cops take him very, very seriously. One day he’d slip up and CPD, the FBI, or maybe the IRS would nail him. Until then, he was the deadliest predator in the jungle.
Ray shuddered.
“Look up, Ray,” I said quietly.
He did, and he saw what I had seen a moment before.
Doors were open all up and down the hallway. People stood in them, men and women, children, parents, the elderly. They all stood there silently and watched a little blond woman handling big mean Ray as if he were an unruly child.
Their eyes were very hard. And there wasn’t any fear in them now.
“Look at them, Ray,” I said.
He did. He shuddered again. Then his body stopped straining, and he sagged down.
“I’ll go,” he said.
“Fucking right you will.” I shoved on his arm, and he screamed with pain—but I hadn’t dislocated it. I only did it to give myself a moment to pick up my badge and step out of grab range, just in case he was too dumb to quit.
He wasn’t. He simply lay there like a beached shark.
“I’ll be checking back here, Ray. Regularly. If I think you’ve harmed any of these people, stolen or broken their property—hell, if I hear that you gave them a dirty look, I am going to find you and shove a bundle of rusty rebar up your ass. I promise.”
I took out one of my business cards, now obsolete, I supposed, and wrote down a phone number. I took the card to Maria and held it out for her. “If you have any trouble, you call this number on the back. You ask for Lieutenant Stallings. Tell him Murphy gave you the number.”
Maria bit her lip. Then she looked at Ray and back to me.
She took the card with a hurried, nervous little motion and scampered back, closing her apartment door. Several locks clicked shut.
I didn’t say anything else. I walked out of the building. I was halfway across the lot, heading back to Will’s place, when I heard quick footsteps coming behind me. I turned with one hand close to my Sig, but relaxed when I recognized Maria.
She stopped in front of me and said, “I s-saw something.”
I nodded and waited.
“There were some odd sounds, late last night. Like . . . like thumps.
And a little while later, a car rolled in. It pulled up to the building across the lot, and a man got out and left it running, like he wasn’t worried about it being stolen.”
“Did you recognize him?” I asked.
Maria shook her head. “But he was big. Almost as big as Ray, but he . . . You know, he moved better. He was in shape. And he was wearing an expensive suit.”
“What else can you tell me about him?” I asked.
Maria shrugged. “Not . . . not anything, really. I saw him come out again, right away. Then he got into the car and drove away. I didn’t see any plates or anything. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” I said quietly. “Thank you.”
She nodded and turned to scurry back toward her building. Then she stopped and looked back at me. “I don’t know if it matters,” she said, “but the man had one of those army haircuts.”
I stiffened a little. “Do you remember what color hair?”
“Red,” she said. “Like, bright orange-red.” She swallowed. “If it matters.”
It mattered—but I didn’t want to scare her, so I nodded and smiled, then said, “Thank you, Maria. Seriously.”
She tried to smile back and did pretty well. Then she looked around her, as if uncomfortable standing in so much open space, and hurried back to her building.
A big guy in a suit with a bright red crew cut—it was almost word for word the short description in the notes of the file that CPD kept for a man named Hendricks.
Hendricks was a former college football player. He weighed upward of three hundred pounds, none of it excess. He had been under suspicion for several mysterious disappearances, mostly of criminal figures who seemed to have earned his boss’s displeasure. And his boss had, presumably, sent him to Will and Georgia’s building late last night.
But why?
To get an answer, I was going to have to talk to Hendricks’s boss.
I had to go see “Gentleman” John Marcone.
THE POLICE KNOW where Marcone can be reached. Finding him doesn’t do diddly to let us nail him. The fact that he has his fingers in so many pies means that not only do we have to work against Marcone