The Big Run-Off (Holden Burke #1)

Four

By the time it had reached morning hours, they had exhausted the third-degree and moved onto the fourth.

The officers had marched me through the doors of the precinct, booked me, photographed me, and left me to dry out in an airless interrogation room while watching the hand of the clock tick the seconds all the way from midnight onwards. They asked me questions for the next couple of hours. I was tired, and I was annoyed, and, even though I was now in fashion, my new steel bracelets were starting to cut into the soft flesh of my wrists. I didn't feel like being especially cooperative.

'You're gonna tell us what you were doing at the shipyard and you're gonna do it right now, 'k, shithead?'

They'd even gone through the trouble of checking with Central Casting and finding two hard-nosed detectives to give me the authentic strongarm experience. They paced around the interrogation room and occasionally slammed their palms onto the table in a grand show of toughness.

'We wanna know what you did with the murder weapon, Burke.'

'What murder weapon?' I said.

'The one you shot him with.'

'Oh, that. Makes sense. I got confused.'

'You're a funny bugger, eh?'

'Not really,' I said. 'I thought it was a lark being brought in here at first, but now it's just becoming tired.'

'Finally you say something we can all agree with. Now you tell us what where you doing at the shipyard already and we can wrap this up and put you to sleep in a nice cell.'

I brought up both my manacled wrists in an attempt to scratch my brow. 'I told you what I know,' I said. 'I don't think you heard me when I did. Maybe if you say please, I'll tell you again. Then we can all go out for breakfast and you can tell me stories of all the other poor buggers you've railroaded over the years.'

One of the detectives blew out a sigh. We were all sweating. Neither of them had been outside the interrogation room since we started, asking the same questions over and over, getting the same schtick from me.

'You're pretty damn happy at this whole thing, aren't you?'

'I'm not,' I said. 'Believe me, I'm as frustrated as you are.'

'We just wanna get to the bottom of this already.'

'I've given you the bottom of it, I'll give it to you again: I didn't see anyone go into the building, but I heard the gun go off. I went inside and found the body. I was going to call the police when your boys in blue kindly grabbed me and trampled all over my inalienable rights. And now we're here. There—you didn't say please, but I told you again anyway. Aren't I a nice guy?'

'This shitty story of yours have any proof?'

'You've impounded my car, haven't you?'

'We got it, yeah.'

'Then if you're not combing it through for evidence, I hope at least you've given it a wash. I had a camera set up on the dash. The feed goes directly through to my phone. I have the whole night recorded. I was in the car the whole damn time.'

The detective with the fuller head of jet hair and the sweatier neck line sat across from me. He looked me hard in the eyes. I rolled mine at his theatrics.

'The bigger question,' he said, 'the one we've been asking all damn night, is why were you staking out the Quinto building anyway if you expect us to believe you weren't involved.'

'I've told already' I said, 'I'll only divulge that to Inspector Dave Chalmers. Is he up yet?'

'No one's gonna hear from you if we don't think you deserve it. And so far, you haven't given us any damn reason to think so.'