Frag Box Read Online Free

palm with his nightstick now.
    “I can identify the victim,” I said.
    “You said you didn’t see anything.” The baton came out of his left hand, and both it and he were suddenly at full cock.
    “I didn’t, but I know the dead man.”
    “Is that all? Well, it so happens that I also know him. That’s why they call this my turf, you know? He’s a bum named Cee Vee, a nobody, lives in a box down in some boofug Dogpatch ditch. And some cokeheads or meth freaks decided to punch his lights out and then liked it so much that they just couldn’t stop themselves. Case closed.”
    “His name was Charles Victor,” I said.
    “The hell, you say. Now you can give me yours.” He took out his notebook and flipped it to a page that looked like as if it was already full of doodles and phone numbers.
    “Herman Jackson.”
    He started to write, and I peered over the edge of the pad enough to see if he had written Charlie’s name, too.
    “You’re starting to piss me off, Herman Jackson. You want to know the remedy for that?”
    “No.”
    “That’s good, because—”
    “Did you get the name of the kid with the shovel?”
    “Jesus, you just don’t take a hint, do you? He’s a kid with a shovel, okay? Another nobody, also saw nothing. The guy that owns the hardware store around the corner gave him five bucks to shovel the walk, he says. Big mystery. You happy now? Get the hell out of here.”
    “Did you notice he wasn’t wearing any gloves?”
    “Your point?” He stopped writing, sighed, and gave me a pained look.
    “Would you be out shoveling with no gloves?”
    “No.” He stuck the notebook back in his pocket and pointed the baton menacingly at my chest. “What I’d be doing, is I’d be over here trying to get rid of some smartass wants to tell me my job. Some guy who’s about to get smacked for his trouble, he pushes it just a little bit farther.”
    “But he—”
    “The detectives will be here in a little bit, also trying to tell me my job, and when they do, I do not want you around helping them. Got it?”
    I could see I was arguing with a parking meter, so I stuck my hands in my pockets and started to go. “There is one thing the detectives are going to want you to have found out,” I said over my shoulder.
    I took three steps back across the street and was stopped by the handle end of the black baton, hooked over my shoulder.
    “You got one shot,” said the cop. “One. What are they going to want me to know?”
    “There is no hardware store around the corner. There’s nothing but the back doors of a lot of offices and a hole-in-the-wall shoe repair shop.”
    “Look, the kid said—”
    “Wow, you don’t suppose he lied to a cop, do you? Why would he do that?”
    “Shit,” said the cop. “Sam bitch! Listen, mister smartass Herman Jackson, you do not talk to the detectives, you got that? You do not .” Then he spun on his heel and ran off in the direction of the now-shoveled street corner, shouting into his radio on the way.
    It seemed to me he had a lot of funny attitudes for a cop. It also seemed that he didn’t know his own turf very well. Or else he belonged there even less than I did. I tagged along behind, just to see what the detectives were not supposed to.
    But when I rounded the corner, the street was empty. I walked a bit farther, to put the street light behind me, and squinted into the darkening urban landscape. Two blocks away, cop, kid, and shovel were running away as fast as they could. They were already far enough off to be hard to see clearly, but it sure looked as if they were together, rather than one chasing the other. Another quick block, a turn into a side street or alley, and they were gone.
    I went back the way I had come, turned the corner again, and looked over at the crime scene. The first squad car was just arriving. The first one. And I knew, absolutely, that the cop I had talked to wasn’t coming back.
    I wanted to kick myself for being so slow on the uptake.