Free Killing a Cold One by Joseph Heywood

October 24
    MACKINAW CITY, CHEBOYGAN COUNTY
    It was after midnight. “So much for initiative,” Friday said as she pulled into Mackinaw City off I-75. It had been snowing tapioca since Vanderbilt, and traffic had slowed to a crawl by the time they got to Indian River, thirty miles south of the straits. “I hate whiteouts,” she carped, pulling up to the city police building. Signs on the bridge’s approach announced it was closed, but not for how long. They went inside, brushing snow off their coats, and found Chief Minky Malette in his office on the phone. Malette waved for them to step in and sit, yelled at someone on the other end of the phone about closing the bridge, and how it had already made for trouble in town.
    The chief hung up. “You two lost?”
    â€œStopping to get a room in the stable.”
    Malette guffawed. “Here? Dream on. We got no rooms left in town. You don’t mind, though, I’ve got a holding cell. Use them for prisoners until we can ship them to Cheboygan, or wherever. Got two, and one’s empty right now.”
    â€œAny port in a storm,” Service said.
    â€œI hate weather humor,” Malette said.
    â€œGood for local business, though.”
    â€œScrew the shopkeeps,” the chief said. “They get profits, and we get to clean up behind the whole mess while the town fathers shrink our budgets every year.”
    Service called Station Twenty in Lansing to let the dispatchers know where he was, and Friday called her office in Negaunee.
    Malette showed them into the cramped holding-cell area. One was occupied by a young woman with stringy black hair in a black leather skirt just short of the average male imagination.
    â€œLike . . . you one of them or one of us? ” the girl asked Friday.
    â€œOne of them,” Friday said. “Above the bridge.”
    â€œThat’s cool,” the girl said. “I stuck my old man in the kneecap with an icepick. Come home from work, see, and, like, I found him pounding doggy on my BFF? Guess I sorta freaked?”
    â€œShould have stuck her instead,” Service offered.
    â€œDid,” the girl said matter-of-factly. “Thirty-eighties, they tell me? I din’t count, myseff? She, like, croaked? Minky, he say I murderize dat bitch?”
    The girl looked fourteen, couldn’t have been more than nineteen, definition of PWT. “Crime of passion,” he told her. “It may not go so badly for you.”
    â€œBut I done stuck dat ho thirty-eightie? You think dat a record? I ain’t never made me no record? I get pissed, I ack out, they tell me? She fuck my ole man, she dis me, see what I’m sayin’?”
    Indeed. The urban patois of a long-haul client of the state’s social welfare system rolled off the girl’s lips. Their fellow resident waved a piece of paper at Friday.
    â€œYou want see my baby? Like, they took her from me, dude. I miss my baby,” she keened.
    Friday looked frustrated and whispered to Service, “I gotta call my sis about the kid and the animals, and this is how bad my life’s gotten, feeling bad for a hormonally driven teenage assassin. I sometimes disgust myself.”
    â€œThanks?” the girl said to Service after Friday went to another room to make her call. “You want kneel down and pray thanks to the Big God Dude with me?” the girl asked.
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    The girl shrugged. “I always try to pray a lot?” she said. “I guess it just don’t take. You want shove yo junk through them bars? I’ll suck that big boy. I ain’t much good at much, but I’m real good at that shit.”
    â€œRain check,” Service said with a wink, thinking, This is a fellow earthling? Someone leaving gorks in campgrounds, walking dead gorks in jail, bad omens everywhere for his granddaughter and Shigun. Thoughts of the future made him cringe for kids.
    â€œBut it’s