Which, to Kane’s eyes, didn’t appear to be anything more than water.
St. John clutched his stomach and retched again, more air than anything else. His eyes were wide with distress and more than a little bloodshot. The heaving didn’t appear to help his color any, and Kane kept half an eye on the door, hoping the dog wouldn’t decide to trot out and track through the watery vomit.
“Damn it, you’re going into shock,” Kane grumbled. He quickly shed his jacket, then hissed when a cold wind whipped through the open garage. If he was cold, he couldn’t imagine how St. John felt. The man looked barely strong enough to walk, much less ward off a freezing San Francisco wind. He leaned down and wrapped the warm leather jacket around St. John’s shoulders and checked his phone again. “I’m going to have Dispatch send out an ambulance. You look like you need one.”
“No, I’m… fine. What the…?” St. John didn’t finish. Instead he tried to get to his feet again, bracing himself against the wall with one hand. His eyes never left Kane’s face, although they shifted once in a while to look at Kane’s holstered gun. “Do you know who killed him? How…. Fuck….”
“No, but I want to know who did,” Kane replied, tapping the badge he wore on his belt. “How do you know him? How’d he end up here?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t kill him,” the young man said. He shook slightly, a barely perceptible shiver under his skin, and his eyes remained fixed on the carved up remains of the body draped over the car seat. “If you find who did it, I want to thank them something fierce.”
OLD Man Shing was dead.
Miki struggled to wrap his brain around the one single thing he knew was a fact. Other than that, his mind whirred from the endless questions and accusations flung at him as he sat in the tiny khaki-painted room.
Still, Shing’s death did something to him inside. He wanted time to think, a spare moment to stop his mind from spinning. He wanted to see the body, to touch it. Anything to have some evidence that the old man who’d terrorized his nightmares was gone, but all he got from the police were whispers and accusations.
Bright lights prevented him from seeing past the one-way observation window, and he imagined there was a line of people who came and went in a tag-team interrogation dance. Mute, hard-faced men came to scrape at his fingers and skin then he’d been told to strip. A pair of scratchy blue cotton scrubs they gave him provided little warmth against the cold air blasting down on him from an air conditioning vent, and Miki wondered if that was part of a cunning plan to freeze out answers from a suspect.
Wiggling his toes did nothing to hold off the chill in them, but it gave him something to do while the cops decided who to send in next.
The door opened and the Hispanic detective who brought him to the police station walked in. There’d been some noise about Miki’s band and more than a few curious glances as he walked past the blue sea of cops and into the bathroom, where a stone-faced uniformed officer watched him strip off his clothes. They let him keep his underwear but took his battered Vans, giving him a pair of thin flip-flops to wear. Miki almost told the cop he’d kill for some socks, but the cop’s tight lips made him think twice.
Mostly, the cop was overly polite. If anything, his good manners made Miki’s skin crawl more than the uniforms staring at him when he was walked into the station. The ride to the station was a brief, silent torture. He hadn’t been cuffed and was informed he was only there to answer a few questions, but his lack of clothes told him a much different story.
“Mr. St. John? Mieko? Do you remember me? I’m Inspector Kel Sanchez.” The detective sat down in the chair across the table. Shivering, Miki leaned back and waited as the detective shuffled through the folder he’d brought in with him.
“Can I go home? I left the bathtub full of water and the car running.” Miki eyed the folder’s contents from under his lashes. A younger version of himself stared up out of an outdated photo, and a cynical rage flared up in Miki’s belly. Leaning forward, he tapped the piece of paper on top. “Isn’t that supposed to be… like, sealed? Isn’t that the bullshit you’re told? That your juvie records are sealed?”