“He noticed something about the E-ZPass. Youssef used it on the way into town, when he was coming up 95 from his house. But on the way out, he went through a pay lane.”
“We’ve been over that. The pass works whatever lane you choose.”
“Sure, which makes sense when the killer is heading north afterward. But this prosecutor pointed out that traffic was backed up that night, said it wasn’t logical to sit there in a long line when a guy’s trying to get out, get some satisfaction, get home again.”
Jenkins took a drink, which burned a little. Reflux. Even his own body was turning on him. “He’s right, but what’s it to him?”
“My opinion? He’s sniffing around, looking for a way to insert himself.”
“So what did you say?” He tried to keep his tone super casual, although Jenkins always worried a little about Collins on the verbal front. Their extremely unofficial task was to gather information, not disseminate it. Jurisdictional proprieties may have placed the case under the Howard County police, but that didn’t mean the federal agencies weren’t going to keep tabs on it. Headquarters had technical oversight, but the locals wanted their own eyes and ears. Of course, it was a sign of how queasy the case made everyone that they let Jenkins be the liaison. If they really cared what had happened to Youssef, they would have wanted someone in better standing to play monitor.
“I said”-Collins paused, clearly proud of himself-“I said, ‘Do you spend a lot of time thinking about what goes on in the mind of a guy about to get his dick smoked by another guy?’”
“Good answer.” In his relief Jenkins bellowed a bit, sounding like the guy on the old quiz show with the families. The original emcee, the cocky Brit from Hogan’s Heroes, not the nondescript guy who had the hosting duties now. “That’ll keep him away from it.”
“For now,” Collins said. “But I think he might keep poking.”
“Who is this guy?”
“One of the newer hires, been relegated to second chair so far. Booted a come-up or two, but all the young ones do that.”
“Have I-”
“No, he’s too new. And too gung ho. What do you want to bet he’ll try to take anything to court when his time finally comes?”
“Sounds too stupid to be trouble,” Jenkins said, knowing that stupid people could be extraordinary trouble, the very worst kind of trouble. Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son. What movie was that? Animal House. Jenkins had been just a little too old to get that when it was released-out of college, already at the Bureau, already a father-but his older nieces and nephews repeated lines from that movie as if they were the Baltimore catechism. Fact was, Jenkins had felt a pang of sympathy for the would-be keepers of order-Marmalard, Neidermeyer, and most of all, Dean Wormer. Well, the world had learned its lesson, hadn’t it? You sacrifice order at a price. Learned it late, but learned it at last. Jenkins had been one of the voices screaming in the wilderness along with John O’Neill, another FBI agent, another guy they screwed over just because they didn’t like his personal style. O’Neill had tried to tell them about the impending threat from Osama, but no one wanted to hear. They busted his balls over a briefcase, forced him out. September 11 was O’Neill’s first month on the job as head of security for the World Trade Towers, and the one man who had been screaming about bin Laden since the bombing of the USS Cole ended up dead. You want to keep planes from crashing into buildings, you need a few more Dean Wormers in the mix.
“He’s ambitious,” Collins said. “You can almost smell it on him.”
“Ambitious and stupid? Now, that’s something we can work with. If it comes to that. For now, stay still. Can you do that for me, Bully? Stay still, stay quiet.”
“Absolutely.”
Collins tipped the lip of his bottle against Jenkins’s shot glass, and they both drank. Jenkins studied the amber legs running down the inside of his glass. He had watched the bartender pour it straight from the Jameson bottle, but he was suddenly dubious that he had gotten what he paid for. Would the bartender have dared to pull such a trick on him? Yeah, he would have. Because the only thing you got for being a regular in the Days Inn bar on Security Boulevard was loser status, even in the eyes of the losers who took your generous tips and smiled to your face, pretending fealty. No one had a nose for weakness like the bowed and bloodied.
That’s why Jenkins liked Collins. Loyal as a dog. Loyal as the lion was to the guy who pulled the thorn from his paw. Collins would die for him, literally. The kid loved him more than his own kids did.
Then again, Jenkins hadn’t divorced Collins’s mom and taken up with a cocktail waitress who ended up being Miss Ballbuster of the new millennium. Fuckin’ Betty. Jenkins had learned the hard way that a guy didn’t have to have much money to attract a gold digger. Betty had seen the way he lived in New York -the restaurants, the clubs-and never made the distinction that it was because of his status in the Bureau, not his salary. And when the status was gone, along with those paltry perks-poof, so was Betty. Neatest little magic trick he had ever seen, a 120-pound woman disappearing into thin air. He tried to tell her that they would live better in Baltimore, that most agents preferred it over New York or Washington. Betty didn’t buy it.
But then, Betty knew her strengths, too. She claimed she was thirty-five when they met, but she was most certainly on speaking terms with forty. She was one of those natural hard-bodies, a freak gift from the gods, because the most strenuous thing Betty ever did was lift a glass to her mouth. The face-the face had been hard, too, and not in a good way. She had required a good thirty minutes at the dressing table each morning to get it to live up to the body, to mask the lines she’d gotten from squinching up her features and thinking about how she was going to separate this guy or that guy from whatever he had. The way Betty saw it, she had maybe one more husband left in her, and she couldn’t afford for it to be Jenkins, not once he was all but demoted.
He glanced at his own reflection in the window. Eighteen months. Eighteen months to the mandatory retirement age. He could walk now with a decent enough pension, but he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. He’d do his time, get to the end, then set up the sweetest little security gig he could find. In the meantime he would pretend he gave a shit about solving the Youssef case. A loser, even his enemies would concede that. It wouldn’t be his fault if an arrest were never made. All anyone really wanted was for it to recede in the public imagination, an easy enough trick. The average joe couldn’t hold a thought for twenty minutes, which is why all the world’s problems kept being trumped by the missing-white-woman-of-the-week.
He caught a vision of his retirement party, sad and empty. In fact, it would probably look a lot like this-him and Collins, huddled at a table together, two pariahs. In a fair world, a true meritocracy, they would be known for the heroes they were. But Jenkins knew that nothing was more unfair than the bureaucracies allegedly devoted to justice.
7
Lloyd had to wait until almost midnight before the house was quiet and he was sure that everyone was asleep. It had freaked him out a little, the sounds of sex coming from the other bedroom, not that he hadn’t heard those noises before. Made them, too, but that was different. These people were old. Well, not old-old, but old enough. And weird. It was like the Brady Bunch parents rocking the bed, like his mama and Murray, and who wanted to think about that shit?
The woman did have a nice shape, though. Solid, not that skinny, flat-ass body that so many white women prized. But she had to be his mama’s age, or close to.