And in that instant, in one of those intuitive flashes, I knew what was causing my anger and why. The hushed voice, not being able to see him or know who he was, had touched on something primal, some primitive foreboding of unseen things that prowl in the dark. I wasn’t really pissed off at myself or the creep on the phone. The anger was nothing more than a blind reaction to fear. And I’m not that easily frightened, either. But I’d let that hushed, disembodied voice on the phone get to me. Time to turn this thing around.
“Hey, Skippy,” I said. “How’s it going?”
Silence... then, “Don’t call me that, Val.”
“What do you mean, don’t call you Skippy?”
More silence.
“Okay, so what do you want me to call you?”
“Come on, Val, I know you know who I am.”
“Probably do, if I wanted to bother taking the time to think about it, which I don’t. So why don’t you give me a clue.”
“I’m hurt you don’t remember, Val. It’s only been four years.”
“Look, Skip, I’ve had a busy day and I’m tired, so get to the point. Did you call to play guessing games, or did you just get tired of pulling the wings off of flies?”
The couple of seconds of dead air that followed felt more like a couple of years. And when he came back on the line, the hushed whisper had taken on a nasty hiss. “You shouldn’t speak to me that way, bitch.”
“Bitch? Oh, Skippy, now you’ve gone and hurt my feelings. I mean, really. What happened to that nice throaty ‘Vaahl’?”
The hiss became a snarl. “You will regret that; you will regret mocking me.”
“Now, you’re not threatening me here, are you, Skippy?”
“To disregard the pain of others is callous,” he said, “but to inflict pain is evil. And evil must be punished.”
“What evil? I have to tell you, Skippy, you’re starting to sound like an old Vincent Price movie, here. But let me give you—”
“Evil is spawned by evil,” he cut in, “and you are—”
“Hey, Skip, give it a rest and listen up, okay? Making annoying phone calls, as long as it isn’t deemed to be stalking, is only a misdemeanor. But threatening bodily harm over the phone is a felony. And if you think just ‘cause you’re whispering into some throwaway phone I can’t find you, Skippy, you’re dreaming. Finding losers like you is what I do for a living.”
“Oh don’t worry, Val,” he whispered, “you won’t have to find me. When it’s time, I’ll find you.”
Despite my bravado, I could taste adrenaline at the back of my throat and feel the fine hair stand up on my arms. I’d had him pegged as a slightly warped weirdo, but he was starting to sound totally bent.
I scanned the cars in the traffic jam around me. He had to be somewhere close by. I could feel it.
I was looking from one side mirror to the other and back again when the guy in the cab over box truck behind me leaned on his horn. The traffic in front of me had started to move.
I hit my left directional, pulled into the outside lane for my turn onto Commercial Street, and sat waiting for a break in the oncoming traffic. The box truck rumbled by on my right headed up Washington Street. And there it was, a couple of car lengths behind him, the electric blue Neon. He was stuck in the middle lane between the line of cars behind me waiting to turn left, and the line on the other side of him waiting to turn right. He had nowhere to go but straight ahead.
He punched the gas, shot out into the intersection, but had to jump on the brakes to avoid slamming into the rear end of the slow-moving box truck. He pulled out to the left to get by the truck. No room. Just a blaring of horns from oncoming traffic. He swerved all the way back to the right, flew up the handicap cut in the curb at the corner, bounced up onto the sidewalk, and barreled past the box truck in a cloud of sparks and red brick dust gouged off the buildings on his right.
On the sidewalk halfway down the block, a bag lady in a tattered, gray, ankle-length dress and black high-tops let go of her shopping cart and threw both arms up in front of her face. With barely ten feet to go before hitting her, the Neon cut left, plowed over a parking meter that exploded and spewed a fountain of coins in the air, bounced down over the curb in front of the box truck, and hightailed it up Washington Street toward Haymarket Square.
Instead of turning left, I drove straight ahead through the intersection and pulled over by the remains of the parking meter. I dug out a notepad and pen, and while the bag lady scurried around on her hands and knees scooping up quarters and cackling with glee, I jotted down the first four digits I’d gotten off the Neon’s license plate.
I flipped open my cell, scrolled down through CONTACTS to LENIHAN, and hit SEND.
I’d met Sergeant Detective Lenihan a few months back when he had been the primary on what had started as an incident of shoplifting, but ended with the manager of the shop dead on the floor. Unfortunately, the manager had been one of three Newbury Street merchants who had hired me to protect them from shoplifters. With a little help from me and a lot of luck, Lenihan had closed the case in less than twenty-four hours. And me? No, I didn’t get any shoplifters. I got canned.
I had to work my way through three or four variations of “Homicide”... “Who?”... “Oh, Lenihan, yeah, he’s here somewhere, hang on, I’ll get him,” before he finally came on the line and growled, “Lenihan here.”
“You ever had the bianco pizza at Nicolai’s?” I said.
“What?... what’s that?”
“Caramelized onion, prosciutto, and parmesan cream.”
He only missed a couple of beats, then he let out a long sigh. “Ah yes, Valerie Dymond, my favorite lady gumshoe.”
“Wow. You remembered me? I’m flattered.”
All I got for an answer on that was, “Umm.”
“But favorite, you say, huh? How many lady gumshoes do you know, anyhow? And that should really be woman gumshoe, by the way. Nobody uses lady as a modifier anymore.”
“ ‘Lady as a modifier?’ And you wonder how come I remember you? But you are the only one I know, Val. And one of you is more than enough. So what d’ya want?”
“What makes you think I want something? Maybe I just wanted to know how you’ve been, see if you’d like to shoot out after work for pizza and a couple a cold ones.”
“Not buyin’ that. Some snazzylookin’ young, ahh, woman P.I. calls askin’ a worn-out old cop like me out for pizza, I know it ain’t my company she’s lookin’ for.”
“Young and snazzylooking? You silver-tongued devil, you. But I’m not that young, Lenihan. And for that matter, you’re not that old.”
He paused just long enough before he answered to make me wonder what he was thinking. And to wonder why the hell I’d even said it.
“What I have,” I said, hoping the flush on my face didn’t show in my voice, “is a partial plate number. What I need is a list of possibles.”
“Jesus, Val, you know I can’t do that. You been readin’ too much Parker.”
“Okay, okay, scrub the bianco pizza. You ever had their pasta primavera?”
“You trying to bribe a police officer?”
“Absolutely, yes.”
“Look, Val, you’re not on the job anymore, and you—”
“Come on, Lenihan, you know I wouldn’t be bugging you with this if it wasn’t something heavy. Some sicko’s been harassing me with anonymous phone calls and following me around in his car. And this afternoon I finally got the first four digits off his plate.”
Silence. Another deep sigh, then, “Okay, give me what you got.”
“It’s an electric blue Dodge Neon, no more than two years old, Mass plate, first four digits: 2-R-T-4.”
He repeated the make, year, color, and partial plate.