Octopus on My Head by Jim Nisbet

Author:Jim Nisbet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Codes: FIC000000; FIC031000; FIC031010
ISBN: 9781468308518
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2013-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

THE KING,” I FACED SAL, “MY ASS. ”

“Guy sticks up the store,” Sal grumbled half-heartedly, “it takes them all fuckin day to get here.”

“Murder isn’t a cash register, Kramer,” Garcia replied. He jerked a thumb at the door behind him. “Beat it.”

Sal looked a little startled. This was his office, after all. But Garcia stepped aside and Sal lost no time in getting out. A uniformed cop posted in the hall closed the door. Garcia turned around and held up a pistol, its barrel impaled on a pencil.

“Yikes,” said Lavinia, “so you’re the guy who smashed my back window and stole my roscoe out of the glove compartment?”

I cringed.

Garcia said quietly, “This isn’t high school, Miss Hahn.”

“That’s true,” Lavinia nodded. “Do you have a warrant?”

“Lavinia…. ”

Garcia forestalled me with a smile. “I do have a warrant,” he addressed her, “if you’d like to play that way.” He patted his breast pocket. “But if you so choose, you’re going to lose. Perhaps you’ll hear me out first?”

“Perhaps she will,” I insisted.

Lavinia had so much trouble with authority that she was perfectly capable of flying in the face of Garcia’s winning hand, even if she went to jail for it. Jails, in fact, are full of such people. Much as a scientist would watch a frog’s leg to which he’s attached an electrode, Garcia watched Lavinia. I watched her, too. My fate was a little too wired into her decision for comfort.

But some stroke of reasonableness stayed her contrariety. “So,” she finally said, “talk.”

Garcia talked. “Through a miracle of technology we’ve established that a second pistol fired three rounds at the scene of the Stepnowski murder.” Garcia let the pistol turn around the shaft of the pencil like a slow noisemaker, whose ominous appearance made up entirely for its silence. “But that gun didn’t fire the shot that killed him.” When the handle came around, we could see that the clip had been removed. Garcia looked past it at Lavinia. “Same caliber, different gun.”

“On cop shows on my television before I pawned it,” I interrupted, “ballistics tests took weeks.”

“It’s probably been several years since you pawned it,” Garcia said, with only mild condescension.

I nodded. “Ten, fifteen, twenty.”

“Other than the march of progress,” he said, with no condescension whatsoever, “you haven’t missed a thing.”

“What’s so hot about this murder case?” Lavinia asked. Despite her reasonable decision of just a moment before, her voice had reclaimed its accustomed note of antagonism. “Don’t you have important dead people to investigate?”

“Oh yes,” Garcia replied mildly. “But there are reasons to fast track this particular case.”

“What reasons?”

The gun began to turn again. “By the additional miracles of computerized record-keeping and gun control legislation, we have also established that the registered owner of a Lexus parked in the lot next to this very building has no gun permit. In fact, even if this handgun is registered, its serial numbers have been filed.”

Lavinia pursed her lips.

“So the pistol will remain in our custody until such time as it

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