25

The afternoon was gray and overcast, a perfect complement to Crow’s mood. Yet he kept postponing his departure, finding another chore to do for Ed, another errand to run. He dropped the Books on Tape in the library’s off-hour boxes. He and Lloyd would never listen to Early Autumn now. On the way back to FunWorld, he stopped at Ed’s trailer park and found the older man sitting on the screened-porch annex to his motor home, wearing shorts and clutching a beer.

“It’s Opening Day,” Ed said. “And on Opening Day I sit on my porch in shorts and drink beer.”

“I thought there was only one game and it’s tonight on ESPN, the Red Sox at the Yankees. Everyone else plays Tuesday.”

“Tradition,” Ed said. “You find the boy?”

Crow winced a little at the “boy” part, conscious of how it would land on Lloyd if he were here. Then again, Lloyd was a very young sixteen. Maybe not a boy, but boyish, as evidenced by his disappearing act.

“No,” he said. “And he doesn’t know how to call me, because I switched burners last night, dumping the other phone. I suppose he could try to call FunWorld if he knew the number, or get your listing from directory assistance. But why would he call? He clearly wanted to get away.”

“You know I was a cop, right?”

“Yeah. A cop, but also a friend of Spike’s. You held his liquor license, in fact. What was that about?”

“Spike has a past. The kind of past that keeps you from having a liquor license. Not even his family knows about it. He was…a little out of control as a young man. I locked him up.”

“You locked him up, but then you helped him get a liquor license when he got out?”

“What he did-Look, it’s not my story to tell. One day you’ll have a past and you’ll want people to keep it to themselves. Trust me.”

“I already have a few mysteries in my life,” Crow said.

Ed snorted, as if Crow didn’t know from secrets, and he had a point. Most people would think that Crow’s secret was a cause for joy and celebration, but Crow felt marked by it, shamed and unsure. “Anyway, let’s just say I could see the bigger picture, see that maybe Spike didn’t have any choices in what he did. So when he did his time and wanted a fresh start, I helped him out.”

“What’s your point?”

“I don’t know. I kind of lost it.” He scratched a pale, freckled calf. “Oh, yeah. Like I said, I was a cop. The boy?”

“Lloyd.”

“Yeah, him. He’s hiding something, too.”

“He was in hiding because he had stopped hiding something.”

“I get the distinction, but that’s what I’m telling you. He ain’t told you everything he knows. That’s why he’s so jumpy-like. There’s another shoe going to drop with him. Maybe you’re better off, not being around him. Someone wants to kill the kid, you’re trying to protect him, and he’s not straight with you. That means he’s risking your life along with his.”

Crow wanted to indulge the older man, but he didn’t think a retired cop’s instincts were worth much.

“Well, I guess we’ll never know. I don’t think I’ll ever see Lloyd Jupiter again.”

“You want a beer?”

Ed was drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, which had enjoyed a brief, strange vogue among the wannabe hipsters that came to the Point. Crow was pretty sure, however, that Ed had been drinking PBR since before those kids were born and would still be drinking it after some of them died.

“Sure.”

They sat in companionable silence, pretending the day was suitably warm and sunny, and listened to the callers on WBAL, whose signal was faint but clear here on the shore. It was the happiest, most optimistic day of the baseball season, with the Orioles fans convinced that they were going to go 162-0. Hey, it could happen. Anything could happen.

Tess dug the cell phone out of her laundry hamper and called the only number on the message list. No answer. How else could she get in touch with Crow? She examined the phone, which had more bells and whistles than hers-pictures, video, Internet access. She could e-mail him, then. She went to her computer and sent Crow a message headed SIX INCHES FOR YOU, a long-standing joke with them.

Call me. Urgent.

All she could do was hope he would check the e-mail via phone-he was clearly too canny to use a computer that could be traced. Oh, she had raised her little spy boy well. Spy boy made her think of flag boys, and she put on a CD of the New Orleans music that Crow loved so much-and kept booking into the club, despite mixed results. “Jockamo fee-NO-MONEY,” her father had complained privately to her.

My flag boy told your flag boy…

She should forward those photos that Whitney had taken of the three caballeros, she decided, although if that trio got close enough for Crow to identify, it would be too late. But at least he would recognize his hunters should they come for him, understand how serious things were. Not that it mattered. Tyner figured she had perhaps seventy-two hours before she would be charged officially and faced with the choice of giving up Lloyd Jupiter or rolling the dice on the federal charge. Of course, once she identified Lloyd, they would still have to find him, and she couldn’t help them with that. Would they believe her? Or would they deny her the promised immunity, thinking she had reneged?

As for Crow’s disappointment when she caved-well, who was Crow to be disappointed with her? Crow, who had listened to her fret about money while he sat on his secret nest egg. She didn’t believe that Crow would be involved in anything illegal, but then-she had never thought he would be cruel or selfish either. He had been playing poor. She really was.

Tess downloaded the three photos, then sent them as e-mail attachments. The nausea came back, and she couldn’t think of anything to do except to lie on the floor, although what she really needed to do was put something, anything, in her stomach. The dogs came over and comforted her, pressing their damp, cold noses to her neck and ears. She was touched-until she realized they were simply petitioning her to take them for their afternoon walks. Man’s best friend, sure, as long as your interests were congruent with theirs.

Her restless, association-prone mind leapfrogged back to the motto she had invoked the first time the happy trio had come for her. It was one beloved by her father, a longtime public servant. What’s the most frightening sentence in the English language? he would ask her when his friends came over. Other kids did the itsy-bitsy spider, but this was Tess’s shtick.

She’d lisp back, We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.

Her father’s friends, most of them employed by the city and state and feds, would laugh until they were bent double.

Jenkins was so frustrated that he didn’t trust himself to speak. Dalesio was an inept asshole. If Jenkins had controlled the interview from the start…ut he hadn’t wanted to do that. He needed that stubborn bitch to focus on Gabe, wanted her to see him as the enemy. Thing is, good cop-bad cop worked only when the bad cop was good at being the bad cop. He should have left Gabe out of it, worked this exclusively with Bully. But the DEA agent was a little too good at playing bad cop. Plus, verbal wasn’t Bully’s strength. Poor guy. He’d never really found his niche after they had taken him out of the undercover unit.

No, the kid had folded, weak and ineffectual. Jenkins had told him repeatedly that they needed to extract the information now, that it was imperative to get her to give it up without going for the actual charge. They didn’t want to do this in public. Her lawyer would certainly leak details of an official deal, if only to embarrass them. Sure, Schulian would go for charging Monaghan; she was furious about the way the Youssef case had played out in the press. She’d be happy to throw the full weight of her office toward obtaining the lead. Hell, she might even be proud of Gabe Dalesio, which was all he really cared about, his own career and standing. But then there would be too many players, too many people in the loop. This asshole kept ignoring Jenkins’s admonition to keep this close, among the three of them.

“There are some other leads in the paperwork,” Gabe was burbling now, not getting how badly he had screwed up-or else covering for his embarrassment. They had gone for a late lunch at a steak house in the harbor, where the misty weather had held down the usual weekend crowds, and while the place wasn’t bad, it made Jenkins wistful for the joints he’d known in New York. Keane’s, Peter Luger’s. The New York office was considered a bum assignment by most of the agents, but it was the only place Jenkins had wanted to be, and it had outstripped his fantasies. The best way to live in New York was to be rich, of course, but there was a second way to do it-having a job that encouraged people to shower you with perks. Access to restaurants and clubs, forgiving owners who let you slide on checks because you were FBI, you were keeping the city safe.

Even with those hidden bonuses, it had been a stretch, living-and dressing-to the heights he desired on his government salary. And Betty had been expensive, surprisingly so. She’d been a waitress when they met, making jewelry on the side, seemingly down-to-earth and low-maintenance. But once he was disentangled from his wife and family, Betty’s needs grew and grew.

Then it had all gone to shit in a way he could never imagine. A tip had come into the Bureau about a possible terrorism suspect, a dark-skinned man photographing bridges around New York on a curiously regular schedule, almost like clockwork. Who wouldn’t have jumped on the guy, brought him in, hammered away at him? He was a young Egyptian, a college student allegedly, and he claimed he was taking the digital photos for a school project, but Columbia University had never heard of him.

Turned out the kid went to Columbia College, in Chicago. He was in New York on spring break. Oh, and he was a Christian, too, not a Muslim. Jenkins might have ridden out the private embarrassment of it all, but then the media had gotten it. Once it was public, someone had to take the fall. The Bureau couldn’t blame Barry for the investigation itself, which had been totally by the book, but they found a way to discredit him. They started going over his expense reports, questioning every line item. In the end they never found enough to fire him, but they found enough irregularities and missing documentation to send him back to a make-work job in Baltimore. To add insult to injury, his new colleagues treated him like a short-timer, a man of no worth. He was given bullshit duties, things that didn’t use 30 percent of his brain. At his lowest he had thought of putting a gun in his mouth a couple of times, but then he met Bully, who’d been even more thoroughly screwed by his bosses-but wasn’t so defeated by it. Bully’s fury had stoked his own, gotten him to take his tail out from between his legs and reclaim himself.

“There’s the articles of incorporation for her business-”

The dumb shit was still babbling. Figured. Guy had wilted in front of the old cripple, but now he couldn’t shut up. Collins hadn’t said a word since he placed his order. Jenkins loved that about Collins, the way he didn’t talk unless he had something to say.

“Look, we have what we need,” Jenkins said, cutting the kid off. “Don’t get carried away.”

“I’m just saying that there’s still more ways to get at her.”

“We had her,” Jenkins said. “The point was trying to get her to tell us today, to keep this from turning into some huge public deal. That’s why I told you not to go after the reporters, because that would have been all over the newspapers the minute you even questioned them.”

“Well, what about the information that Bully developed?” Collins frowned at Gabe’s use of his nickname, but the kid was too insensitive to notice. “What do we know about the dead kid, Le’andro, his known associates? Why not jack up Bennie Tep, lean on him?”

“Brilliant,” Collins said, and Gabe beamed, not hearing the sarcasm.

“We go to Bennie, we alert him that we know he’s involved,” Jenkins said. He was no longer trying to disguise his exasperation. In fact, he was amping it up, hoping that the kid would finally understand how badly he had screwed up. “He’ll kill half of East Baltimore rather than risk being linked to the murder of a federal prosecutor.”

“But he’s such a small-timer in the scheme of things, and you said he’s always tried to avoid violence-”

“He’s small by design. Like a boutique, you know? He keeps his business close in order to reduce risk. He doesn’t like to kill, but he will if he has to.”

“Oh,” Gabe said, getting it at last, or seeming to. “Well, there’s nothing hard and fast about the timeline. We can wait to bring her back in. If anything, it will probably make her even jumpier. Sword of Damocles and all that.”

“Sword of damn what?” Jenkins asked. He was a college boy, too, but that one got by him.

“He was a man who sat under a sword, hanging by a thread,” Collins said. Gabe, the poor sap, couldn’t hide how impressed he was. Bad form. Bully wouldn’t forgive him that.

“You learn that in college?” Gabe asked.

“High school. Dunbar.”

“Right-you were a Poet.” Fuck, the kid was teasing Bully now, making “poet” sound like “faggot.” But Collins wouldn’t even waste a look on the guy.

Crow’s body was completely disoriented. He had stayed up until 3:00 A.M., which was the new 4:00 A.M., then gotten up at the new 10:00 A.M., which was the old 9:00 A.M. Drinking three PBRs on a practically empty stomach hadn’t helped matters much. He should probably grab a meal before heading back. Or maybe stay here, get a good night’s sleep, rather than risk nodding off at the wheel. Was he honoring his body’s needs or postponing the reunion with Tess, who would be full of questions he couldn’t answer? He felt foolish, running away to protect Lloyd only to lose him in a Salisbury nightclub. Some protector he’d turned out to be.

A dusty gray minivan was idling in one of the spaces on the side street along FunWorld. For one stupid, panicky moment, Crow worried that the authorities had caught up with him. But he was pretty sure no law-enforcement agency used minivans.

“Mr. Crow?” a woman called from the car.

“Just Crow,” a familiar voice corrected. “He’s not a mister.”

“I found Lloyd hitchhiking this morning, and he said he lived here. But I didn’t want to leave him until I saw a grown-up.” The driver, a full-faced black woman with a serious Sunday hat-a tall, golden straw concoction that deserved to be called a crown-looked him up and down. “I guess you count.”

The side door slid open, and Lloyd climbed out of the minivan, at once sheepish and defiant. “Where were you last night, man? You left me.”

“I left-” But Crow saw that insisting on this technical point might cost him something larger. “I’m sorry. I went to buy new cell phones. It didn’t occur to me that you would be looking for me before closing.”

“We fed him a good lunch,” the woman said. “My, he does have an appetite.”

“And he smells!” a little girl’s voice called from within the depths of the minivan, provoking peals of childish laughter. Crow thought the insult would throw Lloyd into his worst defensive posture, that he might ball up his fists or say something inexcusably obscene. But he just mock-scowled and said, “Not as bad as you, Shavonda Grace,” which earned another round of delighted giggles.

“Looks like you made some friends,” Crow said after the woman at the wheel-Mrs. Anderson, he had learned, of Dagsboro-made a three-point turn and headed back to the highway.

“Naw. More like acquaintances.”

“Acquaintances can become friends.”

“If you say so.”

Did Lloyd mean to imply that Crow was more acquaintance than friend? It didn’t matter. His actions undercut his cruel adolescent words. He had come back here. On his own, free to choose, he had directed Mrs. Anderson to bring him here. Perhaps he trusted Crow after all.