Free R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning by R.S. Guthrie Page A

on the length of time in the killer’s M.O.—so there’s no way my ‘nineteen being special’ theory is correct.”
    “Okay, well, yeah, I was thinking something along those lines. It’s the detective in me, boss. Sorry.”
    I loved that kid. He had all the makings of a great detective. Better than me. He was still too young for me to say so, because it would ruin him. I was grooming him like a racehorse. Slowly. Giving him his confidence a day at a time. No rushing a work of art, and I wanted Manny to be my legacy in the department.
    I hadn’t told him about my thoughts of retirement. Thing was, I could not leave until Manny Rodriquez was as good as I could make him. I figured a year, two tops. Then I could retire and give back to my wife what I had selfishly taken from her: chasing the bad guys.
    I could do that for her.
    But not until Detective Manolo Rodriguez was ready.
    “You much of a math guy in school?” I said.
    “Fucking hated it.”
    I hated that . Manny wasn’t much of a curser when I met him. He’d picked up on my favoring of the F-word. Kids did the same thing with their parents. I personally didn’t think a word was anything but an emphasizer or a punctuation mark but a lot of folks take umbrage with profanity and I knew I was the one who instilled that in him.
    I also knew, like kids, he’d have picked it up anyway. Every cop I knew cussed like a made Mafioso, man and woman. It was a matter of time; I just didn’t relish being his mentor in that regard.
    “Grab the ages of our victims and I am going to do a small but significant math trick for you,” I said.
    Manny grabbed the file and I got up and cleaned a space on our whiteboard.
    “Read the victim ages, in order,” I told him.
    “16, 22, 19, 20, 19, 20, 19, 17, 19.”
    “Remember the terms mean, median, and mode?”
    “From math,” he said.
    “From math.”
    “Vaguely.”
    “Well you’re not alone. Don’t feel bad, it was a hunch but I had to look them up on the Internet last night to make sure I had them right.”
    Manny’s face de-scrunched and the slight frown that had formed went flat. The competition in that kid—
    “Mean is simple. It’s the average; average and mean, same thing.”
    “So you total and divide by the number of numbers,” Manny said proudly.
    “Yep.”
    “Let me guess, nineteen is the avera—I mean, mean. Shit, that’s a double untundra or something.”
    “Uh, double entendre, and no, it isn’t—that would take you into English class.”
    “Oh, I hated English more than Math. You gringos have the most fucked up language I know.”
     “Fair enough, but you got it right, nineteen is the mean.”
    “What’re the other two?” Manny was literally like a kid in school now.
    “Median is the number in the middle. So if you look at the listing of the ages of our victims…”
    “Nineteen, smack in the middle.”
    “Yes, again, grasshopper.”
    “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
    “Young Jedi?”
    “Ahh, right. Okay, still don’t know what a grasshopper has to do with any of this, but gotcha.”
    “Mode,” I said, “is the number in the sequence used most often.”
    “Nine-fucking-teen,” he said.
    “Watch the language. Yoda would shove his walking stick up your ass, young Rican Jedi.”
    “I like that—call Lucas; the next Jedi needs to be a fucking ‘Rican.”
    “So are you with me on this nineteen thing or do I have to sell it to the lieutenant on my own?”
    Manny scowled again.
    “What’s up,” I asked.
    “I got your back no matter what.”
    I’d have this young man ready in less than a year. Hell, maybe six months. In less than a year the love of my life could have her old job back. I had no idea what the fuck I was going to do.
    “Hey, Jedi,” I said.
    “Yeah, boss?”
    “We’ll work the angle of his daughter being next. But we’ll watch for more victims. Keep the undercover women out on the streets. No reduction in force. We’re covering every base on