Castoff
part 13

Leo started to embellish on the story of the gun when Raph put a finger to his lips. "Keep it down. Donnie just fell asleep."

Lowering his voice, Leo said, "To be accurate, I have to say that Dad found the gun."

Mikey hopped over the railing and into the kitchen. "Wasn't it in the storm drain?" he asked as he began folding the towel Raph had used for changing Shilo.

"Street cleaners had been on that block between the time Guerra tossed the gun and when we discovered it," Leo said. "The wash pushed the pile of junk the gun was sitting on farther down the drain. That's why Casey couldn't see it."

"No wonder it was still there," Raph said. "Guerra had to find a way into the sewers if he wanted to get the gun back. Even then he'd probably get lost."

"We don't have that problem," Mikey said. "Was it hard to find?"

"I smelled the gun oil," Master Splinter said, taking the stairs up to the kitchen so that he could inspect the sleeping baby that Raph cradled in his arms.

"Dad used his tail to push the gun up near the grate so that Casey could reach it," Leo said. "There were uniformed officers and detectives still in the area, so we had to avoid being seen."

Grinning, Mikey said, "We have news too. Raphie changed his first diaper."

Before Leo or Master Splinter had a chance to react to that news, Leo received a call from Casey. Their friend said that he was on his way over, but had to pick up April first and that they would bring lunch with them.

After disconnecting from the call, Leo glanced up at Raph. Eyes twinkling with humor, Leo said, "It looks like your days of dodging diaper duty are over bro'."

"Indeed," Master Splinter said in agreement. "Now the four of you will share equally the job of parenting."

"We're gonna have to share the job of getting the truck and car fixed up too," Raph said. "If we don't, Donnie ain't ever gonna get any sleep."

"Speaking of sleep, some of the boxes I took off the truck have crib parts in them," Mikey said. "The words 'changing table dresser' is stamped on one of the big boxes."

"Time to move your drum set, Mikey," Leo said.

"Where exactly?" Mikey asked, looking none too pleased

"It will have to go in the alcove next to the weight room," Leo said. "It's the only open space."

"Just don't be using those drums while I'm lifting," Raph said.

"If I have to make a sacrifice, then so do you," Mikey told him.

Shilo sniffled in his sleep and shifted around in Raph's arms.

"See, Shilo agrees with me," Mikey said.

"Perhaps you should put him in his bassinet, Raphael," Master Splinter suggested. "Otherwise, he will become used to only sleeping while someone is holding him."

"Oh. I didn't think of that," Raph said. His expression softened as he looked down at Shilo. "I kinda like just holding him."

"Who doesn't?" Leo asked.

"The little guy gets right under your skin," Mikey said.

"The little guy needs his changing table and crib too," Leo said. "Our first step is getting that drum set moved. Let's try to look like we've made progress with those things Vern so graciously purchased for Shilo."

Chuckling, Raph said, "Ya' mean the things April forced Vern to so graciously purchase."

Raphael took Shilo back over to his bassinet and gently placed the sleeping baby into it. Donatello was still passed out on his desk, so his brothers worked as quietly as they could while taking the drum set apart.

It took them little time to reassemble it in its new location. Mikey then swept and mopped the area where the drums had been sitting. While he cleaned up the space that would constitute Shilo's section of the bedroom, Leo and Raph began bringing boxes into the lair.

"What are you guys doing?"

Don was still in his chair, blinking blearily at his brothers as he groped around on his desk for his glasses.

"Putting Shilo's crib together, I think," Raph said as he leaned the crib mattress against a chair. "That baggie full of tiny bolts and screws ain't filling me with confidence."

"At least the instructions aren't as confusing as the ones for the bassinet," Leo said, opening the booklet.

"Says you," Raph muttered.

"Where are we putting it?" Don asked as he walked over to his brothers.

"I moved my drum set," Mikey answered.

Raph cleared his throat menacingly and Mikey quickly amended his statement. "Raph and Leo helped to move my drum set."

The brothers spent the next half an hour putting the crib together in its new location. Don slid a blue fitted sheet onto the mattress and reminded his brothers to throw out all the plastic wrap that had been in the boxes because it was a choking hazard.

Casey and April arrived just as Raph was setting the baby's new combination changing table and dresser into place at one end of the crib.

Mikey was the first to reach April's side and relieve her of the burden of two large sacks. "What'd you bring?"

"Thank you, April," Leo said, giving Mikey a meaningful look.

Mikey grinned. "Thank you, April. What'd you bring?"

"Chinese take-out," April told him. She noticed the boxes strewn around the lair. "It looks as if you guys have been busy. Did everything fit?"

"Come take a look," Don said, indicating that April should follow him into the bedroom area.

Snuffling and gurgling noises coming from the bassinet indicated that Shilo was waking up. While Leo and Mikey set the tables, Casey followed Raph down to Don's computer station where the bassinet was parked.

"Did you guys come up with anything on Bebop and Rocksteady?" Casey asked.

"Don's spent most of the day watching those trackers he put on the Foot soldiers," Raph answered. "He passed out on his desk a little while ago so I don't know what he's come up with."

Raph had been searching around Shilo and then under the bassinet while he talked. Now he started rummaging around on Don's desk.

"What are you looking for?" Casey asked.

"Shilo's pacifier," Raph said. The baby started to whine and Raph glanced at Casey. "Entertain him until I find the damn thing."

Appearing out of his element, Casey nevertheless did as asked and bent over the bassinet to talk to Shilo. Rather than calming the baby, Shilo grew more agitated and began to cry. Casey straightened up and took a step back, unnerved at upsetting the baby further, but when he moved away, Shilo settled down.

Frowning, Casey leaned over the tiny turtle once more, only to have Shilo begin to fuss again.

"Why does he cry when I get close to him?" Casey asked as Raph returned with the pacifier.

"Probably 'cause ya' haven't held him yet," Raph said, offering the pacifier to Shilo.

Don and April joined them. "Shilo codes off of scent and he doesn't know yours," Don explained. "He needs to understand that you're family."

"You have to hold him, Cousin Casey," April teased.

"Me?" Casey asked, looking both shocked and frightened.

"Big, bad police officer is afraid of the little baby," April said as she lifted Shilo from the bassinet.

"I'm not afraid, I just don't want to be the reason he cries," Casey said. Though reluctant, he held out his arms as April passed the infant over to him.

At first he was stiff as he held Shilo partly away from his body. Shilo spit the pacifier out of his mouth and started to cry.

"Somebody . . . um, somebody else take him," Casey said, sounding panicked.

April and the turtle brothers looked on with amusement. "You have to relax, Casey," April said. "Hold him close to you. He can sense your unease."

Since it was clear he wasn't going to be rescued, Casey took a deep breath and pulled Shilo up against his chest. "It's okay, Shilo. Shh, I've got you," he said as he began to gently rock from side to side.

Shilo started to quiet and then stopped crying altogether. He accepted the pacifier again when April touched it to his lips.

"Not bad," Don said.

"Wait until he gets a little older," Casey said with a grin. "I'll teach the slugger here how to play ice hockey."

"Food's ready!" Mikey called.

Leo was carrying a bottle as he walked up to the group. "He's making his 'I'm hungry' sounds," he said. "That's why he's fussing."

"You guys are tuning in to his needs very quickly," April said.

"They are naturals," Master Splinter said as he came out of his room. "Give Shilo to me; I will feed him while the rest of you eat."

Casey handed Shilo to his grandfather, who took both baby and bottle over to the couch. Expertly seating Shilo on his lap, with his head supported against an arm, Master Splinter used the remote to turn the television on. When he had changed the channel to a favorite program of his, he began feeding the baby.

The turtles and their two friends gathered around the kitchen tables to eat. Their conversation naturally turned to the situations with which they were currently faced.

"I handed that gun off to the case detectives," Casey said. "They'll drop it off at the forensics lab. We should have some answers today from ballistics on whether it's the gun used to kill Colón or not. They have a backlog of cases, but since Chief Vincent is interested in this one, our gun got pushed to the head of the line."

"Casey was asking about the search for Bebop and Rocksteady," Raph said, looking over at Donatello.

"The tracking devices stopped moving around six this morning," Don said. "Two of them wound up in the same location, but when I checked the address, it turned out to be an apartment building. I know which apartment they're in, for future reference, but the complex itself is legit. The other two went to separate addresses, both of which were rentals. They haven't moved all day. The interesting thing is none of them went all that far from the area where the food thefts have been occurring."

"Which seems to prove that the Foot have set up new headquarters in the Hell's Kitchen district," Leo said.

"That's still a big area with a lot of places where Karai and her goon squad could hide," Casey said. "Saki owed a lot of property in the city, most of it held in dummy corporations. For that matter, Sacks had large holdings as well. Our forensic accountants are still trying to trace it all."

"We only need one of the Foot soldiers that Don tagged to lead us back to Karai," Leo said. "It's a good bet that after nightfall they'll all report to her for instructions."

"There's an entire task force on stand-by just waiting to take her down," Casey said. "Once we give them the word, they'll swoop in and corral that gang along with Bebop and Rocksteady."

"No disrespect to the police, but Saki had officers on his payroll," Raph said. "Ya' sure there ain't no chance someone on that task force will warn Karai that they're coming?"

"Chief Vincent found most of those bad cops after Saki escaped," Casey said. "On the off chance there are still any of them in the squad, the task force has regular training exercises. They'll be told this is another training run. The only communication devices allowed are the ones supplied by the unit and those frequencies are monitored. It's completely compartmentalized."

"So now it's a waiting game," Leo said.

"While you guys were out hunting the Foot last night, I managed to track down someone who had some interesting information on Colón and Guerra," April said.

"You found someone willing to talk?" Casey said.

April raised an eyebrow, giving him a sassy look. "Not to the police," she said. "Talking to a reporter 'off the record' was another matter. After I paid her for her time, of course."

"A prostitute," Casey said.

Nodding, April said, "She and Colón used to work the streets together. It just so happens that they were also roommates for a time."

"We questioned that woman," Casey said. "Darla Brown, right? She told us Colón moved out of their apartment over a year ago and Brown didn't know where she'd gone. She also said that Colón kept to herself and she knew nothing of her private business."

"Darla remembered you. She said you were cute," April said with a hint of a smile. "She also said you were a cop and she doesn't discuss her personal life with cops."

"What'd she have to say about Colón and Guerra?" Raph asked, growing impatient.

"Apparently Colón met Guerra at a party," April said. "He took a liking to her and eventually bought her off the pimp she'd been working for. Guerra got her a place of her own so he could come and go without anyone else knowing his business. In return for his 'kindness', she was supposed to quit hooking, give up drinking and stop using drugs. He made it known that she was his woman and that if anyone sold to her, he'd put a bullet in their head."

"He didn't strike me as the type that would care that much about anyone," Leo said.

"Some of these guys are funny that way," Casey said. "There's usually one woman out of the dozens they're sleeping with who they have an extra connection to. They don't normally kill them though, not unless they cross the man in some especially intolerable way."

"Like dumping the guy's kid in a garbage can," Mikey said.

"Darla told me that there was talk on the street that Guerra couldn't have kids," April said. "Something wrong with his pipes was how Darla put it. Most of his crew have children, so his not having any had them talking behind his back. Some of them even wondered if he wasn't really into women, if you know what I mean."

"Damn," Casey said. "In that kind of gang culture, being gay is a big sign of weakness. If he wanted to remain at the top of the Mala Noche, he'd need to quash those types of rumors."

"That's probably why he hooked up with Colón," Raph said. "He had to prove he was the same kind of macho asshole as the rest of them."

"But if he has some sort of reproductive defect or disorder, the odds of having a child would be vastly skewed against him," Don said. "It's very possible that his disorder was responsible for Shilo's spinal deformity."

"He wouldn't have accepted that," Casey said. "If he'd discovered that his son was deformed, he'd have blamed it on her. He'd have to in order to save face with his men."

"Darla said that when Lia became pregnant, Guerra went around crowing about it," April said. "That shut down the men who'd been talking behind his back."

"So now he wants Shilo as proof that he can father a child and that he's just as heterosexual as the rest of them," Casey said.

"Then why did he kill the mom?" Mikey asked, looking confused. "Didn't she dump Shilo so that he wouldn't kill her after seeing that the baby was messed up?"

"Maybe she thought not telling him where the baby was would keep her alive," Raph said.

"Or maybe she planned to say the baby was kidnapped," Leo said.

"Maybe that's what she did say," Don said. "It could be why he's still looking for Shilo."

"You guys saw how Guerra was," Casey said. "Whatever Colón did say before he killed her, it wasn't to admit to the baby having a deformity. He's still searching for him. The man has a temper; hell, he almost drew on me while we were standing out on the street. He probably shot Colón in a fit of rage."

"There's a chance that the spinal deformity wasn't Guerra's fault," April said. "Darla told me that Colón was still drinking and using cocaine without Guerra's knowledge. She was buying it off of other users as a way to bypass the man's dictate to dealers that they weren't to sell to her."

"She was pretty much screwed no matter which direction she went after the baby was born," Raph said. "I don't want to even think about what Guerra would have done to Shilo if he'd found the baby."

"Nor do I," Don said softly.

They were just finishing up with lunch when Casey's phone rang. He excused himself and went into the lair's entrance tunnel so that the caller wouldn't pick up on any background noises.

Leo sat down on the couch next to Master Splinter and took Shilo from him so that his father could go have his lunch. The baby seemed fascinated by the leather straps across Leo's chest and wrapped his little fingers around the edge of one of them.

In a soft murmur, Leo began telling Shilo the history of Japanese swordsmithing, a craft that the turtle had researched extensively. Before long, Raphael joined them, listening silently until Shilo had dozed off.

"Good job putting him to sleep, sword guy," Raph teased. "Ya' pretty much guaranteed he'll choose a more exciting weapon when he gets older."

Leo grinned. "I suppose you mean the sai?"

"He's got the grip for it," Raph said, noting how Shilo's hand was still locked onto the leather strap.

Donatello walked over and gently pried Shilo's hand loose before taking the baby from his brother. "Into the bassinet with him," he said. "He's getting very spoiled with you guys holding him all the time."

Raph snorted his amusement. "Right. Like you ain't doing the same damn thing."

After depositing Shilo in his bassinet, Don sat down at his computer station to begin working again. A few minutes later, Casey reentered the lair, red faced and looking completely frustrated.

Spotting Leo and Raph in the television corner, Casey strode over to join them. Seeing the look on his face as he passed by them, April, Mikey, and Don followed.

"What's wrong?" Raph immediately asked.

"Just got the report back on the gun," Casey said. "The ballistics are a match to the bullet we pulled out of Colón and there were several identifiable prints on the gun itself. One of those prints belongs to Guerra."

"That sounds like good news," Raph said. "How come ya' look so pissed?"

In a tone that indicated extreme aggravation, Casey said, "Because I was just told that's not enough to arrest the guy."

TBC….