“Don’t push me, Colby. Be a good boy and lay down.”
“No,” he said, taking a step toward me.
“Don’t make me shoot you.”
“You won’t. In the first place, I’m unarmed and I haven’t threatened or attacked you. In the second place, you haven’t told me that I’m under arrest. In the third place, if you shoot me you won’t get what you really want.”
He was right on all counts. My right hand began to quiver. I squeezed the butt of my gun to steady myself but it didn’t help. My belly broke out in minitremors. I could feel them but I hoped Colby couldn’t see them.
“Where’s Wendy?”
“She’s not at the Andrijas’ house.”
“That’s what you were doing there? Looking for her? Then where is she?”
“That’s not the way this is going to work. You put your gun down and kick it over to me. Then we’ll talk.”
“She loves you. Now you’re using her as a bargaining chip?”
“You’re the one pointing a gun at me. Doesn’t leave me a lot of choice.”
I reached in my pocket with my left hand, removed my cell phone, and?ipped it open. “I make one call, we’ll have company. Or you can tell me where I can find Wendy and walk away.”
“Go ahead. Make the call. That will be worse than shooting me. Troy and the rest of the gang will show up. I won’t talk until I get a lawyer and the lawyer won’t let me say a word. Besides, they’ve got nothing to charge me with. By the time I walk out the door, it won’t matter where Wendy is. It will be too late.”
My heart slammed into my throat. “She’s alive?”
“Last time I saw her.”
“When was that?”
“Last night.”
“Where?”
“Her place. We were having dinner. I left. When I came back, she was gone.”
“How can you do this to her?”
Colby ran his hands through his scraggly hair, his eyes hard but not hard enough to hide a pained wince, too?eeting to be fake. Kate had been a better teacher than she gave me credit for. I was seeing things I would have missed.
“I’m not the one doing it.”
His question matched his involuntary confession. He was worried about Wendy, too.
“Then let me help you get her back.”
“It’s not that simple,” he said, looking away.
And then I understood. “So you’re willing to sacrifice her to save your own ass. Just like you did Thomas Rice.”
Colby took a deep breath as if he was about to launch a denial and then dropped his hands in surrender. “Rice was different.”
“Different because you weren’t sleeping with him?”
“Different because you think you know what you’re talking about but you don’t. Wendy’s a big girl. She made her choices, just like me.”
He was baiting me, implicating Wendy as an accomplice, something I wouldn’t buy. “When you didn’t show for your polygraph, Troy sent a couple of agents to your house. They found enough drugs and cash to put you away for a long time. If anything happens to Wendy, that won’t matter because I’ll kill you before you serve a day.”
“The way my luck is running, you’ll have to get in line.”
“Jill Rice denies calling our office looking for someone to buy her car. She says her ex had it all set up before he went to prison. That it was all part of a deal to set him up for when he got out.”
“I guess that’s a better story than the one I told.”
“You have a good story for the money and dope that was found in your house?”
“Yeah, and this one is irresistible. I’m not that stupid. I know how the game is played. I was set up.”
“Why?”
“To discredit me if I came in and told what I know.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I needed an exit strategy. The drug business is like every other business, Jack. Everyone always wants a bigger slice of the pie. I took mine and used it to buy the house and car. People I do business with didn’t like it.”
“Who are they?”
“Sorry, Jack. I’m not making that deal with you or anyone else anytime soon.”
“There’s a big difference between the drug business and every other business,” I told him. “You steal from GM, they send you to jail. You steal from drug dealers, they kill you.”
“Except I’ve got an insurance policy. Anything happens to me, they go down. Long as they don’t find it, I’ve got leverage. They must have snatched Wendy, figuring she gives them leverage against me.”
“Except you’re willing to let her die!”
He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s an ugly world, Jack. You arrest me, they’ll think I gave them up and they’ll kill Wendy. You kill me and they’ll kill her because they won’t need her and can’t risk letting her go. Now put your gun down.”
Colby took two more steps toward me. I raised my gun at his chest, but my arm began to wobble and then I began to shake. My eyes clamped shut as the fog wrapped around my brain. I twisted and folded in half at the same instant, slammed with contractions that took my breath away. I tried to straighten, but the contractions pulled me to my knees and held me there like chains.
I felt Colby next to me, felt him take the gun from my hand. I opened my eyes. He was standing over me.
I forced my words into a choppy stutter. “What happened to you?”
“I looked around and decided I didn’t want to be you. I wanted a life I couldn’t afford at my pay grade. I had the girl, the house, and the car. Then you fucked it up. Anything happens to Wendy, it will be on your head.”
The contractions eased. My breath was ragged. The shakes were hitting me on and off as if a child was playing with a switch.
“How did I fuck it up?”
“By doing your job.”
“What about your girlfriend, Tanja? You running out on her, too?”
He laughed. “That’s your problem, Jack. You only see what you want to see.”
“My daughter is the only one I want to see. What’s happened to her?”
His mouth turned up in a cruel grin.
“Maybe she didn’t want to be like you, either.”
Another wave of contractions rocked me, arching my back and neck. Colby shoved me on to my side. I watched with clenched teeth as he scooped up his gun and threw mine against the fence. He looked at me, shook his head, turned, and ran away, his silhouette suddenly familiar. I’d seen it once before when he ran away from Marcellus Pearson’s house. The fog came again and I closed my eyes, shaking while his footsteps faded in the darkness.
Chapter Fifty-eight
Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice in Wonderland that if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. My midnight trip to Strawberry Hill would have made the Mad Hatter proud, though I had learned enough to get me back on my feet.
Wendy was alive. I didn’t know where she was or how I would find her, but she was alive. Colby had implied that she was as guilty as he was. I wouldn’t believe that unless Wendy told me. Even if it was true, it changed nothing.
I focused on what I knew. Colby said that I had screwed up his plans by doing my job. My last job had been shutting down Marcellus Pearson. That threatened Colby because Marcellus would have given him up to make a deal with the U.S. Attorney.
That explained what Colby was doing near Marcellus’s house the night of the murders. He’d come there to kill Marcellus, only Latrell had beaten him to it, just as Marty Grisnik had surmised. Colby must have waited around long enough to be certain that the job was finished, letting Latrell kill Oleta Phillips.
With Marcellus out of the way, he knew we’d go after Javy Ordonez next. Colby couldn’t let that happen because Javy would also give him up in a heartbeat, so Javy had to die, too. Colby followed Latrell, found the murder weapon, and used it to kill Javy.
Colby must have blessed his luck when he found the photograph of Latrell and his mother. He left the murder weapon beneath a Dumpster where it was likely to be found and planted the photograph of Latrell, nailing him for the murders he was guilty of while framing him for one he didn’t commit.