“Lucas, there are girls in this church who are much younger than your daughter,” Virgil said.
“Ah, man,” Davenport said. “Where do you want the plane?”
THEY SETTLED THAT, and he got Davenport to switch him up to the DNA lab, where he talked to a tech. The lab was still processing the DNA from the hair taken from Spooner’s couch, but, the tech said, she’d have something to tell Virgil by noon the next day.
Virgil got off and said to Coakley, “Noon tomorrow. I do believe we’ll have Miz Spooner in jail by two o’clock.”
“That could crack it,” Coakley said. She patted him on the thigh again.
12
Loewe watched the two cops go out to their truck and pull away, and he stepped away from the window and grabbed the roll of window plastic and began unrolling it, quickly, then frantically, his hands shaking. He cut a sheet and carried it to a window and began trying to tape it up, but he was so frantic now, shaking so badly, that he finally let it crumple to the floor, and dropped into his only easy chair and covered his face with his hands.
He should have left. He should have left right after Kelly was killed, should have gotten everything together and gone out to San Francisco. He was a good carpenter, had taken cabinetry classes, knew enough electric and plumbing to get along. He’d been told he could make a fortune out in San Francisco. He could find jobs in the underground economy, paid with cash, and live quietly and invisibly and mostly legally, until he found out how everything shook out.
Now, they were looking right at him. He had nothing to do with Kelly Baker, but he knew about it, and that was enough. That was their message. They were floating a deal, but if the church were blown up, no deal would stick. Not for him. He’d been a boy in the church, used by older men, and then he got to be a man, and had used the younger boys as he had been used . . . and nobody in the World of Law would forgive that.
He had more than thirteen hundred dollars in the bank, and a good paid-off F250, only six years old. He could still run to San Francisco, sell the truck, move down to a little-used Tacoma, license it in a fake company name, put together a Mexican crew from the Wal-Mart slave markets, live underground. . . .
He put the first knuckle of his right fist into his mouth and bit until it hurt. What to do?
Twenty minutes after the cops left, he’d cooled down, and he called Emmett Einstadt. “I need to see you. The sooner the better. I think . . . at the Blue Earth rest stop.”
“Blue Earth? What are you talking about, Harvey?”
“Because we need to see who comes in after us. That’s why. I need to talk to you, and we need to see who comes in after us. Be there. One hour from now, exactly. Don’t get there one minute early, or one minute late. If you aren’t there, you won’t be seeing me again. Ever.”
There was a long silence as Einstadt took that in. He started, “Harvey—”
“I’m not fooling around here, Emmett, and I’m not going to talk about it on any phone or cell phone or any other way, or in any building,” Loewe said, and the panic was bleeding into the phone. “You be there.”
Loewe hung up and watched the phone: when it didn’t ring, he figured Einstadt would be there.
AND HE WAS.
He followed Einstadt’s Silverado into the highway rest stop, parked next to him. The Silverado had a crew cab, and he climbed out of his Ford and into the back of the Chevy. Einstadt turned half-sideways in the driver’s seat to take him in. “What in the heck was so blamed urgent—”
“The cops came this morning. The sheriff and the state guy, whatever his name is. Flowers. They’ve hooked up Jake Flood and Kelly Baker, they’ve got information coming from someplace, I don’t know where. But they know, Emmett, or they’re about to find out. They were hinting around that I could deal with them. . . .”
“What’d you say?”
“I said I didn’t know what the heck they were talking about. What did you want me to say? That I fucked Jacky Shoen last week?”
“Watch your language, Harvey,” Einstadt said. “You’re talking to the Senior.”