On The Grind

Chapter 39

As soon as we pulled into the parking lot of the Haven Park PD, Alonzo and Horaee got out of the Esealade. I just sat there. I was almost certain that Alexa and Olivia hadn't had enough time to locate and block the polygrapher. While I was trying to figure out what to do, Alonzo jerked open the passenger door. "You coming?"

"Yeah," I said as I climbed out, "but is this really necessary?"

"The mayor wants it," Alonzo said. "He's a cautious guy. So lets just get it done. That way we all know there's no rats, okay?"

"Okay."

The three of us walked into the station. From the look of the lobby, the swing shift was having a busy night. There were half a dozen tense brown faces — mostly women. Mothers and girlfriends sitting in worn leather chairs, their knees tight together, clutching worn fabric purses, waiting for ugly news about loved ones courtesy of the corrupt Haven Park PD.

I followed Alonzo into Talbot Jones's empty office.

"We're gonna do it in here," he said.

He picked up the phone and dialed an extension. "There should he a guy out there from FSA. That's Electronic Systems Analysts. He's a polygraph operator. Hunt him up and send him hack to Tal's office." After he hung up he said, "Who wants to go first?"

I certainly didn't. I had a wide, dishonest smile that felt like I'd borrowed it from a drugstore Halloween rack. Horace Velario was still staring at me suspiciously.

Alonzo picked up the phone again. "Let's go. Where is the guy? We need to be over in Fleetwood by ten-fifteen." He listened, then said, "You can't be serious!" He slammed clown the phone and left the office without saying anything.

Velario continued to stare at me.

I endured his gaze for almost half a minute. Then I said, "My fly open?"

"You need to know how it is with me and Alonzo," he finally said. "We played high school football together at Long Beach Poly. The press called us Omelet and Toast. I was Omelet. Weak-side linebacker. They called me that 'cause when I hit somebody I scrambled their eggs. Bell was on the strong side and made the toast. We were fucking dangerous. You didn't want what we were dishing out. Between the two of us we logged almost two hundred tackles our senior year."

"That's real nice," I said, tuning him out. My mind was elsewhere, trying to come up with a way to avoid taking the damn polygraph.

"The reason I'm boring you with this shit is you need to know that since then, I never stopped watching Al's back. He looks big and tough, but underneath all that he's got this dumb trusting side, which dickheads always try and take advantage of. When that happens, I scramble up an omelet. My job over the years has been to pick off the bullshitters. Fve been looking at you for two clays now, and I've come to the decision that you're a lying sack a shit."

That got my attention.

"You're the fucking mole," he said.

"You need to stop taking yourself so seriously," I responded. "This isn't the Long Beach Poly defensive backfield."

"I told Alonzo you're the rat, but since he vouched for you with the Avilas, it's in his best interests for you to be okay, so he don't believe me. But I'm still over here covering the weak side, just like always."

"You were there in the orange grove," I said. "He fired a shot at me. If I was the mole, I would have talked."

"I'm not saying you don't have balls, Scully. I'm saying you're a spy."

"You're probably gonna have to prove that."

"I don't gotta prove shit. This fucking poly is gonna do all the proving for me. You fail, you're gonna go outta here feet first."

Just then Alonzo came back through the door. He was pissed, on the verge of losing it, his brown complexion red with anger.

"Fucking guy isn't here!" he shouted at us.

Alonzo pointed at Horace. "Call Tal. Use the WC's office. Tell Captain Jones the polygraph examiner is a no-show. He booked this guy. Have him get on the phone to FSA. He needs to get the man here now. We need to be out the door in twenty minutes."

Horace shot me a hard look, then exited the office.

Alonzo paced around the room fuming. "Fucking civilian agencies. We used to have our own poly guy, but now because of budgets we're subcontracting all this shit out."

Two minutes later Horace was back. "Talbot can't reach ESA. Their phones go straight to voice mail. He says he don't have no personal contact number on the guy they assigned to us."

Alonzo stood in the center of the office for a long moment, then he looked at his watch. "Okay, then we gotta go without it. From here out, we do this as a team. Once it's done, the conspiracy to commit guarantees everybody's silence."

"I'm good with that," I said.

Horace said nothing, but kept his gaze on me.

"Let's go," Alonzo said. "We got no time left."

We headed back to the Escalade and squealed out of the police lot. We hit Lincoln Boulevard chirping rubber.