An Acquired Taste Read online

  There was no answer.

  He knocked again, even more loudly. This time he announced, “San Antonio Police.”

  Still no answer.

  But there was a voice from an open doorway just down the hallway.

  “There’s nobody home.”

  John turned to see an old black man in a ragged yellow housecoat.

  And pink bunny slippers.

  But John wasn’t one to judge. His own fashion tastes were sometimes just as extreme.

  “How do you know, sir?”

  “He left half an hour ago. And nobody’s seen Rose for days.”

  “Who left half an hour ago?”

  “The man who claims to be her son, but who obviously ain’t.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “No. But he goes to the food bank to stand in line for food every day about this time. That’s my guess. He’ll probably be back soon.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t mention it, officer. I want to find out what happened to Rose and make sure she’s okay, that’s all.”

  The old man disappeared back into his room and closed the door. John took up watch at the end of the hallway, sitting on a Queen Anne chair next to a small table with a house phone.

  The old man called it perfectly. Twenty minutes later a rail thin man entered the hallway from the opposite end and walked directly to room 203.

  If he noticed John sitting there he gave no indication.

  The La Mansion was one of the few hotels in the downtown area which didn’t use electronic door locks at the time of the blackout. Hotel management had felt such locks detracted from its old world charm and chose to use old fashioned door keys instead.

  That was one of the reasons the hotel was so popular with squatters in the new world. Their room doors would actually lock.

  As John’s suspect reached into his pocket for his room key, he shifted the bag he was carrying to his other hand.

  With both his hands occupied, John figured it as good a time as any to challenge him.

  “Excuse me, sir. I need to talk to you for a minute.”

  The man suddenly seemed to be aware of John’s presence and looked at him in a mild panic. He seemed to know John was a cop.

  Maybe the woman he’d met earlier wasn’t the only one who identified police officers by their hairstyles.

  What happened next was a blur.

  So much of what happens in police work involves hours and hours of sitting and waiting, followed by a flurry of activity which happens so quickly it makes one’s head spin. Then it takes several hours to sort everything out. Who did what, when they did it, the sequence of events…

  In this case, the man at Room 203’s door seemed to know John was a cop even though he hadn’t said so.

  Instead of pulling the room key out of his pocket he pulled something more deadly: a .25 caliber handgun.

  John’s life was saved because as soon as he saw the panic on the young man’s face he knew there was going to be trouble.

  In a flash his eyes went to the man’s right hand. The one in the pocket. The only one which could be a threat to him, since the other was holding the bag of food.

  The gun seemed to be hung up in. His jeans were too tight to be carrying a pistol stuffed deep inside the pocket.

  That was a good thing. For if he’d been wearing looser jeans John might have died on this day.

  John’s life was saved because the man struggled temporarily to get his gun. And because John saw the butt of the weapon in the man’s hand. And because John was one of the fastest draws on the San Antonio Police force.

  John had his own weapon, a .9 mm, out before the man was able to raise his.

  As the man’s weapon came up in John’s general direction, John fired three shots in rapid succession.

  The first shot went just wide of the heart, taking a rib and forcing it through the lung. It left a gaping hole in the man’s back, and would have been fatal, given the fact there wasn’t an operating trauma center within ten miles.

  And ten miles took an awfully long time to traverse without ambulances.

  His second shot went cleanly through the heart, shredding it as it went.

  The third bullet wasn’t necessary.

  The man fell face first onto the carpeted floor of the hallway. He wouldn’t have cared if it had been hardened concrete, for he didn’t feel it either way.

  As he hit the handgun he was holding was jarred loose from his hand and went bouncing across the floor.

  John knelt beside him and felt for a carotid pulse.

  It was a wasted effort, he knew, but he had to go through the motions. He couldn’t officially declare the man dead, the threat permanently neutralized, until he verified the heart was no longer beating.

  Then he rolled him over to get a closer look at his face.

  For from the moment he’d first laid eyes upon him, he looked vaguely familiar.

  -30-

  John pulled a folded piece of paper from his back pocket and examined the photo on it, then looked back at the dead man.

  There was no mistaking it.

  He’d just shot the man he’d been looking for. The man who led the group of thugs who’d almost killed Rhett Butler.

  Lamar Taylor, AKA Big Boi, had met his end.

  It was possible the 36th Street Boiz, a street gang based three miles to the west, would miss Lamar.

  But nobody else would.

  Toni peeked out of her room next door and saw the carnage wrought from the one-sided gun battle.

  “My goodness. Is it safe to come out now?”

  John looked at her and said, “Yes. Just don’t touch him or the weapon.”

  “Officer, I wouldn’t touch that thug with a twenty foot pole.”

  Toni seemed to sense other residents were listening at their doors, wondering what all the commotion was about.

  She yelled out, “Y’all can come out now. It’s all over.”

  Three more doors opened.

  The first one out, the old man in the pink bunny slippers, exited his room without a word and took a position next to Toni.

  Two others walked out from the other side of the hallway, close to where the .25 had come to rest.

  John felt the need to repeat his previous instructions.

  “Nobody touch the body or the gun.”

  He stood and walked to Room 203, then rapped loudly on the door.

  “Rose, it’s Deputy Chief Castro from the SAPD. It’s safe to open the door now if you’re able.”

  He waited a full twenty seconds, in case the woman inside was shaken and slow to respond.

  Then he tried the door.

  It was locked.

  He went back to Lamar and fished into his right front pocket for the keys the dead man had been struggling to get out.

  Then he motioned to the others to stay back.

  “There might be some of his friends in there.”

  Before he inserted the key in the lock he rapped again, this time louder than before.

  “SAPD. I’m coming in.”

  He almost said something else, but decided there wasn’t much else which needed to be said.

  Handgun at the ready, he unlocked the door and pushed it open.

  He paused for a long moment before proceeding.

  He saw nothing amiss. The room seemed perfectly still.

  He proceeded cautiously, letting the door close behind him.

  The group in the hall all knew Rose. They all liked her. They huddled together in John’s absence and speculated about what was going on inside.

  And a couple of them prayed he found Rose still alive.

  It was a full five minutes.

  When the first blackout struck John Castro was a patrolman.

  Back then patrolmen didn’t process crime scenes. They secured them and waited for detectives to arrive and relieve them.

  The EMPs changed everything.

  These days there were few dete
ctives left, and they were put on the streets to augment an also-depleted patrol team.

  In essence, the lines between the two teams was erased. Patrolmen investigated their own cases, although most were not close to being qualified to do so.

  John had learned a lot lately about how to handle a crime scene.

  He’d learned how to spot things which might be important amidst the thousands of things which looked important but were just noise.

  He’d learned how to bag and mark evidence so it could be examined more closely at a laboratory by someone who knew what they were looking for.

  And how to capture trace evidence not visible to the human eye or an untrained person.

  He was also keenly aware that all his efforts, in all likelihood, would be a gigantic waste of his time.

  The evidence bags were piling up at police headquarters. One evidence room was completely full now. A storage room which used to contain computer paper, toner cartridges and unneeded furniture was emptied out and made into a second evidence room, and it was filling up fast.

  The problem wasn’t that they didn’t want to expertly examine the evidence and bag it and tag it for use at future trials.

  The problem was that there was no one to do it.

  Everyone was on the streets.

  And even if there were a thousand lab technicians, forensics specialists and latent evidence experts available to handle the evidence, it wouldn’t make any difference anyway.

  The court system had broken down. There were only a couple of judges still on the bench in the Bexar County Courthouse.

  And they’d thrown constitutional law out the window.

  It was now routine for bad men to get arrested and for judges to drag their feet. They wouldn’t be arraigned for days. Or weeks. Or, in the most serious cases, months. And when they were they were always denied bond, but told to plead guilty in exchange for immediate sentencing.

  In minor cases, they were sentenced to time served and released.

  It was a crummy way of doing business, but it was reality.

  The judges couldn’t release them on bond because there were no longer any bonding agents.

  They couldn’t charge them because there was no district attorney to try them. No defense attorneys to argue their cases for them.

  There was some method to the madness, although it was minimal.

  The judges placed priority on the arrested based on their offenses.

  Those arrested for property crimes were released within a few days.

  Those arrested for crimes against persons, such as armed robbery or assault were allowed to wallow in jail for several weeks or months, depending on the seriousness of their crime.

  Those arrested for murder, rape, sexual assault or any crime against children or the elderly were thrown in jail and forgotten about.

  John knew all this. He knew he was essentially wasting his time.

  But he couldn’t not do his job to the best of his ability.

  He was on his hands and knees, examining a brownish-red spot in the carpet about the size of a dime.

  He was trying to determine whether it was blood, and how long it had been there.

  The door suddenly opened, and several heads poked in to watch him.

  He’d left the key in the doorknob.

  Toni’s hand went to her mouth and she felt faint.

  To Toni, John’s crawling around on the carpet meant only one thing.

  That her good friend Rose was dead.

  Her thinking wasn’t without logic. For if John had found her tied up and gagged inside the room he’d have been untying her and attending to her.

  Not crawling around on the floor examining spots.

  She felt faint, and demanded of the policeman, “She’s dead, isn’t she? You’ve got to tell us what that animal did to her.”

  He stood up and walked to her, put a hand on her shoulder to calm her a bit.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She isn’t here.”

  -31-

  Scarlett and Bill were walking half a mile from Baker Street, headed toward an undeveloped section of the city.

  The rabbits there were scarcer than they used to be, their numbers thinned by hunters. But it was the only place within five miles with enough greenery and hiding places to sustain a rabbit population of any size.

  They’d been discussing Scarlett’s plans to work with Bill to till up the back yard of his new house and to plant a garden there.

  “But I don’t know how to plant a garden. I don’t know how to grow stuff. I never did that, and Eddie didn’t either.”

  “We’re going to do it together, Bill. This year, you and I will plant the seeds. I will show you how to water the plants, how to care for them.

  “Then next year we’ll see how much you remembered. I will watch you plant the seeds next year by yourself. I will watch you care for the plants and water them, and will jump in to help only if you need it.

  “By the third year you should know what you’re doing and I can stop helping. By then you’ll have the gardening skills to sustain you.”

  Bill was tired of talking about gardening. He changed the subject.

  “Wait a minute. You said something before we left my house that didn’t make any sense to me.”

  “What was that?”

  “You said I have to be able to shoot rabbits before I can start shooting at squirrels. And then you said after I get good enough to shoot squirrels I can’t shoot them any more? That we’re gonna start catching them instead.

  “I’m stupid. But even I know that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Oh, Bill, you’re not stupid. You’re not stupid at all.”

  “Yes I am. People have told me my whole life that I’m stupid and dumb and retarded.”

  “Bill, you’re none of those things. You’re a wonderful man and a wonderful human being. The people who called you those things, they’re the ones who are stupid. And they said those things because they were jealous of you.”

  “Jealous of me? Why?”

  “Because they knew deep in their hearts that they could never be as good a person as you. Not even close. So they tried to cut you down to feel better about themselves. That’s why bullies and assholes like that act the way they do.”

  “Ooohhh, you said a bad word.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, it’s okay. Eddie said bad words all the time. He used to say that sometimes only those words would do.”

  “Well, he was certainly right about that.”

  “Would you ‘splain to me why we’re gonna stop shooting squirrels?”

  “Well, because we don’t have a lot of .22 ammo left. There will come a day when we run out, and it’s awfully hard to come by.

  “I’ve bartered for some squirrel traps and a couple of rabbit traps from a prepper who learned how to trap long before the power went out. I didn’t get enough of them, but that’s okay. Once I examined them and found out how they were made and how they worked, I decided I could get all the materials at the hardware store and make more of my own.

  “There will come a day when we have to trap our squirrels instead of shooting them, so we can save the bullets we have left.”

  “What did Mister Tony mean the other day when he said he was gonna build the world’s biggest rabbit pen?”

  “That’s a plan he has to convert one of the back yards into a holding pen for wild rabbits.”

  “Yeah. That’s what he said. He asked me if I wanted to help him. But I didn’t understand what he meant by it.”

  “Do you like to dig, Bill?

  He grew quiet. She got the sense she hit a raw nerve.

  So she was patient and gave him time to find his words.

  Finally he said slowly, “I used to. When I was little I had my own shovel. My daddy gave it to me for my birthday. I used to dig holes in the back yard.”

  “Holes? For what?”

  “Oh, sometimes just to sit in and read my comic b
ooks. Sometimes to hide from my brother. And one time I decided I was gonna dig a tunnel so I could escape.”

  “Escape? From what?”

  “From all the other kids who always made fun of me.”

  “Oh, Bill, that’s so sad.”

  “I used to like digging. But then when Eddie died I had to dig a grave for him and put him in it. Now I don’t like to dig so much anymore.”

  “That’s too bad. I guess you won’t be able to help Tony then.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because digging is what he needs help with.”

  “What do you mean? Is he gonna be digging holes too?”

  “Not exactly. He’s going to dig out one of the back yards down about three feet or so. Then he’s gonna lay down some heavy wire fencing and cover it back up. He’ll put the same kind of fencing directly beneath the fence, going down about three feet, then connect it to the fencing three feet down.

  “But why do all that? It sounds like a lot of work.”

  “Oh, it will be. Even with three or four men digging it’ll take a couple of months.”

  “Why does he want to do all that?”

  “He wants me to build rabbit traps to catch rabbits, not for eating but for breeding.”

  “What’s breeding?”

  “That’s when rabbits have babies.”

  “Oh. But how do they make the babies?”

  “Um… hey look, Bill! Up there in the sky. Doesn’t that cloud look just like a locomotive?”

  “Sure, I guess so.”

  “And look at that other one. It looks just like a teddy bear.”

  “Where? I don’t see it.”

  “Right there. See his ears?”

  “No. Oh, okay, maybe. But teddy bears don’t have three ears. I know on account of I have a teddy bear, ‘member?”

  “Okay, you’re right. I guess it doesn’t look much like a teddy bear after all.”

  “So how do bunny rabbits make babies?”

  Her efforts to distract him didn’t work.

  “Oh, geez… I’ll explain that to you another time, Bill. Right now we’re talking about Tony’s project, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, his plan is to put wire three feet below the ground in one of the back yards. When he’s done I’m going to trap several rabbits and bring them back alive. They’ll be let loose into the back yard, and they’ll start having babies. And before long there will be so many of them we won’t have to hunt them anymore. We’ll just catch them and kill them as we need them.”