The Dangerous Edge of Things - By Tina Whittle Page 0,48
which was exactly what I thought it was. As we drove past Boomers, the club’s lights striped the car interior with pink and purple neon bands. The crowd had thickened, and there was an Oldsmobile cop car pulled up at the entrance. I squinted at the figure standing right beside said cop car, hands on hips, looking mean and official.
Garrity. And he was staring right at me.
“Oh crap!” I turned my face away and hunkered down in the seat. “Get outta here!”
“What? Why?”
“Just do it! I can’t let him see me!”
“Who?”
“The cop! I’m not supposed to be investigating, and he’ll be pissed as hell!”
So Rico drove. I stayed on the floor. He turned the music up. “Hate to break it to you, baby girl, but I think you’re busted. Cop dude’s still watching, and you’re right—he looks pissed as hell.”
***
Back at the Ritz, I sat by the phone like a guilty teenager, waiting for Garrity to call and chew me out. But he never did. And since I wasn’t about to call him, I went to bed around two, feeling like I’d temporarily dodged a bullet.
The call came at three-fifteen, and the dread returned. Only it wasn’t Garrity—it was an officer with the Kennesaw Police Department.
“Ms. Randolph?” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”
Chapter 25
“What security system?” I said.
The Kennesaw officer looked perplexed. “The one rigged to the window. Nobody made it inside, though—the burglar bars did the job, and once the alarm started, your perpetrator fled the scene.”
I took another deep breath. In the shop, a second officer took notes, his shoes crunching on the glass shards that used to be the gun shop’s front window. Somewhere on my floor was a brick. And apparently none of this would have been discovered without the security system that alerted the Kennesaw cops.
Only one problem. Dexter didn’t have a security system. And I hadn’t installed one.
I explained this to the deputy. He scratched his forehead. “Well, there was one in there. A surveillance camera too, only it got busted. The perpetrator hit it with another brick. “
“If you’re talking about the thing mounted on the wall behind the register, it’s broken.”
He looked at me like I was slow. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you—somebody hit it with a brick and broke it. He had good aim too, whoever it was. Took it out in one shot.”
I didn’t try to explain. The old camera was for show only, a prop. Not that anyone could tell from looking at it—hence its current bashed-in state—but my real concern was the inventory.
“Was anything missing?”
“There doesn’t seem to be. The alarm scared off the perpetrator, and the safe is untouched. But you’ll want to check, of course.”
He was right about that. There were a lot of things I planned to check out, just as soon as I got ahold of Eric, who still wasn’t returning my calls.
Luckily, there was another person who was.
Garrity saw me and made his way over. He carried two cups of coffee, one of which he handed to me wordlessly. It was scalding hot and loaded with cream and sugar.
“You’ve got to stop calling me in the middle of the night,” he said. “It never turns out well.” He was dressed casually, but I saw the holster under the tan jacket.
I shrugged. “What can I say? You’re my go-to guy these days.”
He pulled the lid off his coffee and a tendril of steam curled into the air. “You have any idea who did this?”
“Nope. You?”
“Maybe.”
He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. It was a photocopy of a BOLO on William Aloysius Perkins. I checked out the mug shot—it looked just like the sketch I remembered from my second interview. An ordinary face: dark buzz cut growing out, round eyes, small nose, soft chin.
“Bulldog,” I said.
Garrity’s eyebrows rose. “You know this guy?”
“Janie told me about him. She’s convinced he killed Eliza.” I handed the paper back. “Is he a suspect?”
“Right now he’s wanted for questioning, but once they get him in a chair, I’m sure he’ll spill. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, you know what I mean? The manager at Boomers said he was usually riding the squirrel train.”
“The what?”
Garrity looped a slow circle at his temple. “High, whacked out, hyped.”
“You think he has something to do with this?”
“Maybe. There’s been a lot of camera breakage going on—first Phoenix, now here. And this guy’s got a history of B and E.”