by John Lutz
“We’ll play this close,” Quinn said. “Renz will give us some undercover help we can trust not to leak anything. And I’ll bring in Nancy Weaver to fill in for Pearl. We’ve used Weaver before. She’s good, and we can trust her, especially if there’s a possibility of promotion in it for her. Between us, we’ll keep a close tail on the new Madeline.”
“Starting when?” Fedderman asked.
“Renz has already got an undercover outside her apartment. One of us will relieve him this evening. Word is, she stays cooped up, keeps the blinds closed.”
“Scared,” Fedderman said. “That’s good.”
“What’s left of her stash might be running out,” Quinn said.
“Also good.”
“But pure hell for her.”
“She took the elevator down,” Fedderman said. “Far as we know, nobody forced her to get in.”
“Meanwhile, let’s go over the murder book on Ruth Malpass,” Quinn said. “See if between us we can spot something useful, especially if it makes a closer connection to E-Bliss.”
“Weaver?” Pearl said. “Weaver filling in for me?”
It wasn’t out of the blue. Quinn had been expecting it.
“Weaver,” he confirmed. He tried to use a tone of voice that would discourage Pearl from making a drama out of it.
Pearl wasn’t crazy about seeing Officer Nancy Weaver brought in on the case. The two women didn’t like each other, maybe because similarity bred contempt. And competition. Weaver and Pearl shared the same relentless approach to their work, as well as the same tendency to raise hackles. Weaver didn’t have Pearl’s short fuse, though. Quinn had to give her that.
“Weaver’s back in uniform,” Pearl said. “Got some shit-hole assignment over in Brooklyn. She got caught fooling around with a married lieutenant on the vice squad.”
“Seems the place to do it,” Fedderman said. “What the vice squad’s all about.”
Quinn wished Fedderman would take it easy. There was no point in detonating Pearl.
“That woman put the ‘cop’ in copulate,” Pearl said.
“But she’s good at what she does,” Fedderman said. “Being a cop, I mean.” He tried but failed to take a sip of his searingly hot coffee. “Almost at the boiling point,” he said, looking at Pearl and not his coffee.
“All Weaver wants is to be promoted,” Pearl said.
“I want her promoted, too,” Quinn said, “if it’s for helping us break this case. Weaver’s got her flaws, but she’s also smart and resourceful. Renz will put her back in plain clothes for this, and she’ll work herself to the nub to stay there.”
Pearl made a sniffing sound. “It’s hard for Weaver to stay in any kind of clothes.”
Fedderman gave her a pained look. “Give the woman a break, Pearl.”
“Just don’t give her any trouble,” Quinn said in the voice he used to warn people. No mistaking it. Like God laying down the law from on high.
“You know me,” Pearl said.
53
Some ringing phones are better left unanswered.
Victor had been alone in the offices of E-Bliss.org and fielded Maria Sanchez’s phone call.
He was still pale and obviously angry when Palmer Stone walked in wearing one of his Armani suits and carrying his Hansom and Coach leather briefcase. Palmer was also wearing his usual handsome and benign expression, that of the kind sitcom father who’d never once raised hand nor voice to his make-believe wife and children.
“Something the matter, Victor?” he asked, with a concerned frown, as he set the briefcase alongside his desk and settled into his leather swivel chair. Victor might well have been his troubled son.
Victor, slumped on the sofa, stopped gnawing on his lower lip. “The Sanchez bitch phoned here a while ago, talked like she was crazy. Didn’t even use her Madeline Scott name, called herself Maria. As if Maria Sanchez still actually existed somewhere.”
The concerned frown, genuine now, stayed glued to Stone’s symmetrical features. “I didn’t expect to hear from her again. She seemed to understand the rules, and why they’re necessary.”
Once the new identity was assumed, there was no reason ever to contact E-Bliss.org again. It didn’t exist anymore. The old identity no longer existed except here and there on paper or in obscure databases. Each special client was made to understand that that was the entire idea, to draw a line between an old and a new reality. Madeline Scott (Stone no longer allowed himself to think of her as Maria Sanchez) seemed smart enough to comprehend that. Seemed safe as a special client. Apparently she hadn’t come as advertised. Stone felt himself getting disturbed and pushed the heat of his anger aside. Anger was an emotion he couldn’t allow. Only one letter away from danger, he reminded himself. Bad for business in so many ways, anger.
Victor, Stone observed, seemed to still be angry over the phone call. Victor, who might himself be a potential problem. Stone wondered, would Gloria, if he asked, be able to deal with Victor?
A problem for another day. Here was Stone, worried about Victor’s anger today.
“What did our troublesome special client want?” he asked Victor
“Said she wants the better apartment we promised her. She wants money. She wants us to live up to our end of the arrangement. She wants things to change. She wants, wants, wants!”
Stone smiled. “She wants quite a lot.”
“No, I think she wants one thing,” Victor said. “A fix.”
Stone thought for a moment, then shook his head no. “Maria Sanchez couldn’t be a drug addict. She was around the stuff, but not a user. Somebody like that, in her position, she wouldn’t survive long if she even started to use.”
“If it became a problem.”
“It always becomes a problem,” Stone said. “Or often enough that no chances are taken. People in the business know that going in.”
“Maybe it was a problem that hadn’t had time to develop enough to be noticeable.”
Stone said nothing. That was a possibility. An unsettling one. The company might have inherited a nascent problem, only just beginning to become a monster.
“I know the signs, Palmer. I know how cokeheads talk, especially when they get desperate. The bitch was unhinged.”
“I still say it’s unlikely that drugs are the problem,” Stone said.
“If she’s not a head that hit the wall, she sure sounded like one. You should’ve heard her, Palmer. She was ranting like she was nuts. She had to be crazy to phone here in the first place.”
Stone thought back to the poised young woman he himself had interviewed, to the background file reaching into her childhood. She’d been something of a revolutionary as a young girl, but a smart one. Near the top of her college class when she met her husband. Stone even knew her IQ, which was in the superior range. He remembered her correct and concise replies to his questions, the calm and appraising intelligence in her cool blue eyes.
Palmer Stone knew breeding and quality when he saw it. Maria Sanchez qualified.
“I’ll phone and discuss things rationally with her,” he said. “Don’t worry, Victor, I can calm her down.”
Victor thought about the surest way to quiet the nutcase new Madeline Scott, a way he’d relish and she wouldn’t. But he said nothing and with effort turned his mind away from possibilities already stirring in the core of him. The new Victor would think about the new Madeline Scott later, but he wouldn’t act on his imaginings. Not in any way involving her. It wouldn’t be worth the risk. She was business and would stay business.
He knew this was the kind of situation that called for bullshit, and nobody was better at it than Palmer Stone. He was built of the stuff.
Victor stood up from the sofa, stretched, and nodded.
“Whatever you say, Palmer.”
Jill could see that Tony was getting tired of it. And maybe a little puzzled.
He’d dropped in unexpectedly this evening, and two minutes later Jewel had turned up at the door. Jewel the pest
and barrier to the bed. Jewel was talky, and downright pushy sometimes. She didn’t take a hint and she didn’t scare away. Tony and Jill were stuck with her. Jill played it that way, raising her eyebrows and making a what-are-you-gonna-do face at Tony when Jewel wasn’t looking.
Jill had been barefoot tonight when Tony arrived. As soon as Jewel showed up, on had gone the shoes. Obviously, Tony saw that as a bad sign.
“Let’s go out someplace and grab a bite to eat,” he suggested, standing up from where he’d been sitting on the sofa.
“Great idea!” Jewel said.
Tony glanced at Jill. “I mean’t—”
“The three of us,” Jill interrupted.
He stared at her, not even caring now if Jewel saw the look he was giving her. Why did you say that? What the hell’s the matter with you?
No doubt Jill saw Jewel as a friend as well as a pest and didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Not that Jewel seemed to have any.
Tony bet she could be made to feel. He found himself looking at her from time to time, sizing her up. Small woman with a great body, if she’d quit trying to conceal it. Slender waist, big boobs and ass. Sometimes he wondered what she’d look like nude. Jill had caught him looking at Jewel like that, and he had to think fast and make it all seem innocent. Jill wasn’t difficult to deceive. Tony didn’t think many women were. They only thought they were clever, which made them all the easier to fool.
“We can go back to that pizza place,” Jewel said. The three of them had eaten several times at a pizza joint down the block.
“Sounds great.” Jill looked at Tony.
“Sounds good,” was all he could muster.
The three of them started toward the door. Jill hung back and let Jewel go out first.
In the hall, when Jewel was half a dozen steps ahead of them, Jill raised her head and whispered in Tony’s ear, “She’s my friend. I don’t want to be rude to her.”
She could feel the tension in Tony, hear it in his breathing. How long could this charade last without him becoming suspicious? And if he did suspect, what would he do? She was beginning to think this might be the evening when she was going to find out.
Then his face broke into his beautiful smile. Easygoing Tony. The Tony she knew.
He bent over as they approached the elevator and whispered back to her, still smiling, “Hey, I understand. What’re you gonna do?” He kissed her ear.
Despite herself, she felt something in her melt.
He’s a killer.
Sometimes it was so hard to remember that.
He reached over and squeezed her hand gently, lovingly, assuring her he did indeed understand her predicament with Jewel.
“Don’t worry, darling,” he said patiently. “We’ll be alone sooner or later. Just the two of us. I’ll see to it.”
Something with a thousand legs walked up JiIl’s spine.
54
Tom Coulter stationed himself at the small wooden table where he’d sat drinking last night in Rodney’s Roadhouse. The mingled odors of stale beer and stale sweat were in the air, along with tobacco smoke. Nobody in Rodney’s was afraid to inhale.
The place was narrow but long, with a bar to the right of the entrance, tables to the left, a few of them back beyond the bar where the light wasn’t so good. Most of the light was provided by illuminated signs advertising beer: a hunter holding up a bottle, label out, posed near a dead buck; a girl in a skimpy bikini casually sipping brew while water-skiing; a famous baseball player, retired and free of contractual constraints, regarding a half-empty frosty mug and grinning with a foam mustache. Mixed in with the beer signs were a few advertising cigarettes. Like Rodney’s itself, most of the ads seemed to date back about twenty years.
Coulter’s table had old initials carved in it, worn almost smooth with the grain. It was the farthest table from the bar, near a short hall leading to the back exit, which was a screen door poked full of holes. From where he sat he could sip his beer and observe everything going on in Rodney’s, and at the same time get out in a hurry if it became necessary. Beyond the back entrance was the swamp, where Coulter had lost himself before and could again. City boy that he was, he had come to regard the swamp as a reliable friend on call to lend him shelter.
Rodney himself, a guy about fifty, built like a potato sack with a lumpy face to match, wandered back now and then to see that Coulter had enough beer in his bottle. It wasn’t the kind of place that furnished glasses. It took two of those trips before Coulter noticed that Rodney had an artificial right eye that didn’t match his left. Or was it the other way around?
It was getting to be evening, and the roadhouse regulars were filtering in. Half a dozen guys who looked like construction laborers were at the bar. Two homely women in jeans and sleeveless T-shirts perched on the last two stools at the end of the bar near the entrance. Coulter had figured it out on the first night that they were whores working the place. One of them, Cathy Lee, chunky and obviously proud of her generous cleavage, had approached him. She had a tangle of blond hair, wore way too much rose-scented perfume, and had a sweet twenty-year-old’s face with forty-year-old eyes. He’d bought her a drink and strung her along, but not so much that she hadn’t deserted him for a more likely prospect.
Cathy Lee sensed he was watching her and turned her head and nodded, smiling. She wasn’t coming over, though. She figured sooner or later they’d get together. Coulter thought that under ordinary circumstances she’d be right. Cathy Lee might have been his going-away present to himself, only there wasn’t the time. He had other ideas for tonight.
About half the tables had people sitting at them now. The air wasn’t good. It was humid from the swamp, as well as heavy with the unpleasant smells trying to crowd one another out. Conversation and laughter were getting louder, and speakers mounted high on the walls were playing a lament by some country singer about a man who’d shot at his wife’s lover and accidentally killed the wife. A guy with my kind of luck, Coulter thought.
He was particularly interested in two rough-looking guys at one of the tables. One was about Coulter’s height but even skinnier and had a scraggly red beard, though the hair on his head was brown. The other guy was short but broad and had his head shaved. Had—guess what—a strand of barbed wire tattooed around both oversized biceps.
Swamp turkeys, Coulter thought. Every once in a while someone would approach the two men. What looked like money would change hands; backs would be slapped; high fives would be given; smiles would be exchanged. Coulter eared in and made out that the tall skinny guy’s name was Joe Ray. The short, broad one was called Juan, though he didn’t look as if he had a drop of Latin blood in him.
Coulter figured they were dealing drugs, most likely meth. He’d fallen behind lately on the news, but he knew this part of Looziana was meth country. There’d been an explosion that had killed two guys cooking the stuff in a house trailer not far down the state road, and the sheriff had promised action in shutting down meth labs. Coulter smiled. A sheriff. Wild West. And the hayseeds don’t know the biggest desperado in the country’s sitting right here among them drinking draft Bud.
They’d crap in their drawers if they did know, and that I’m sitting here with a plan.
Coulter hadn’t been lounging around wasting time in Rodney’s. He’d been watching and waiting, figuring things out.
He knew he wouldn’t be safe around here much longer. He couldn’t afford to stay anywhere very long. He’d stashed the big F-150 truck back in the swamp and had been more or less living out of it. He knew he shouldn’t move it around much. Its description and plate number must have been broadcast all over the country.
Joe Ray and Juan, the meth guys, had a truck. A beat-to-shit old Dodge pickup nobody’d look twice at in swamp country, mostly rust and dents, but with a legal license. And they were bound to have drug money stashed wherever they lived.
Coulter had the F-150 out in the gravel parking lot tonight, parked way back near the trees. Black swamp mud
was artfully packed on its license plate so you couldn’t read most of the numbers and letters, in case anyone got curious. This model of truck, being so popular, was one of several F-150s on the lot, so Coulter felt pretty safe about leaving it there.
When the meth guys left Rodney’s tonight, he’d follow them to wherever it was they slept, hold them up at gunpoint, and trade trucks with them. He’d have to explain to the dumb jerkoffs how things worked. They wouldn’t report their truck being stolen, because if caught with it, Coulter would blow the whistle on their illegal meth operation. The F-100 they could paint, and then maybe arrange for a junkyard title and drive it as long as they wanted. Guys like them had the connections. Yokels were into trucks.
Coulter figured that when the two meth guys thought about it, they’d be glad for the deal. Sure they’d lose some cash, but they’d be gaining an expensive new truck in exchange for their rolling piece of crap. Some trading up.
The other thing about his plan, before he drove away in their junker and with all their cash, was that he would be sure to let them know they’d been held up by the most wanted fugitive in the country. Couple of hicks, it’d probably be the biggest thing in their lives. But they wouldn’t tell anyone. They couldn’t. They’d have an interest in him not being caught. Not with their rust-bucket truck, anyway. Also, they’d probably secretly be on his side. Underdogs stuck together tight, just like the smelly swamp mud around this place.
Pleased with himself, Coulter sipped his beer and through half-closed eyes observed money changing hands.
Money that would soon be in his hands.
55
She had to do something!
Had to move!
Maria Sanchez decided to walk off some of the energy that was building up in her like a nuclear device about to reach critical mass.
She left her shit-hole apartment, and when she got outside the building took a deep breath and turned right. The evening air was cooler than the heat of the day, but not by much. The city’s concrete still radiated heat from today’s bright sun.
