Page 16 of Lime Gelatin and Other Monsters
The man took off, and without hesitation, Vikash sprinted after him, weaving through the crowd with the grace of a dancer from the Bolshoi. Kyle would’ve followed, but Jeff’s hand landed on his shoulder.
Handing Kyle three oranges from the produce stand next door, Jeff said, “Your partner works too hard. You’ve been standing next to me for a bit, right? Follow my lead, Officer Kirby.”
Kyle took half a second to catch up, in which Jeff had begun to teleport the oranges he held and Vance had barreled out of the panaderia across the street in pursuit of the suspect. Gaze locked firmly on the suspect, Kyle concentrated on his oranges, hyperaware of their nubbly skin against his palms, andthoughtabout sending them on ahead.
The oranges vanished from his hands only a breath later than the ones teleporting out of Jeff’s hands. It should have been easy. Send the oranges under the suspect’s feet, trip him up, and let Vikash catch up. In theory, that one thing and only that one thing should have happened. Instead, several ancillary things happened to accompany Jeff’s oranges materializing under the suspect’s feet to send him flailing and careening to his hands and knees.
Kyle’s first orange smacked into a Mercedes with such force that it splattered all over the back window and set off the car alarm. The second clipped Vikash’s ear, which caused Mr. Perfect to wince and duck but not to lose a single step. The third decided on the truly disastrous course of reappearing under Vance’s left boot. The firestarter didn’t have even a thimbleful of Vikash’s grace and when the front of his boot met orange and the orange rolled, he went down hard.
“Fuck!” Vance bellowed. “What the hell, Jeff?”
Jeff called back, “Easy, Virago! Not my fault.” He started to move through the crowd to where Vikash had the suspect on the ground while he muttered, “Not entirely.”
Hesitating, Kyle waffled between going to assist his partner or to help Vance up, though approaching an enraged Vance was probably a bad idea. Probably because he was still focused on both oranges and Vance, a dozen more oranges suddenly materialized in the air above Vance’s head and fell on him in a flood like Mr. Moose’s ping-pong balls used to on Captain Kangaroo. Smoke began to rise from Vance’s jacket as his face turned a shade of scarlet that definitely clashed with the oranges. In possibly his only wise decision of the day, Kyle hurried down the sidewalk to Vikash.
The suspect, sullen and glaring, stood against the wall of a shop, hands cuffed behind him, stolen cell phone beside him, while Jeff Mirandized and Vikash did a quick pat down.
“Looked like he was going for that car.” Vikash nodded toward a dark green Mustang parked around the corner.
Kyle tipped his hat back, trying to match his partner for expressionlessness. “That your car, sir?”
“Fuck, no,” Varsity Jacket, a pasty character with blotchy skin and dirty blond hair, spat out. “And I didn’t take that chick’s phone, neither. She’s a psycho.”
“He got keys on him, Soren?” Kyle asked casually.
“Does appear to have a set.” Vikash drew them out of the man’s left hand jacket pocket. Without moving his head, Vikash pointed the rectangular key fob at the car and hit ‘unlock’. The Mustang obligingly blinked its lights and clicked its locks open.
“Hey! You can’t do that!” Varsity protested.
“And this phone you were carrying, sir? You’re saying it’s yours?” Kyle picked up the smart phone. The screen had gone into lock mode.
“Yeah, it’s mine. This is, like, unlawful detainment.”
“What’s your code to unlock it, and when I do, what’s your background look like?”
“It’s…” The suspect hesitated, his eyes shifting back and forth. “I forget. You guys make me nervous.”
“Uh-huh.” Kyle gestured down the street. “I’ll just go ask the woman who says you stole her phone the same questions, all right?”
“No, wait! It was just a joke, all right? Just a gag. She’s just got no sense of humor. Never did. You know how chicks are.”
Vikash raised both eyebrows at the appeal to misogyny and strolled back down the sidewalk to where Vance had picked himself up and was controlling his matchbox temper enough to talk to the woman in question. Just to annoy their liar of a suspect, Kyle talked over his head to Jeff about inane things like the weather and whether dogs should wear coats while they waited patiently.
After a few moments and a short discussion during which the woman didn’t show even the tiniest bit of amusement, Vikash strolled back. “The owner of the cell phone states she doesn’t know this man and that, I quote,even if it was a stupid joke, he still stole the freaking phone.”
“Gentlemen, I believe we have probable cause.” Kyle held out his hand for the key fob and clicked open the trunk. “Anything in there you’d like to tell me about, sir?”
Varsity had clamped his lips shut, a visible twitch in his jaw. The scattering of cell phones in an old red milk crate didn’t shock Kyle. Their guy wasn’t a terribly organized thief, but he apparently was a busy one. What caught his eye and made his pulse skip a beat was the implement peeking out from a canvas roll near the back of the trunk. Carefully, he took a pen from his pocket and lifted a corner of the canvas.
“Vikash, you see this?”
Looming over Kyle’s shoulder, Vikash spoke nearly in his ear. “I see it. Red residue could be blood. Should I call it into Third District?”
“Yep.” Kyle leaned farther into the trunk, both to move away from Vikash’s voice that was sending shivers down his spine and to get a better look at the gardening trowel, an elongated one with deep sides and a sharp end. “Human perpetrator. No monsters. No paranormal weirdness. This is outside our mandate.”
Vikash nodded and jogged back to their squad car to call it in.
Damn, he has a fine ass. And no way in hell do I have any business thinking that about my partner.My probably straight-as-a-Popsicle-stick partner.
