Strange hit “end.” “Janine will get it quick. She sends a Christmas card every year to this guy she’s been knowin’, over at the DMV? One of those little things she does, small gestures of kindness. Gets results.”
“She is good.”
“The best.” Strange pointed his chin up the block. “You want the alley or the front of the house?”
“The alley.”
“Where’s your gun at, case I need it?”
“Right here, under the seat.”
“Is it loaded?”
“Yeah.”
“You got your cell?”
“In my pocket.”
“Keep it live.” Strange kept the pen Quinn had given him and slipped a notepad into his jacket. “The old lady will be going out, I expect. Either he’s in there or she’s gonna find him and tell him to get back to the house and take his medicine. But I don’t trust him to do what she says. If you get sight of him, you call me.”
“What if you see him first?”
“I’ll do the same.”
STRANGE positioned himself a half block east of the Carter home, his 10×50 binos around his neck.
Quinn walked down the alley, found the Carter bungalow, and quickly opened the link gate at the end of the weedy concrete path to the back porch of the house. Then he walked back and stood three houses away on the stones of the alley. A pit bull in a cage barked at him from a neighboring yard. No one came out to see what the barking was about, and no curtains moved from the back windows of the houses.
Quinn paced the alley for an hour. Then his phone chirped. He flipped it open.
“Yeah.”
“The old lady just left. She’s drivin’ off in her Ford right now.”
“Okay,” said Quinn.
Another thirty minutes passed. Then a sad sack of a man in oversize jeans and a T-shirt came out from the back of the Carter house. He stepped down off the peeling wood porch and reached into his jeans for a pack of cigarettes. He shook one out from a hole cut in the bottom of the pack and lit it with a match he tore from a book.
Quinn stepped back behind a tall lilac bush that still had leaves. He phoned Strange and kept his voice low.
“Derek, he’s out in the yard. How do you want to play it?”
“Hard,” said Strange. “Strong-arm him into the house and keep that back door unlocked. How much time you figure before he goes back inside?”
“However long it takes to smoke a cigarette.”
“Right,” said Strange.
Strange ran to the Caprice. He dropped his binoculars to the floor. He found Quinn’s automatic, a black Colt .45 with a checkered grip and a five-inch barrel, underneath the seat. He released the magazine and checked the load: a full seven shots. It had been a long time since Strange had had the weight of a gun in his hand. He felt that he needed one today.
EDWARD Diggs took a last drag of his Kool, then a real last drag that burned his throat, and crushed the butt under his shoe. He picked up the butt and tossed it over the fence, into the yard of a neighbor who was also a smoker. Diggs’s grandmother wouldn’t let him smoke in the house, and she didn’t like to see any evidence of it in her backyard. Mad as she had been this morning, he wasn’t gonna do anything to get her back up more than it already was.
But fuck that shit if she thought he was gonna talk any more to the police. Let them deliver that subpoena. He had told them he didn’t know shit about what had happened to Lorenze and that kid, and he didn’t have to go on repeating it if he didn’t want to. Far as telling them the truth, he had decided from the get-go to keep his mouth shut. Lorenze was his main boy, he loved him like a brother and all that, but all the talking in the world wasn’t gonna bring Lorenze back. Diggs felt that the police wouldn’t waste their time protecting a guy like him. All he wanted now was to live.
He turned and went back up the walkway, cracked and overgrown with clover and weeds. He thought he heard something behind him, but it couldn’t be, it was just his own footsteps and that cur, wouldn’t stop barking across the way.
His right hand was grabbed from behind and then bent at the wrist. A bolt of electric pain shot up to his neck, and the shock of it nearly dropped him to his knees. But the man behind him held him up.
“Let’s go, Ed.” A white man’s voice, the one saying the words pushing him along the walkway to the back porch. “Inside.”
“Fuck is this shit? You’re hurtin’ me!”
“Investigator, D.C. Move it.”
“I’m ’onna get your badge number, man.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“This is assault right here!”
“Not yet,” said Quinn. “Open that door, let’s go.”
Diggs did it and Quinn released him as they stepped inside. They were in a clean kitchen that held a small table and chairs. On the table was a coffee cup and the sports page of the Washington Post. A set of knives sat on the Formica counter, sheathed in a rubber stand. Diggs stood by the table, trying to give Quinn a hard glare. Quinn looked Diggs over carefully, thinking of the knives, deciding that Diggs would never make a play.
“Sit down,” said Quinn, pointing to one of the chairs. Diggs pulled one away from the table and sat in it. He mumbled to himself as he stared at the linoleum floor.
Quinn moved to the rear window and looked through it. Strange was coming through the open gate and moving quickly up the walkway. His shirttails were out over his jeans. Then Strange was opening the door and he was in the kitchen and closing the door behind him. He walked toward Ed Diggs. Diggs stood from his chair.
“Meet Ed Diggs,” said Quinn.
“Ed,” said Strange, and as Strange reached him he threw a deep right into Diggs’s mouth and knocked him back over the chair. Diggs slid on the linoleum and stopped sliding when the back of his head hit the kitchen cabinet beneath the sink. Strange yanked him up by his T-shirt, kept his left hand bunched on the T, and hit him with a short, sharp right to the same spot. Diggs’s neck snapped back and his eyes fluttered. His eyes came back, and he stared up at Strange as blood flowed over his lower lip and dripped onto his shirt. Strange released him and Diggs dropped to the floor. Diggs staggered back up to his feet.
“We tell you to stand?” Quinn righted the chair. “Sit your ass down.”
Strange pulled a chair over so it faced the one Diggs had been sitting on. He and Quinn listened to Diggs mumble and moan, and they waited for him to slouch across the room. Strange had split Diggs’s lip wide, and blood came freely now from the cut.
Diggs sat down dead eyed, his shoulders slouched. Strange reached under his shirt and pulled the .45.
“Nah,” said Diggs in the voice of a boy. “Uh-uh, man, nah, uh-uh.”
“Who killed Lorenze?” said Strange.
“I don’t know who did that.” His diction was sloppy and wet.
“Somebody was huntin’ him. Was it a drug debt?”
“I don’t know.”
Strange racked the receiver on the Colt.
“Why you want to do that, brother? I told you I don’t know.”
Strange got up out of his chair and with his free hand flat-palmed Diggs’s chest. Diggs and the chair toppled back to the floor. Diggs grunted, and Strange crouched over him and forced the barrel of the .45 into his mouth.
“You know,” said Strange. He withdrew the barrel, touched it gently to the corner of Diggs’s right eye, and then pressed it there with force.
“They’ll kill me,” said Diggs.
“Look at me, Ed. I’m gonna kill you right now, I swear to God.”
“Derek,” said Quinn. It wasn’t part of the act. Strange’s eyes had long since veered from the script.
“Look at me, Ed.”
Diggs did look. His lip quivered and he closed his eyes. When he opened them again a tear sprung loose and ran fast down his cheek.