That question hit Nomad like a double blow to both heart and stomach. “What?” he managed to croak.
“Here he is.” Allen slid from the folder a sheet of paper and pushed it toward Nomad. On it was the color photograph of a man’s face, his eyes hooded in shadow. “This is his most recent driver’s license photo. His name is Jeremy Parker Pett, born January 5th, 1978 in Reno, Nevada. Ever seen him?”
Nomad was in a daze. He thought he shook his head. “No.”
Allen let him stare at the face in the picture for a few more seconds, and then he returned it to the folder. “The doctors are giving Mr. Emerson an eighty percent chance to pull through.”
“That’s good. Thank…um…why…” Nomad couldn’t make sense of what he was trying to ask, so he waited for it to come together. “Why…is this…Pett guy after us?”
“You’ve figured that out, have you? That Jeremy Pett is following you? Stalking your band, I guess would be the better way to describe it.”
Nomad swallowed thickly. “What’s he got against us?”
“We’ll talk about that,” Allen said, his gaze steady. “First we have to talk about some other things. You’re pale. Want some water?”
“I’m all right.”
“Sure about that?”
“Yeah,” Nomad said, and he meant it. He drew a long breath and let it out. “This isn’t…what I expected to be happening today. So how did you find out this was the guy?”
“Later. Right now we have to talk about your future. I understand you refused to see Captain Garza when he came here. I’ve talked to Miss Collier about the phone conversation you had. One would think you wanted to curl up in here and try to make the world stop turning. Is that what you want, John?”
“I want to be left alone.”
“Hm,” Allen said. “Sorry, I can’t do that. You’re much too important to me to be left alone.”
Allen leaned forward slightly, his hands still on the brown folder that held the picture of Jeremy Pett. “I want you to walk out of here with me,” he said. “Today. In fact…” He checked his wristwatch. “Within the next half-hour.”
“Oh, right!” Nomad couldn’t supress a crazed grin. “Just walk out of jail! After the shit I stirred up? Right!”
“Yes,” Allen said. “Right.”
Nomad searched the man’s eyes, which had taken on a flinty color. “Are you serious? How the fuck can I just walk out of here? I’m a prisoner!”
“I can take you out. Simple as that.”
“You can…take me out? Uh uh!” Nomad leaned back in his chair; he wanted to laugh, but he didn’t think Truitt Allen would like the sound of it and he decided he’d better not piss off Truitt Allen. “It’s not simple, man. I don’t know what this is about, but I know it’s not simple.”
“You did cause some damage, yeah. You did kind of fly off the handle. But, some things have come to light since you were brought in here.”
“What things?”
Now it was Allen’s turn to lean back, and cross one leg at the ankle. Nomad saw he was wearing socks the same color as his shirt. “Number one: the wall you tore down. With the mural on it.”
“Okay, so what?”
“The building inspector found an electrical wiring hazard behind it. If you hadn’t broken the wall up and exposed it, the place might have caught fire sooner or later. So maybe you saved the restaurant, and maybe the owner is grateful to you.”
“I’m sure he is,” Nomad said sarcastically.
“The nightshift cook had no permit for his pistol,” Allen went on, his expression nearly the same as in his picture ID. “So he’s in a little trouble himself. The waitress you attacked turned out to have a few skeletons in her own cupboard. One big one, like being wanted under her real name for the sale of crystal meth in Amarillo two years ago. Seems her current boyfriend has been cooking the stuff in a rented house on North Edith Boulevard.”
“What’ve you been doing?” Nomad asked. “Beating the bushes?”
“Beating them ’til they bleed,” Allen said.
“I hit a guy in the mouth. I think I might have broken his jaw.” Nomad cocked his head to one side. “Are you going to tell me he needed oral surgery anyway and I saved his folks some money?”
“No. He’s an honor student at UA with a father in the banking business. Big Wildcats supporter. The other kid whose shoulder you dislocated is a trombone player in the marching band. So…you’re still up for assault and battery, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. Am I?”
A slow smile crept across Allen’s mouth, but his eyes remained cool. “A real tough guy, huh? Mad at the world? Think it owes you something?”
“Wrong. Nobody owes me a fucking thing.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use that word.”
“What word?”
“The four-letter word, and don’t play stupid. How come you people use that word all the time? You use it so much it doesn’t mean anything. Noun, verb, adjective…using it says your mind is lazy because you can’t come up with another descriptive.”
“What people are you talking about?” Nomad asked, doing his best Clint Eastwood squint.
“Young people,” said Allen. “If this is the voice of the future, I’m glad I won’t be around a whole lot longer to hear it.”
“That’s your problem,” Nomad said, and he wished he had a cigarette because in the time-honored tradition of prison movies he would’ve spewed smoke in the old fucker’s face.
Or maybe not, because he didn’t particularly care to wind up in the infirmary today, and anybody with the first name of Truitt probably had a lot of practice putting people in plaster casts and bandages. And to tangle with an FBI agent, even a geezer like this? No way.
After a long pause during which Nomad thought he could hear the geezer’s wristwatch ticking, Allen said, “Let’s talk about your problem, John. Which I think is not going to go away anytime soon.”
“What would that be?”
“Jeremy Pett,” came the answer. “You know, we think the bullets that hit Mr. Emerson were fired from the top level of a parking deck. We didn’t find any brass, he cleaned up after himself, but we believe we’ve calculated the firing angle pretty well. It definitely was a downward shot. A difficult shot. You know how far away that parking deck is from where Mr. Emerson was hit?” He didn’t wait for a guess, which wasn’t coming anyway. “Across the street and three blocks away. He had a sliver of a view to work with, but he found a position to watch the van, and he might’ve been sitting there for hours. Just waiting for somebody to come get it after the show. Probably didn’t matter who it was, as long as it was a member of your band.”
“George is our manager,” Nomad said. “He’s not on stage. How could this fu…how could this guy recognize George?”
“He may have seen him at one of your shows, or—”
“Gigs,” Nomad corrected, for the sake of it.
“Okay, thank you for that. Or, as I was about to say, he probably got a good look at Mr. Emerson when he was scoping you at that gas station outside Sweetwater. Bear in mind, Pett has likely—I’d say without a doubt—gone to your Internet site and made note of your stops during this tour. Am I getting anywhere with you? Impressing you on how serious this young man is?”
He was. Nomad frowned and looked down at the green-tiled floor, but no answers lay there. “Why does he want to kill us? We haven’t done anything to him.”
“That you know of,” Allen said.
Nomad lifted his gaze back to meet the other man’s. “What’s that mean?”
“It means,” Allen said, in a slow and deliberate voice, “that Jeremy Pett is probably not going to stop what he’s doing—for whatever reason he has, whatever grudge he’s holding—until he’s satisfied. I’m telling you that Mr. Emerson—”