At the time Shepherd had accused his mother of giving up. Now he understood.
After a while his phone rang once again. He looked at the screen, answered it.
“We’ve found who you’re looking for,” Rose said. “Arrangements for a meeting are being finalized.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
“When I call, be there fast,” she said. “This situation has to be resolved immediately, I’ve got a bad feeling about who this might be.”
“Who?” he asked, to see whether she’d gotten it right, making it sound like it didn’t matter to him.
“Someone we all used to know,” she muttered, and cut the connection.
Shepherd stood. She knew. That didn’t matter. It merely made it all the more important that Madison O’Donnell wound up dead, and that it happened fast.
He got his gun out of the suitcase and closed it up.
chapter
THIRTY-SIX
“I don’t see how we’re going to do this,” Gary said.
We’d spent five minutes inspecting the back of the building in Belltown, confirming that the windows were boarded from the second story up. Their condition was academic: The fire escape stopped ten feet from the ground, and I wouldn’t have trusted a cat’s weight on the rest. The ground-level door had a pair of Dorling bolts, which could be opened only from the inside. It would have taken time and a sledgehammer to get through the door from here, an endeavor that would arouse comment in the parking lot that ran right up to the back wall and in which we sat, peering up through the windshield. Patrons came and went, and an officious-looking man was sitting in a booth. He’d already given us a long and suspicious glare. Nobody was going to be dealing drugs on this guy’s watch. Or smashing down doors.
We got out of the car and walked around the side to the road that ran along the front of the building. Crossed the street and stood looking at it from the other side. It was coming up to five o’clock. Passing road traffic was light and moving fairly fast. Nobody in a car was going to notice much. The problem was pedestrians. There was enough cause for people to be on their feet in this part of Belltown—a few battered bars, hopeful new ones, restaurants dotted here and there. Most people would mind their own business. Some would not.
“Go over and ring the buzzer,” I said.
Fisher went across the street. I watched the windows of the upper story as he leaned on each of the buttons in turn. The sky was overcast and dark enough that the reflections were muted, but there was no discernible change behind any of them. Gary looked back at me. I held my right hand up to my ear, nodded upward. He got out his phone, dialed. He shrugged. Nothing changed.
He walked back. “So now what?”
I went into a convenience store, and then we met L.T. outside the coffeehouse on the next corner up from the building, the one Gary had been sitting outside when he took his photos of Amy. L.T. was on the sidewalk with a friend, a tall guy who looked so disreputable you could have arrested him just for being alive and probably made it stick. He regarded Fisher and me with something between hunger and open hostility, but he probably looked at his own reflection that way, too.
“I said to meet inside,” I reminded him.
“Threw us out,” L.T. answered.
I offered him a cigarette, a folded fifty lying on top of the pack. He took the note, along with two cigarettes, winked at his friend.
“So?”
“Nobody come out,” he said. “They still inside.”
“You want to earn another fifty? Each?”
“Shit,” L.T. said, which I took as assent.
“Either of you holding?” They shook their heads. “No, really.” After a beat, both nodded. “You don’t want to be,” I said. “Stash it somewhere. Now.”
They touched hands with the lightness of magicians, and then the tall one trotted around the corner to hide their drugs.
“Okay,” I said when he got back. “Here’s what we’re going to do.” I pointed down the street. “I want one of you on each of those corners.”
“And do what?”
“Just stand in the middle of the sidewalk. Eyefuck anyone who looks like they’re heading your way, but don’t do or say anything. To anyone. Okay? I just want five minutes without too many people passing that building.”
“What this shit about?” L.T. asked.
“None of your business.” I gave him the money. “When you can’t see us anymore, you can go.”
L.T. took the cash, nodded at Fisher. “This dude ever say anything?”
“He’s choosy. Only talks to other narcotics cops. And he’s seen where you hide your shit. Understand?”
L.T. made the money disappear. “Don’t you want to know about the girl?”
“What girl?”
“Little girl I told you about, man.”
“Not really,” I said. “Why?”
“See her again, last night. She come back later, go right up to the door. Keep pressing a buzzer. But there ain’t nobody answer. And then I see her later watching outside some new bar, a couple blocks downtown. Way after little-girl bedtime, you know?”
“Great,” I said. “Now go stand where I told you to.”
Gary and I waited as the two guys crossed the street. L.T. took the corner nearest us. His friend loped down to the other end of the block. Within a couple of minutes, most pedestrians were electing to cross to the other side rather than walk close to either of them.
“Let’s go,” I said.
I went across the street and straight up to the door of the building, Gary following right behind. “Get out your phone,” I said. “Make it look like you’re placing a call. Glance up at the building once in a while.”
I got out my key ring. I took it slow, trying to feel confident that the combination of a largely empty sidewalk behind me and a colleague who looked like he was trying to get hold of someone in the building to achieve legitimate entry, would make me invisible for long enough.
“Christ,” Fisher said after a couple of minutes. “There’s a police car.”
“Where?”
“Down at the intersection.”
“Keep an eye on it.”
I kept moving the tool. Trying just to feel the metal inside the lock, the balance of tensions, the ways the hidden components did and did not want to move. It wasn’t happening. I switched to a more flexible tool.
“Fuck—he’s gone,” Fisher said, looking up the street the other way.
“The police?”
“No—your friend. L.T. Just vanished, didn’t even see him go.”
“What are the cops doing now?”
“They’ve pulled over. Where that other guy is.”
“He’ll be fine.”
“He’s running this way.”
“Oh, crap,” I said. I glanced around and saw L.T.’s friend pounding up the sidewalk. One cop was running after him, the other stood at the car, on the radio.
“Stupid fucker kept L.T.’s drugs,” I said. “You can’t trust any one.”
“Jack, he’s heading toward us.”
“I know that. Put your back to the street.”
I turned to the door again, closed my eyes. I heard the sound of the foot pursuit, the cop shouting at the running suspect, but tried to concentrate only on the feel of the thin piece of metal in my hands.