“Didn’t do shit to your tire.”
“Well, you’re lucky she wasn’t driving it today. She’s a lot tougher than I am.”
Lloyd gave Crow a look as if to say, That’s not so tough.
“For one thing, she’s licensed to carry a gun.”
“She a cop?” This prospect was clearly unnerving.
“Private detective.”
Lloyd couldn’t maintain his studied indifference. “For real? Like Charlie’s Angels and shit?”
“A little more down to earth. Skip traces, insurance stuff, missing persons, financial background checks.”
“She ever kill anybody?”
“Once. It was self-defense…’’ He had Lloyd’s full attention now. Tess would rather that Crow post nude photos of her on the Internet than speak of the near-death encounter that had thrust her onto the front page last year. The scar on her knee was slowly disappearing, but Crow had noticed how often her fingers went to that spot, fingering the lumpy, purple-white line as if it were a crooked pennywhistle. Hot cross buns. Hot cross buns. One gunshot, ten gunshots, hot cross buns.
He had a scar, too, but Tess seemed to forget that. Everybody had scars, one way or another.
“She know kung fu? I do.”
Lloyd jumped to his feet, executing a mishmash of moves that appeared to have been gleaned from films such as The Matrix, Hero, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. His impromptu performance alarmed the mostly white, all-suburban audience of waiting families. It wasn’t Lloyd’s race so much as his loudness, the sudden movements. That just didn’t play in Columbia.
“She has her methods.”
“Is she like the White She Devil in Undercover Brother?” Lloyd struck another pose, shaking his head violently from side to side as if trying to dislodge a bug from his ear. Crow considered himself well versed in all forms of pop culture, but Lloyd had left him behind with that reference.
The pretty brunette hostess hurried forward, ready to seat them even though several other parties had been waiting longer.
“Where do you live, Lloyd?” Crow asked as he watched Lloyd tuck in to his salad-bar creation, more cheese than lettuce. Cheese, lettuce, and nothing else.
“’Round.”
“Round where?”
“I don’t like to specify too much about myself. But you know, I turned sixteen last fall. They can’t make me go to school anymore.”
“So what are you doing if you don’t go to school?”
“I worked for a man ’round the way.”
The past tense didn’t escape Crow. “Doing what?”
Lloyd gave him a look. “You sure you’re not a cop?”
“I’m a bartender.” Not quite the truth, but more expedient than trying to explain his jack-of-all-trades role at Pat Monaghan’s bar, the Point.
“Why you so interested in me?”
“Because you’re a person, sitting opposite me in a restaurant. Why wouldn’t I be interested in another human being?”
Lloyd pointed a fork at him. “A human being that you think slashed your tire.”
“Well, didn’t you?”
Lloyd grinned. He was so long and bony, thinner than even Crow had been at that age, and he was rampaging through his salad as if he hadn’t had a solid meal for a while. Weekends were light on free food in the Baltimore area, with only a few churches open for business. That’s part of the reason Crow had started using his day off to take supplies to the smaller soup kitchens, the ones that didn’t get as much publicity as the name-brand charities.
“Did not. Word. But I saw the guy who did, and I told him that an old lady had seen him and called the police and he better run. I told him I’d hold his tool for him so the police wouldn’t pick him up. Then I waited for you to come back. Tire was already flat, right? No harm in helping out.”
His last words echoed in Crow’s brain. It was true, despite what Tess maintained. There could be no harm in helping anyone.
“Lloyd, tell me straight: You got a place to sleep tonight? The temperature’s supposed to go down into the twenties.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, but when I take you home, I’m taking you to an address and watching you go inside. In fact, I’m coming inside with you and meeting your folks.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Why not?”
“Some white dude bring me home, my mom starts asking questions, and she’ll figure out that I wasn’t up to any good, and I’ll be beat.”
Lloyd’s tone and reasoning were persuasive, but he had hesitated just long enough for Crow to know he was lying.
“But according to you, all you did was take advantage of someone else’s crime.”
“Yeah, but she won’t believe that. My mama ain’t got much use for me.”
“Lloyd-do you live with your mom? Or any adult? Is anyone looking out for you?”
Their entrées arrived-the speed of the service was setting records, as if the staff could not be free of Lloyd and Crow soon enough-and Lloyd busied himself with spaghetti and meatballs. He ate as a child might, Crow noticed, holding the fork in his fist, cutting the strands instead of winding them around the fork.
“I’m not dropping you off on the street, not in this weather. Either I take you to a place where an adult comes to the door and vouches for you or I’ll find you a shelter bed-”
“No fucking shelters!” Lloyd almost yelped in his distress. “You show up there, you young, they call juvenile services or social services and they haul you away for what they say is your own good. That ain’t for me.”
“Then I’ll take you to where I live. Just for the night, okay? You can sleep in the spare bedroom, and I’ll take you back to the neighborhood tomorrow morning. Even drop you off at school, if you like.”
“Told you, I’m sixteen. I don’t have to go.”
“Fine, Lloyd. You don’t have to go. But do you want to go?”
“Hell no.” His look was scornful, contemptuous of the very idea that one could want to go to school if it wasn’t required by law. Crow decided to change his tack, to become Lloyd’s supplicant, allow him the illusion that he had the upper hand in their dealings.
“Here’s the thing, man. I need you to tell my girlfriend what happened with her car. She’s going to be pissed about the tire, and she’s not going to believe me.”
“What-you whipped?”
“A little,” Crow said. “A little.”
Of course, if he were truly cowed by Tess, he wouldn’t dare bring Lloyd Jupiter home with him.
“Women,” Lloyd said with a world-weary sigh, as if he had a lifetime of experience.
“They can be demanding. But they’re usually worth the effort.”
“True dat,” Lloyd said, reaching for a fistful of garlic bread. “Can I have dessert?”
3
“Surveillance isn’t for amateurs,” Tess Monaghan told the bright young faces that stared unnervingly up at her from the seats of the Beacon-Light’s small auditorium, a spanking-new addition to a building that seemed to be under constant renovation. “Remember the Miami Herald and Gary Hart? They staked out his apartment but didn’t realize it had a back door. There’s no such thing as partial surveillance. That’s a classic amateur mistake.”
“But you were an amateur, right?” one of the men asked. It was that logy middle section of the afternoon, the Q-and-A portion of her presentation, and Tess had long ago figured out that this particular reporter was far more interested in his own Q’s than in anyone else’s A’s. She wasn’t sure of his name, which had been given in a flurry of handshakes and greetings over coffee at 10:00 A.M. and reiterated during the lunch break. The men here all looked alike-Ivy League preppy with floppy hair, khaki trousers, and button-down shirts with sleeves rolled up to the exact point just below the elbow, almost as if they had been measured with a ruler. And all white. The male reporters picked for this tutorial in investigative techniques were extremely white, white-white, so white that they made Tess doubt her own credentials as a Caucasian.