“Go ahead and step out, Brady,” Sandy said.
“Jesus, Sandy, really?”
The driver pounded my car’s trunk once with his fist. “Get out,” he said. “Now!”
I rolled my window up, opened the car door, and stepped out. Sandy backed away. “Do you have a weapon on you?” he asked. He looked me up and down like he was sizing me up.
“Who’s your angry friend?” I asked, nodding toward the back bumper where the driver was still standing.
“Agent Barnwell,” the guy said. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“Oh,” I said, turning to look at him. “Welcome to Gastonia.” I turned back to Sandy. “I’ve got a.38 under my seat, and I’ve got a license to carry it.”
“I told you he had a gun,” Barnwell said. Sandy looked at him, and then he ducked down and reached under my seat and felt around until he found the gun. He opened the cylinder, dumped the bullets into his hand, and dropped them into his pocket.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“That’s it,” I said.
“No it’s not,” Barnwell said. He walked around the other side of the car, so I couldn’t see him without turning my head. “We’ve got some questions for you.”
“I’m ready when you are,” I said, my back still to him.
“Not out here,” he said. “Inside.”
I turned to face him. “What makes you think I’m letting you in my house?”
He smiled and put his hands in his pockets. “We can do it down at the police station if you’d like,” he said. “Give you a chance to see all your old friends. Detective Sanders was just telling me on the way over about what a huge fan club you’ve got down there.” I looked at him for a second, and then I turned back to Sandy.
“Y’all have to take off your shoes if you’re coming inside,” I said. “I won’t get my security deposit back if you track bullshit everywhere.” I turned and looked at Barnwell and took my keys out of my pocket. “And you’d better move your car before one of my neighbors sees that you don’t know how to park. Director Freeh’s not going to appreciate you getting his car keyed.”
The inside of my apartment was dark, and I flipped on the lights and Sandy and Barnwell followed me into the small kitchen.
“Nice place,” Barnwell said, looking around and smiling.
“Thanks,” I said. “I love hosting parties.”
“You mind if we go into the living room and sit down?” Sandy asked. “We just need to talk for a bit. It won’t take long.” They followed me into the living room, and I turned on the light on the ceiling fan and sat down in the recliner. Barnwell looked around the room, and then he took a seat on the sofa beside Sandy.
“Y’all see Sammy get fifty-eight tonight?” I asked, but they just sat there staring at me. I looked at Barnwell. “You not a big baseball fan?”
He pulled out a pad and pen from inside his jacket. He flipped through the pad until he found an empty page. “What were you doing at Tomcat’s tonight?” he asked.
I shrugged and raised my eyebrows. “Having a four-dollar beer,” I said. “That’s what you should be investigating.”
Barnwell looked up from his pad. “How do you know Tommy Broughton?” he asked.
“The same way Sandy knows him. We used to run into him from time to time. You meet all kinds of people in this line of work,” I said. “Gangsters, thugs, FBI.”
Barnwell laughed and closed his pad. “You’re a piece of work, Weller,” he said. He looked over at Sandy. “He’s a piece of work, isn’t he?” He stood up from the sofa and walked past me and stopped at the sliding-glass door. He pulled back the curtain and looked out onto my tiny, cluttered patio. He acted like he was looking at something, even though I knew it was too dark out there and too bright in here for him to see anything besides my rusty, old grill and folding chairs. The curtain swished closed when he let it go, and then I felt his hand rest on the back of the recliner. I looked up and saw him staring down at me.
“That was cute,” he said. “Turning up the music: they teach you that in alarm school?”
“No,” I said. “I saw it on Law & Order.” Barnwell snorted again, and then he looked at Sandy. “I can’t believe you got to work with this guy,” he said, smiling. Sandy was leaning forward, staring at me. “We should take you down to the station and let you do some stand-up,” Barnwell said. “Maybe you could sign some autographs for your fan club.”
“They’re a devoted bunch,” I said. I stared at him until he looked away.
“Brady,” Sandy said, “what the hell were you doing there tonight?”
“No,” Barnwell said before I could respond. “No more questions.” He stepped in front of me so that I couldn’t see Sandy anymore. “If you do that again, if you piss on this investigation again, I will do everything in my power to bury you,” he said. “You can take that to mean anything you’d like, but you should know that I mean it. We don’t need you out there playing cop. Those days are over.”
“What he’s saying, Brady, is that we’ve got everything under control,” Sandy said.
“It seems like it,” I said. “Y’all are really doing a great job.”
Barnwell laughed and walked back over to the sliding-glass door and stood staring at the closed curtain, his hands making fists in his pockets.
“Brady, I’m telling you: don’t do this again,” Sandy said. “That’s not going to help anybody: not those girls, not us, and definitely not you.”
Barnwell turned around and pointed at me. “You pull some shit like that one more time and I won’t come back here looking to talk,” he said. “You’re in the way, Weller, and I’ve been on this case for too long for you to waltz in and blow it here at the end.”
“In the way of what?” I asked. “Finding the money or finding those girls?”
“We think we’ll find both of them if you let us do our jobs,” Sandy said, standing up.
“I hope so,” I said. “I also hope you know what’s out there.”
“We know more than you think,” Barnwell said.
“I doubt that.”
They both stood there looking at me, but then Sandy reached into his pocket and brought out a closed fist that held the bullets he’d taken out of my.38. He lined them up slowly one by one on the coffee table. When he was finished he looked up and smiled. “Have a good night,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”
I kept my seat and watched them leave, and I didn’t move until I heard the car crank and pull away from my apartment. It was only then that I walked to the small hall closet, opened the door, and pulled down my old suitcase from the top shelf.
Easter Quillby
CHAPTER 26
The first night after leaving Charleston we pulled off the highway at a rest stop in North Carolina. We got out and used the bathroom and got some snacks and some Cokes from the vending machines and went back to the car. Wade pulled around back behind the bathrooms, hoping we could stay there for the night, but just as we got settled in a man in a uniform came and knocked on the windshield with a flashlight and told us we couldn’t spend the night there. Wade rolled the window up without saying anything, started the car, and pulled back onto the highway.