White Space Season 1

night. They said it seemed like you were carrying something pretty heavy.”
    Houser kept his eyes fixed on the monster, waiting for him to drown himself in a lie.
    “I don’t remember,” he dove into the deep. “I often go out on my rounds late at night, picking up junk, looking for the furniture and stuff people leave out for trash. That’s not a crime all of a sudden is it?”
    “No, Mr. Jurgen, not at all.” Houser shook his head, then looked down at his notes, flipping back a page for effect, then looked back up at the monster. “Odd thing was that your neighbor said the garage light was out, just like the light in your car.”
    “So, what of it?” the man said, fear in his voice starting to smother the calm. “I can see well enough with the street lights. I can see you just fine, right?”
    Bet both balls in the sack, this is our asshole.
    “OK, well then Mr. Jurgen, you won’t mind if we take a quick look around,” he said, nodding to his silent partner, Chan, who was standing to Houser’s left. “Just to save us some time, so we can get on with the search and rule you out.”
    “You have a search warrant?”
    Fucker.
    “No, but based on what I do have, a warrant’s exactly one short phone call away. I was hoping that since you’ve nothing to hide, you wouldn’t mind if we took a quick look around so we can get out of your hair. We have to follow up on leads, if only to rule you out. I’m sure you understand.”
    “I know my rights,” the monster said, his voice still even. “And I’m not letting you do anything without a warrant.”
    “OK,” Houser said, pulling his boot from the doorway, then turning around and walking back to their car.
    “Motherfucker,” Houser said once he and Chan were inside the cruiser. “She’s in there. I can fucking feel it.”
    Chan put in a call to Judge Cleary seeking a warrant while Houser waited as patiently as he could, listening to Chan’s side of the conversation.
    Come on, judge, don’t fuck this one up.
    The tricky part of getting a warrant with this particular case was that the neighbor who alerted them to the suspicious activity, an old busybody named Earl Moody, had a long history of calling the cops on Jurgen for the sort of routine bullshit most neighbors handled themselves. In short, the two had bad blood, giving the judge enough cause to deny the warrant.
    Chan’s voice went up an octave, letting Houser know where the conversation was headed.
    Houser wanted to snatch the phone from his partner and rip Cleary a new one, but he was already on thin ice with Cleary, and was likely the reason the judge was giving Chan a hard time in the first place.
    “Yes, your honor. Thank you,” Chan said, hanging up. He shook his head. “No dice.”
    “Fuck!!” Houser screamed, slamming his fists into the steering wheel, then turning back to scowl at Jurgen’s house. The fucker was in his living room, peeking through his blinds at the cruiser.
    Houser turned back to Chan. “You like this guy, right? It’s not just me.”
    “Yeah, he’s hiding something, alright.”
    “OK, we need to talk to more neighbors. See if we can find something from someone who isn’t the neighborhood douchebag, then ring Cleary back.”
    Chan agreed, then suggested one of them hit the courthouse when it opened in the morning to see if they could find anything on the guy that wasn’t yet in the database. The courthouse was currently in the process — which seemed to be taking years — of moving their old records to online archives, so most of the crimes older than 10 years were still in their giant file vault.
    Houser hated combing through old files slightly less than he hated sitting on his hands while Jurgen was inside his house with time to do God knows what, flushing evidence, arming himself to the teeth, raping the hell out of the girl, or whatever it was the condemned might do before the jaws of justice clamped on their ass.
    Chan said, “Is that your way of saying you want me to go?”
    Houser turned, with his biggest smile, “Pretty please?”
    “You know I hate you, right?”
    Houser laughed. “As if anyone could hate me. But one of us has to sit on this fucker in case he decides to bolt, and to be honest, I wanna be the first one through the door to knock the fucking smile from his face. And let’s face it, I’m a helluva lot faster than you if it comes to a foot chase.”
    “Yeah, yeah, whatever. But you owe me.”
    “Whatever you want, man.