrew his .40 caliber Baretta model 96, and in one fluid motion, LaCrone aimed and released three short reports into Mrs. Coel’s torso. With the adrenaline draining, Peter quickly spoke his thoughts aloud to assess the situation.

He spoke in a shaky, but clear voice, and stated not without some panic rising in his voice, “I have been stabbed. I looked up in response to a metallic sound, and I was stabbed while I was distracted. Suspect is dead, as a result of three of my bullets to her torso, in self defense.” He hoped the recorder in his coat pocket picked all of that up clearly, since he knew that his situation would not last much longer. He calmly put the safety back on his gun, with only a fraction of a second to spare.

A truck hit Peter LaCrone as his body began to convulse wildly. The good Inspector did not just simply fall, but rather collapsed, face first into the ground of the second floor apartment, back arching to facilitate his literal fall from grace. He tried to scream, but before an explicative could escape his mouth, his cries quickly became indiscernible sobs and the cracks of a overstressed set of vocal chords. He had an iron grip on the wound, and his flesh could not stop trembling. His voice shook unevenly as he began to feel light-headed, and he began to cough blood, the vibrations of which shot more pain into his stomach.

He thought of Mr. White. Jeremy would just love this. He thought of all the other officers sitting in the break room, discussing various battle wounds with pride, as Peter merely chuckled nervously. He had thought at the time that a bullet was a real wound, but it was clear to him now just why he was always told to stay out of arm’s reach. Back then he had always thought within arm’s reach, too close for a gun, was the safest...

He bit down on his tongue, hard. It sprung even more blood, but he was now shocked back to reality. He couldn’t afford to fade out on this one: doing so meant certain death by blood loss. He shook in pain once more as he blindly fished through his pocket for his cellular phone, eyes locked as tightly shut as his teeth were now gritted. Why hadn’t he worn Kevlar? He wasn’t sure if Kevlar resisted stab wounds... He couldn’t remember his training. “Snap out of it!” he cried as he writhed. Once chance at this: just one. He remembered his training from the military. It came flooding back. How to block out the pain! Focus on the source... He focused his entire mind on isolating the wound, compressing the pain that had spread throughout his body into that once spot, and mentally held it in place. He smashed down the three on his phone and held it in place. He thought he heard a ring, but it was too late. He was fading fast, and he soon seeped into unconsciousness.

His first thought before the world faded to black before him was that he would not die like this... not on some petty, faceless criminal. It was almost certainly true that the woman had never fallen for his guise, and that the metal that hit the ceiling was almost certainly, and ironically, the “penny” he had used to track her. Of course, LaCrone was in no state to consider either of these thoughts to their full extent, so his final thought before going under was simple, once again lost in the petty technicalities of his lackadaisical subconscious: “The penny... it was not a bug.”