Donatti exhaled a plume of sour, booze-laden breath. “She left on her own.” He stubbed out his cigarette and pulled out two water bottles, tossing one to Decker. “Something changed her mind.”
Decker drank greedily. “Any ideas what?”
“No.” Donatti looked at him. “I told you she was unstable. She was even more freaked after she met with you. You probably scared her away.”
“Me?” Decker answered.
“Yeah, you! You freaked her out.”
“Then it was up to you to calm her back down-”
“Fuck you, Decker!”
Neither one spoke as they gulped down water. Decker touched his nose. It was throbbing with pain. “Assuming she left on her own, where could she have gone?”
“I don’t know. There’s no place as safe as mine.” Donatti gritted his teeth. “I can’t imagine why she bolted! It doesn’t make sense. You gotta leave now. I gotta make some calls.”
Decker said, “You want to do me a big favor?”
“No. Get the fuck out of here!”
“Stop being so vile!” Decker finished the smoke and the water. “You want to make some headway, do yourself a favor and stay out of it. At least, for now.”
Donatti jerked his head up. “I think my fist scrambled your brains. Get out of here!” He pulled out a gun. “OUT!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Decker felt his lip. That throbbed, too. “What is that? A Walther double automatic? Twenty-four rounds, right? It’s a nice one.”
Donatti squinted at him, then erupted into laughter. “I’m glad you approve.”
“Put it down, Chris… please.”
“Since you said please.” He placed it on the table and picked up the booze.
“Donatti, let’s think this out logically,” Decker began. “I came to New York as this big-cop lieutenant to help out with a homicide. What happened? I fanned, kiddo. Zilch as far as Lieber’s murder, and now Shayndie’s dead. The local heat have got to be thinking that I’m a bust-this big, dumb lug from hick town L.A. who couldn’t detect his way out of a paper bag.”
He dabbed his face and nose with the wet towel.
“It’s not far from the truth.”
Donatti regarded the lieutenant’s face, then passed him the bottle.
Decker took a drink. “Right now, I’m a washout. No one’s afraid of me. Not the Liebers, not the cops, not you, and not the bastards who whacked Shaynda and Ephraim. I’m a steaming turd, my man. No one wants to get near me. But you… you’re different, Donatti. You’ve got the rep as a real nasty dude. If you start nosing around and the perps get wind of your involvement, they’re going to rabbit. Even worse, if you screw up, you’re dead meat. Me, on the other hand, I screw up, it’s par for the course. For the time being, it’s in both of our best interests to keep you a guarded secret.”
The room was quiet.
Donatti banged his fist on the table, wincing in pain. The gun jumped up and down, landing with the barrel pointed at Decker’s stomach.
“Get that thing out of here,” Decker groaned.
“Shit!” Donatti picked up the Walther and stowed it underneath his shirt. Rage invaded his face. “They got one of my girls, Decker. It’s personal!”
“But if she bolted, and they didn’t take her from under your nose, it isn’t personal. Think about it for a moment, Chris. Say I did scare her into bolting. Then whoever popped Shaynda didn’t even know she had an association with you. If that’s the case, you sure don’t want it advertised that she was one of yours, right?”
Donatti was silent.
“Talk to your people, Chris. Maybe they’ll tell you she simply rabbited.”
“Is it possible you were followed last night?” Donatti said.
“I don’t see how!” Decker said. “I took so many twists and turns, it would have been impossible to tail me. Not because I was so clever, but because I was lost.”
“Did you check for a tail?”
“Christopher, that’s offensive.”
He threw his head back and looked at the ceiling.
Decker said, “Talk to your girls.”
“Of course I’ll talk to my girls.” He ran his fingers atop his stubble of hair. “Man, there goes that trust. I was invincible to them. They’ll never feel the same way again.”
“I would think just the opposite, Donatti. If Shayndie ran away on her own accord, it’ll make you look stronger in their eyes. They’ll have to be thinking, ‘See what happens when someone tries to make it on her own. See what happens when I don’t have Mr. Donatti’s protection.’ That’s what I’d be thinking.”
Decker raised a brow.
“Am I right about this?”
Donatti didn’t answer. He picked up the bottle, then put it down, his face restored to its former expressionless self.
“You’ll have to trust me on this one.” Decker took the wet towel off his face. Now his nose was frozen as well as sore. “As tempted as you are, you’ve got to stay out of it. You’re an excellent hunter, Donatti, when you know who your prey is. But in this case, we don’t know the prey. That’s my specialty. Finding the bastards. Let me handle it.”
Again Donatti looked at him.
“Yeah? I’m right? You know that.” Decker nodded. “You back off and you won’t be sorry. Because I’m going to find this son of a bitch and put him in deep freeze. Don’t worry. He’ll be taken care of.”
“Not the way I had in mind.”
“It’s true we have different styles,” Decker said. “This entire mess has to do with my business-my family. You owe it to me so I can redeem myself. Give me this one or we’ll both end up in deep shit.” He touched his nose and lip. “How the hell am I going to explain this to my wife?”
“Just tell her some random nutcase came up and slugged you. It’s New York. She’ll believe you.” Donatti rubbed his head and pushed the bottle over to him. “I don’t see what I missed… There must be something else going on.”
“Maybe there is.” Decker inhaled. It hurt to breathe. “If you give me a chance to figure this out, then maybe we’ll both know what happened.”
Silence.
Decker needed Donatti’s cooperation; he didn’t want to get in Chris’s way. Mistakes could be lethal. “So you’ll back off, right?”
“No, I won’t back off,” Donatti snapped back. “But since it’s your family, I’ll give you a twenty-four-hour head start. Then it’s everyone for himself.”
“Even I can’t work that fast. Seventy-two hours, Chris. At the end of three days-solve or no solve-I’m out of here.”
“Right.”
“Donatti, I’m not jerking my chain over this. No one has a one-hundred-percent solve rate.”
“What’s yours?”
“High enough. But it’s not one hundred percent.”
“Forty-eight hours.”
“Sixty hours, starting now. You broke my nose, you bastard. You owe it to me.”
Chris leaned over the desk and examined Decker’s features. “No, I didn’t break your nose. I just clipped it. I got you on the cheek-bone’s swollen, but not too bad. It wasn’t full force, Decker. If I had meant business, your face would have been a Cubist study.”
“If you’re asking me to thank you, forget it. Sixty hours.”
“This is stupid! You want me to back off until you leave town, I’ll do it. But I’m not paying for your funeral.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I’m serious, Lieutenant. You may be a good cop in L.A., but out here you don’t know horseshit.”
“So fill me in.”
“That’s impossible. Could you fill me in on what makes a good Homicide cop in Los Angeles? These kinds of things are intuitive. I’ve lived on these streets and with these people all my life. It’s just this… feel-this sixth sense. Here I can do in a day what you couldn’t do in a year. I’d actually be an asset to you.”
“I don’t think a partnership would enhance either one of us in the reputation department.”
“I’ve worked with cops before.”
“Not honest ones.”
“No such animal.”
Decker didn’t argue. What was the point?