“Yeah, that’s a laugh, all right. The old puke, plop, and perish.”
“Perish my left ass cheek.” The other male snorted, slouched down farther on the single bed they all shared. “Bitch is messing around, like she does.”
Eve took out her badge, walked closer to shove it into his face. “I’m Homicide, you fucking moron. Dead’s my business. Loxie Flash is dead.”
“No serious way. I was humping her like a minute before she puked and plopped.”
“Consider it her last hump.”
“She’s, like, dead?” The blonde blinked and some tiny glimmer of sanity flickered in the glassy eyes. “Like, dead?”
“Yes. You two.” Eve kicked the bed to break up the tongue-diving competition. “Knock it off, cover it up.”
“Sex is life, man.”
“If you take that pathetic replacement for your brain out, I’ll haul it and you down to Central, lock you in a cage, and forget about you for the next forty-eight. Man.”
His hand paused in the act of undoing the trio of buttons that covered the bulge of his crotch. “Fuck, a bitch oughta lighten up.”
Eve just opened the door, finger curled to Shelby. “Officer, take that extreme asshole into Central, book him on committing lewd acts in public, and toss him in with the other perverts.”
“Whoa, whoa.” He threw up both hands. “Take it down, yeah? I’m chill. I be chill.”
“Stand by,” Eve told Shelby, and shut the door again. “You be quiet until I tell you otherwise. Janis Dorsey.”
The blond raised her hand, wiggled her fingers.
“Did Loxie have plans to join your group of stupid tonight?”
“I … I don’t know. I hadn’t hooked with her for a few days.”
“You texted her this evening.”
“I did? I don’t know.” She looked at the woman beside her. “Did I?”
The woman shrugged. “You didn’t say.”
“But I … Uh-uh, I didn’t. The G-man came in, and I thought it’d be some laughs if she came in, too, but then we wanted to dance, and I forgot. Anyway, I texted her how he was in Palisades when I went in to have dinner awhile ago, and she got super pissed. And all, like, ‘Why should I give a shit?’ So I wasn’t even sure I should because she’s mean when she’s pissed. Then she came anyway.”
“Let me see
your ’link.”
“I don’t think you hafta.” The one whose crotch had ceased bulging gave Eve the hard eye. “She needs, like, a warrant.”
“I can get one—and you can go to Central and wait until I have one, wait until I examine your friend’s cold, dead body, until she’s taken to the morgue, until I finish with the crime scene. Then I’ll come let you out of the holding pen.”
“You can’t—”
“I warned you to stay quiet. Speak again, you’re charged with obstruction, the lewd behavior, and possession of whatever’s left in your pockets of what you’ve ingested.”
“You can see it, you can see it.” Janis opened a tiny, useless purse, pulled out her ’link. Closed the purse so fast Eve assumed some of what was left was inside the small and useless.
Eve took the ’link, called up the texts. Then turned the display screen around.
She watched Janis’s face, saw the baffled shock. “But I didn’t! Hey, Dodo, look! This isn’t from me. It doesn’t have my sig.”
Dodo stopped examining her nails, looked at the display. “Bogus. She, like, signs her texts. Jadar. Like radar with a J, right? No sig, not hers.”