“Okay, I’ll do it.”
“That’s great, Ralph,” Dunlap said excitedly. “You won’t be sorry, believe me. Come in, I’ll give you the details.”
Blunt followed Dunlap to the rear of the store, once again stumbling through the darkness, raking whatever lay in his path before him like a huge black wave.
“Have a seat, Ralph. You want a beer?”
“I ain’t got all night, Harry.” Blunt’s small eyes whipped back and forth. “I got to be back in town by six.”
“Oh, yeah?” Dunlap asked brightly. “You got some broad waiting for you?”
“Shit,” Blunt grumbled. “Broad, my ass.”
“So, you want to sit down?”
“Fuck, no. Let’s get on with it.”
“Yeah, okay, no sweat, Ralph,” Dunlap said. “Let me show you the deal.”
Blunt watched glumly as Dunlap sprinted to a desk, jerked a folded map from one of its cubicles, and spread it out across a square card table. “Okay, here it is,” he said. “Titus.”
“I know where Titus is,” Blunt growled.
“Sure you do, Ralph,” Dunlap said. “But it ain’t Titus I’m showing you.”
“You said that fucking locker was in Titus.”
“Basically, yeah. But not exactly in town.” He ran his finger along a green line marked Route 6. “You go along here until you get to the outskirts of town, see?”
Blunt nodded sullenly.
“You come to Brighton Avenue,” Dunlap went on. “There’s an Esso station on the right. The corner, I mean. You can’t miss it. You go past the station. Maybe a mile.” He drew his finger toward the eastern side of the map. “You get to Covenant. There’s a church there on the corner. Saint something’s. Got a Madonna out front.”
“Madonna out front,” Blunt repeated, now with a sense that things were getting crowded inside his head. “Fucking boonies, this place.”
“It’s the nutcase that picked it, not me.”
“All right, just go ahead,” Blunt said, waving a beefy hand.
“Okay, so, you go maybe a mile, two miles down Sumpter. It gets to be like woods, you know? Like trees and shit. Nothing the fuck around. Then you come to this gate. A sign on it. AJS Storage. That’s the place you’re looking for. Where the goods are.”
“The gate locked?”
“Nah, you just swing it open. Drive right in. At this time of night, nobody’s around.”
“Okay, what then?”
“There’s this bunch of little houses. Like sheds, you know? Made out of wood. You’re looking for number twenty-seven. The number’s painted right over the door. Big black number. Twenty-seven.” He reached into his pocket and drew out the key. “The creepo hadn’t bothered to lock the fucking thing, but I did. So, that’s it. You bring the stuff back here. I give you the five hundred bucks like I said. End of story.”
Blunt folded his paw around the key. “It fucking better be the end of story, Harry.”
Dunlap’s hands fluttered like small pink birds between them. “Oh, it will be, Ralph. Believe me. It will be.”
Blunt dropped the key into the pocket of his trousers, stepped over to the curtain, and flung it back. “This better go smooth, Harry. ’Cause if it don’t—”
“It will, it will.” Dunlap used all his inner strength to hold up a smile. “You can trust me on this one, Ralph.”
Blunt grunted doubtfully, then stepped through the curtain and into the unlighted interior of the store.
Dunlap followed him for a few feet. “See you later, Ralph.” He watched his cousin’s huge frame lurch toward the door, scraping and banging all the way. Like a fucking bull, he thought, fucking bull in a china shop.
3:07 A.M., Route 6
The road was dark, with few lights burning in the houses or nondescript roadside shops that swept by on either side of the car. It was a bleak area, but Pierce remembered that it had been quite beautiful once, the silver waters of the tidal marshes teeming with birds, golden reeds weaving in the breeze.
“I grew up around here,” Pierce said. “Met my wife here. She was from the Midwest. Just in Seaview on vacation.”
“Where were you from?”
“Englishtown,” Pierce answered.
“So you could just walk over to the river and look right across to the city,” Yearwood said. “Did it call to you?”
“No.”
“Then why did you go there?”
“I don’t know,” Pierce answered, though he knew quite well that he’d left Englishtown for one reason only, because Costa had left it, moved into the city, rented a house in a nice, quiet neighborhood, a house near a school and a playground, just the way his house in Englishtown had been.
“You weren’t following a dream?” Yearwood asked lightly.
“No,” Pierce answered. A nightmare, he thought.
A brief silence, then Yearwood asked, “So, what do you do in the off hours?”
“Nothing much.”
“A loner, then.”
Pierce imagined Anna Lake in her tidy apartment, curled up on the worn blue sofa, her legs drawn beneath her, a woolen sweater draped across her shoulders. “Not because I want to be.”
“So let me ask you again,” Yearwood said. “What happened to you, Detective Pierce?”
Rather than answer, Pierce said, “What do you think might be in that shed Garrett told us about?”
“What if nothing is?”
“Then I’ll go back to the city.”
“And give up?”
Pierce relived his long hours of stalking Costa, watching him from the distance as he drunkenly weaved down the streets of Harbortown. What would Anna think of him if she knew just how deep the poison had finally sunk? And yet, what choice did he have but to tell her how night after night he’d followed Costa to his seedy dockside haunts, then on weekends when the little mechanic had strolled to the playground near his house and sat feeding squirrels and pigeons while Pierce watched him in the distance, red-eyed with hatred, hoping with all his raging heart that once, just once, Costa would lose his grip and in that instant of lost control approach a solitary child. Just once, he’d thought at the time, just once, and you’re mine.
“No, never,” Pierce said.
Yearwood cracked the window, and a blast of wet air swept into the car. “But what happens when you reach the end of the line? When you’ve done all you can but you just can’t get your man?”
“Then you have to let him go,” Pierce answered. He pressed down on the accelerator. Or cross the line yourself, he thought.
3:11 A.M., Interrogation Room 3
“So, anyway, I haven’t had the guts to approach her,” Cohen said. “I just can’t seem to work up the courage to do it. Woman trouble. You ever had that, Jay?”
“No,” Smalls answered.
Before Cohen could say more, the door opened.
“I need to speak to you, Detective Cohen,” the Commissioner said.
Cohen joined the Commissioner in the corridor outside Interrogation Room 3.
“It’s been a long night, hasn’t it?” the Commissioner asked.
“Yes, it has.”
The Commissioner removed one of the white gloves of his dress uniform and examined a smudge. “So, are you making any headway?”
“Not as much as I’d like,” Cohen answered. “Pierce has gone to—”
“Yes, I know,” the Commissioner interrupted. He drew off the second glove. “Have you heard anything from him?”
“Not yet.”
The Commissioner placed his bare right hand on Cohen’s shoulder. “The race is not always to the swift, isn’t that so?” The Commissioner smiled. “That being the case, I want you to understand—both you and Detective Pierce—that I know you both did your best. Not just during this last interrogation, but in the whole investigation. You found your man, Detective. This fellow. Of that there is no doubt. And you are both to be commended for it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
/> The Commissioner looked at his watch. “You’ve been at it for almost ten hours now. You must be tired. And so at six sharp, I want you to go home, Detective. You need rest, I can see that. I want you to get up from your chair and walk directly to your car and go home and get a full twelve hours of sleep before you come back here to headquarters. Don’t worry about that fellow in there. His release will be handled by others who haven’t been at him all night. The same goes for Pierce. When he leaves … where is it he went?”
“Seaview, sir.”
The Commissioner nodded. “He should go directly home from there.”
“Unless he’s found something we can use,” Cohen said.
“Yes, of course. In that case, he would come back. Do you expect him to call in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When he does, tell him what I said. That I’m proud of what you two men accomplished in this case, and that I know you’re both dead tired, and that he should go directly home.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s at six A.M. You’ll leave the interrogation room.”
“Smalls will need to be guarded though,” Cohen said. “Otherwise he might …”
“Might what?”
“Might just walk out the door.”
“At six o’clock, Detective, this fellow is a private citizen again. He has no warrants against him and no charges have been filed. A private citizen. Nothing else.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Commissioner’s smile returned. “Well, good night, then, Detective.” He gripped Cohen’s hand. “Sleep well.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll try.”
With that the Commissioner turned on his heel and strode back down the corridor to his office, moving down it, Cohen thought, like something dark through an even darker vein.
3:12 A.M., Criminal Files Room
Burke glanced up from the transcript and glimpsed the Commissioner as he strode past the glass door, his features curiously troubled. He started to rise, follow his old friend down the corridor, but the jangle of the phone stopped him.
It was Dr. Wynn.
“I wanted to let you know that Scottie’s condition has deteriorated,” the doctor said. “His breathing is extremely shallow.”
“So I should come there now?”
“I think so, yes.”
“All right,” Burke said.
On the way out, Burke saw the Commissioner standing at the window that looked out over the city.
“I have to go to the hospital, Francis,” he told him.
The Commissioner did not bother to face him. “There’s no need for you to come back, Tom.”
“But I should—”
“Stay with Scottie. That’s where you belong. I’ll handle this fellow from here on out.” The Commissioner turned around slowly, and Burke saw that his eyes were oddly imploring. “You know, Tommy, there’s something else the nuns never taught us. That sometimes there’s no way to do the right thing. If we always had choices, then we could be condemned. But we don’t always have choices, do we?”
“No, we don’t.”
A slender smile, soft as candlelight, rose to the Commissioner’s lips. “Go to your son,” he said.
And so Burke did.
What’ll it be?
3:25 A.M., Route 6
Blunt steered the car into the dimly lighted station. He’d not planned to stop anywhere en route to Titus, but during the last few minutes Dunlap’s directions had begun to blur. He needed to get his bearings, make sure he was headed in the right direction.
Through the fetid smoke trapped inside the car, he watched as the attendant lumbered forward, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“What’ll it be?” the attendant mumbled.
“Fill ‘er up,” Blunt answered.
The attendant staggered drowsily to the pump, snatched the nozzle from its metal cradle, and began to pump the gas.
His movements were slow, indifferent, and Blunt thought that what this jerk really needed was a swift kick in the ass. But then, wasn’t that what everyone needed?
He thought of the meeting he’d had with the Commissioner an hour before, the way the Old Man had edged around what he wanted done, never saying it straight out. Smalls needed a swift kick in the ass, that was what the message had been, but the Commissioner had delivered it at a slant, going on and on about how it was a cop’s job to protect little kids from freaks like the one they’d found in the park, and how this fucking freak was going to have to be let go, and how he’d end up in the park again, and how some little girl would find herself wandering by this shit-hole the freak lived in, and how if the freak saw her, he’d do the same thing to her that he’d done to the little girl a few days before, and how that was terrible, terrible, and something should be done about it, right, Ralph, something should be done, you know what I mean, don’t you?
He’d known all right, Blunt thought now, he’d known from the first words the Old Man had said to him, known that he was headed for the cement house on Lake Warren at around dawn, him and the freak, and that maybe the freak wasn’t coming out of it again, at least not in shape to choke the life out of some little girl, not with his hands all fucked up the way they’d be, mangled to hell, thumbs broken. You break a guy’s thumbs, Blunt thought with deep philosophical satisfaction, he never fucks with you again.
“Dollar ninety.”
“Huh?”
“Dollar ninety,” the attendant repeated, this time a little sharply, so that Blunt had the urge to grab him by his scrawny neck, jerk his head into the car’s smoky interior, and give him the whack his smart-ass attitude was clearly begging for.
But he was a cop and so he couldn’t do that. The punk would yell it to high heaven if he did, scream to some fucking lawyer that some fat-assed cop had roughed him up. How did it happen, Blunt wondered, that the pussies ran things now? They couldn’t do shit without men like him. They couldn’t control the first grade at Our Lady of Lourdes without people like him supplying the muscle. He wondered if the Commissioner had now joined the ranks of the pussies who ran things, a guy who couldn’t do the dirty work himself anymore, afraid he might get something on those fucking pretty white gloves he’d worn in Molly’s Café.
“Dollar ninety,” the attendant said again.
When Blunt met his gaze, he saw something in the kid’s eyes he didn’t like, a vague contempt, or maybe just a question. What’s the matter with this fucking guy?
He’d seen other people with the same look in their eyes but had never quite understood what he did that caused them to look at him that way. Maybe it was just that he didn’t answer them the way they expected, that it took him a few extra seconds to get things straight. He’d broken more than a few noses over that look but decided that breaking the attendant’s nose wouldn’t be a good idea. After all, he had bigger fish to fry than slapping the shit out of some night-shift grease monkey. He had fifty grand waiting for him, and that thought brought a smile slithering to his lips.
“Yeah, okay,” Blunt said lightly. “Dollar ninety.”
He reached for his wallet, drew out two singles.
The attendant snapped them from his hand and strolled, now even more slowly than before, back inside the station.
Waiting in the car, Blunt considered his next move. Drive to Titus, find that fucking storage shed, get the money, haul ass back to the city in time to get the pervert. The last part was the easiest. The Old Man had made sure of that.
He’ll be in Interrogation Room 3.
What about the guys who are going at him?
They won’t be there. Pierce. Cohen. Neither one of them.
They know the setup?
Nobody will be there, Ralph. That’s all you need to know. You just go in and get Smalls. Nobody’ll stop you or question you or anything else. I’ll make sure of that.
Okay, Blunt thought now, okay, that part’s easy. He’d done it before, provided the muscle. But as to what he had to do before that, this whole bu
siness of the shed and the money, he was less sure of how that might go down. Maybe he should make a plan, he thought, and immediately began to do what he always did in such situations, figure that if so-and-so does this, I do that. One by one, he clicked off the contingencies: If a guy is at the gate, fuck Harry, I won’t go in. If the key don’t fit, I’ll snap the lock with some cutters. If the money’s not there, I’ll blow the place and get the hell back to town. If the money’s there, I’ll grab it fast and put it in the trunk. If anything goes wrong, I’ll kick Dunlap’s fucking ass.
“Your change.”
“Whuh?”
“I said, here’s your change.”
The attendant’s tone seemed sharp, as before, and Blunt noticed that he was looking at him that way again, giving him the once-over with the same look too many people had always had on their faces, everybody from the kids on the block to his own drunken mother, like there was some secret that everyone else knew, and that he was supposed to know but didn’t.
“Yeah, okay.” Blunt snatched the coins from the attendant’s hand. “How far to Titus?”
The look remained in place, and for a moment Blunt wondered just how much he could get away with. Suppose he whacked the smart-ass, then sped away. Who’d know the difference, he asked himself, and after a few minutes of looking into it, who’d give a shit that some gas-pump jockey had gotten creamed at four in the morning? Nobody, Blunt decided, nobody at all. He felt his right hand curl into a fist. Just one word, you fuck, he thought, just one smart-ass word.
The attendant shrugged. “I’d say you’re about twenty minutes away.”
Blunt gave him another chance to fuck himself. “Twenty minutes, huh?”
The attendant didn’t take it. “This time of morning, you’ll have the road to yourself.”
“Okay,” Blunt said. He hit the ignition and pulled away, giving the grease monkey a final look in the dusty rearview mirror. Lucky bastard, he thought. He’s got no idea how fucking lucky.
3:38 A.M., Interrogation Room 3