The coffee machine puffed and huffed, quite a production for the task of pouring hot water over a paper filter of coffee grounds. It tasted better if you waited until the whole pot brewed, but Jenkins could never resist pulling the carafe out and letting his mug catch the first syrupy cupful.
“You sure you don’t want any?”
“I’m fine.”
It was only when Jenkins turned back to the counter, FBI mug in his hand, that he saw the gun on the counter. Not a service revolver, his mind registered. A street weapon, a piece of shit. Then: Why does Mike have it? Why is he showing it to me?
“Mike,” he said, his voice soft and pleading. “Bully. What’s this about? What’s wrong?”
Even in this agitated state, he was so very handsome. Extremely dark-skinned, with features that had always seemed vaguely Native American to Jenkins-strong straight nose, high cheekbones, a bow-shaped mouth. That mouth was trembling, just a little now. Yet any show of emotion in Collins’s face was noteworthy.
“Mike…?”
The young man picked up the gun, studying it as if he wasn’t quite sure what it was or where it had come from, then put it back down.
“I…I may have overstepped, Barry.”
“Overstepped?”
“Gabe Dalesio learned something, and it struck me as key, but I knew if we acted on it, he might begin to put things together. So, um, I killed him.”
This was a new situation to him. As a father to his own sons, Jenkins had been the one who disappointed, who stood before his children’s sorrowful and disapproving faces again and again. Here at last was his chance to assure someone that it was okay to screw up, to give comfort and succor.
Succor. Funny word. Say it out loud and it sounded just like “sucker.”
“You used this gun?”
“Yeah. Out on the street, like it was a carjacking or a robbery gone wrong. I took it off a drug dealer years ago. There’s no paper on it.”
“You take the car?”
“No, but I grabbed his wallet and his keys. Then I went to see a woman I know out Hunt Valley way, one who’s not too fussy about advance notice.”
“What you kids call a booty call?” Collins managed a feeble smile at Jenkins’s deliberate squareness. “That was smart, Bully.” This earned a genuine smile, one of relief and pride. “And you didn’t use your service weapon, smarter still. Now we just have to throw this one down the sewer.”
“And go to Delaware?”
“Delaware?”
“That’s what Dalesio found. There’s an ex-cop, held the liquor license on the dad’s bar, and he’s also listed as the founding partner in the girl’s business. He figured that a guy like that was probably in the habit of doing the family favors.”
“Well, that sure is interesting.” But not worth killing another federal prosecutor for. “I mean, it’s worth checking out. Still sounds like a bit of a long shot to me. Why would an ex-cop shield someone wanted in a murder investigation?”
“Dalesio did some preliminary checking. He pulled a reverse directory, started calling some of the guy’s neighbors. There was some strange guy drinking beer with him just yesterday.”
“Strange?”
“Unknown, not a familiar face. White, youngish. Could be the boyfriend. We should go over there.”
“Throw the gun down the sewer. Then go to work.”
“Work?”
“A federal prosecutor was killed last night. You don’t know that now, but it will be all over your office soon after you get there. And while you may have his wallet-throw that down the sewer, too, okay?-police will have already traced the car registration back to him. Go into work and be glad, for once, that they treat you like shit. I’ll do the same thing, and we’ll do what we’ve been doing all along: keep our eyes and ears open, figure out who knows what, then proceed according to an orderly plan of my devising.”
Collins winced a little, picking up the implicit criticism in that one stressed word, and Jenkins realized that he had to modulate his tone. “It’s okay, Bully. You did okay. Just let me do the thinking. It worked with Youssef, didn’t it? We took our sweet time, and it was just about perfect.”
“Except for the kid using the ATM card again. And then that private eye came along.”
“Yeah, well, she’s got other fish to fry now.” Jenkins wondered fleetingly how they would continue to press her without Gabe. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe they really did have the information they’d sought all along. “The thing is, we’ve got to do this without involving civilians. Mike? You feel me?”
Another wisp of a smile from Collins for the way Jenkins sounded when he aped that ghetto talk.
“If this little fucker is at the beach, we’ve got to take him into custody and isolate him. Set him up to run from us, then do the old throw-down. Nothing fancy, nothing complicated.”
“I get it.”
“You sure? Because we’re up to two more bodies than we ever planned to have. I don’t blame you for Youssef-he tricked you into telling him what we had going, demanded in, then wanted out. He was a liability, and we had to get rid of him. But this…”
Collins’s shoulders sagged. The kid meant well. But his central flaw could not be fixed. When in doubt, he went for his gun. It was a weird defect, one usually found in female officers, but it had been okay as long as Collins kept shooting criminals. It was only when he shot that civilian that he’d gotten in such deep shit. Irony was, he’d been absolutely justified for once. The guy had refused to stop, just kept coming at Collins, one of those old-timers who thought he could beat a drug dealer with a rake, fucking up a big buy that Collins had spent eight months getting to that moment. The geezer was lucky to have survived, in Jenkins’s opinion.
“Go to work, Bully,” he said. “The minute someone tells you about Gabe, say, ‘Holy shit! I was having a drink with him last night. He was telling me his theories about the Youssef case.’ Don’t say anything that can be contradicted by an eyewitness. You walked out with him. Walked most of the way to his car with him because you were parked in the same direction. Admit that you were a little lit-”
“I wasn’t, actually.”
“Admit that you were a little lit, that you went out to visit your lady friend and barely had time to change your clothes before coming in to work. Get me? We’re in assessment mode today.”
Collins left, and Jenkins sat at his kitchen table, head in hands. How had it all gone so wrong? It had been so perfect on paper, so bloodless and simple, money coming in and no one going out. He added up the death toll in his head. Youssef, Dalesio. Oh, and the kid, Le’andro Watkins, not that the world could really mourn a lowlife who was going to kill or be killed before his twenty-first birthday.
And now they had to find this other kid, set him up. But then they would be done. It had to end there. Please, let it fucking end.
30
Tess had planned to go straight to her office from Laurel, but she headed home instead. WBAL was reporting on a street murder in Canton, the kind of crime sure to spook the area’s yuppies and tourists. When the newscast yielded to the morning call-in show, she could hear people trying to extract the detail that would establish that the crime was somehow the victim’s fault. Was it a domestic? No, it appeared to be a robbery and attempted carjacking. Was it someone driving a flashy car? Not clear. A man cruising for…um, female companionship? The callers were desperate for proof that no crime or misfortune was ever truly random. Tess thought it more remarkable that such murders were so infrequent. It was less than a mile from the swank condos on the Canton waterfront to the desperate neighborhood where Dub, Terrell, and Tourmaline squatted in an abandoned rowhouse.