your friends? These other three guys?”
“I don’t know.”
“You stupid, Luther, or you just look like you’re stupid?” Mike asked, pulling up a chair to sit opposite Mercer.
Mercer held out his arm to tell Mike to back away. “The two guys inside, who are they?”
“I only know their faces. Not their names.”
“How about the dude that ran off?”
Luther just stared at the tabletop. “Don’t know him.”
“Shit. So when you want to hang out with him,” Mike said, “you just ask around for the ugly mother with the big scar across his cheek? That how you find him?”
“What’s he running from?” Mercer asked.
“Just running, I guess.”
Mike slammed the table and Luther sat up. “Olympic trials, don’t you think, Detective Wallace? Fastest ex-con with his butt crack showing, sprinting away from a murder rap.”
“What you mean, murder?” Luther swallowed hard and looked to Mike, who stood up and turned his back.
“Scotty?” Mike called out into the sanctuary. “Any blood downstairs ? Body parts?”
“Not so far. A crack pipe and a dusting of white powder. Smoke and coke.”
“Your buddies are giving you up, Luther. They’re sitting inside the church, telling the other cops why they’re here,” Mercer said. “And they’re here because of you. Because your grandfather was kind enough to let you crash inside this church. Risk his job and everything he cares about. So who are they?”
“They just guys. We hang out sometimes.”
“PacMen,” Mike said. “Gangsta-wannabe assholes. What’d you do time for?”
Luther licked his lips.
“Let me guess. At least once for drugs. Then, two years? Armed robbery, I’m figuring. Botched job at best. Nobody got hurt, you weren’t the one carrying heat. You were too dumb to get away clean. Copped to the attempt and got a deuce up the river. Am I warm?”
“My lawyer made me take that plea.” Luther Audley rolled his head around and looked up at the ceiling.
“Always the damn suits that make you do things you don’t wanna do, isn’t it?” Mike asked. “Ms. Cooper here, she’s a mouthpiece too. She finds out you know something about this murder and she’ll have your parole revoked, then ship you right back up to the yard. She actually enjoys doing that.”
Luther’s head dropped and he fixed his vacant gaze on me. “What you keep talking about murder?”
“There was a body found on the steps of the church tonight,” I said, trying to edge Mike farther away from the young man. “A woman was killed and—”
“We didn’t kill nobody.”
“I’m going to start easy, back it up a few hours, and find out what brought you here,” I said, pulling my chair closer to the slow-to-anger interloper.
“Whoa, Ms. Cooper.” Wilbur Gaskin had appeared in the doorway. “How about Miranda? How about the right to—”
Mike interrupted him and rose to back him away from the room. “Nobody’s in custody, Mr. Gaskin. Let’s not put a plug in the works yet.”
“Not in custody? You’ve got the kid closeted in back here, while his God-fearing grandfather is going to pieces right outside,” Gaskin said. “You hear that, Luther? Get your tail out of this place.”
The young man’s mouth was open but he didn’t move fast.
“I’d sooner lock up Grandpa for aiding and abetting,” Mike said. “I’d get my answers damn fast, and they wouldn’t be full of lies and laced with crack.”
Luther lit up like he’d had a snake bite. He stood and shouted at Mike, his finger jabbing at the air. “You can’t be all gettin’ on Amos. You can’t be all—”
Mike was walking out the door and directing Gaskin to come with him as he looked back for a last comment. “You’d be surprised at the things I can do, Luther. Hold tight and tell Ms. Cooper what she wants to know. Who comes and goes is up to me.”
Luther Audley stared at me and laughed.
“Talk to her,” Mercer said.
Mike’s bluff had worked. If the kid was agitated about nothing else, he still wanted to protect his grandfather. He snarled at me but took his seat.
“Tell me why you’re here tonight,” I said.
“I’m here every night. My mother won’t let me be at her house. She got a boyfriend who don’t want me there.”
“And Amos?”
“He don’t have space for me. Him and my grandmother live in a studio. Ain’t no room.”
“How do you get in here?”
Luther fidgeted with the belt loops on his pants. “Amos. He the last one to leave every night, first one to come in the morning.”
“Your friends, he lets them crib here too?” Mercer asked.
“Not exactly. He don’t