As they got closer, they heard voices from the houses—a shout here or there. Impossible to make out from where they stood.
“You sure this is it?” Trent asked.
“Yeah. Anita found him. She called the contracting company earlier to see where Pantalone would be. This is the job site.”
Trent looked again at the towering houses before them, trepidation tightening his features. Then he sighed and shook his head. “Well, let’s give it a try then. If I think this guy has something to say that’s worth hearing, I’m asking him to come downtown. If not, we roll.”
They picked their way over mounds of dirt and rocks and up the set of concrete steps leading to the front door of the house where the voices seemed to come from. Trent opened it, and they stepped into a barren room with wooden floors and freshly sheet-rocked walls. To their right were a set of steps. “Yo,” Trent called as they started up the stairs.
On the second floor, they found a man at work. He was in his fifties, wearing spackle-stained jeans and a long-sleeved Eagles T-shirt. His head was swathed in a dark green bandana. He stood beside a large bucket of joint compound and used a spackle knife to slop it onto the wall and smooth it over the seams in the drywall. Near his feet, a small black radio played country music. The man sang along until he noticed them. He froze, the blade extended halfway between him and the wall.
At first, he looked as though he was going to tell them to get the fuck off the job site, but then he clamped his mouth shut and looked them over carefully from head to toe. Trent had changed into a suit with a long navy blue winter coat over top. The man was still taking them in when Trent flashed his badge and said, “How many guys you got in here?”
The man lifted his chin toward the ceiling. “Got two guys running wire on the top floor and one guy sheet-rocking the third floor.”
“There are three trucks outside,” Jocelyn said.
The man’s eyes darted toward her. She knew she looked the part still—black dress pants, a white blouse with a black suit jacket, and a black leather coat over that. She’d pulled her hair back into a bun. “Plumbers went to get parts,” he offered.
“We’re here to talk to Davey Pantalone,” Trent said.
With his free hand, the man pointed his finger at the ceiling. “Next floor. Drywall.”
Trent gave him a mock salute as they turned to find the stairs.
“Davey getting locked up?” the man asked.
Trent stopped and looked back at the man. “Nah,” he said. “We just came to talk.”
They started up the steps again. The man slapped a glop of spackle onto the wall in front of him. “They don’t send the suits unless it’s a felony.”
“Now that’s just not true,” Jocelyn said. “I once arrested a guy for making love to a block of cheese in a public place. Misdemeanor.” She winked at him as they moved out of sight.
The third floor was open, the walls meant to separate the floor into individual rooms unfinished, just two-by-four frames waiting to be wired, insulated, and dry-walled. Bundles of pink insulation lay on the floor like great wrapped hay bales. Against one wall stood two black-and-red plastic saw horses. An assortment of tools lay scattered across the floor. Toward the back of the house, a man stood with his back to them, a large, squared-off tool that looked like a clunky gun in one hand. Nausea spiraled up from Jocelyn’s stomach. She put a hand on Trent’s forearm to stop him from going any further. “Oh my God,” she said. “Is that a nail gun?”
He looked at her, his face twisted in confusion. Then he looked back at the man. “No,” he said. “It’s a screw gun.”
It wasn’t much better, but it was some relief. She watched as the man made quick work of the screw gun, securing a panel of drywall, positioning the tip of the screw gun where the drywall rested against the studs, and pushing the screw into the wall with a high-pitched squeal. It was still a little unsettling.
“That’s a nail gun,” Trent added, pointing to the corner of the room. She saw a red toolbox, a level, and the offending nail gun. It was large and yellow and unlike the screw gun, in front of its handgrip it had what looked almost like a gun’s magazine, a long one like the kind an AK-47 might have. A twenty-round mag, she thought. Nails, nails, and more nails. The object of her nightmares. Trent was staring at her.
“I have some issues with nails,” she said. She realized she was stroking her scar again and stopped, putting her hands at her sides.
Trent frowned. “Right,” he said.
The screech of the screw gun sent a cluster of butterflies flurrying in Jocelyn’s stomach as they crossed the open space toward the man. He was only slightly taller than Trent but flabbier in all the places that Trent was lean muscle. His torn jeans sagged in the back, and his large stomach hung over the front of them. He wore a red, zipped hoodie over a white T-shirt. His long brown scraggly hair hung down his back. On the top of his head was a backward baseball cap with a worn Flyers logo on it. He looked nothing like the skinny, pimple-faced kid whose mug shot Trent had pulled up on their way there.
He had no radio. He whistled a tune Jocelyn couldn’t place, and when he turned and saw them, he had much the same reaction as the man downstairs—a look of intense annoyance at their intrusion that morphed into nervousness the closer he looked at them. It was then that Jocelyn realized that something was off. Pantalone and his coworker were nervous, which meant that one, or both of them, was probably armed, with no concealed carry permit. Either that or they had drugs on them. They already knew that Davey Pantalone, at least, had no outstanding warrants. They’d checked before coming to talk to him.
As if of its own volition, Jocelyn’s hand reached for her shoulder holster, patting it furtively to reassure herself that it was still there. But it wasn’t. She didn’t have her gun. It had been taken into evidence after she shot Francine with it. She suppressed a whispered, “Fuck,” and studied Pantalone. His face was ruddy and pitted from acne. The outline of a beard grew on the very bottom of his chin. He had big, wary brown eyes and thick, bushy eyebrows. He wasn’t at all what Jocelyn had expected. She tried envisioning him as the teenager from the mug shot—a thinner, slightly better groomed version of this man. Still, she couldn’t imagine Francine locked in anything resembling an embrace with this man. Maybe it had been quick and dirty. Come to think of it, she wasn’t able to imagine Francine with Craig Hubbard either. But maybe that was the point. Francine’s advances must have been so unexpected. That in itself was probably a turn-on.
Davey Pantalone stared at them without speaking.
“Mr. Pantalone?” Trent asked. “Davey Pantalone?”
The man nodded. He looked from Trent to Jocelyn and back to Trent again. He licked his lips. “You’re here because of Francine Rigo, aren’t you?”
Jocelyn gave Trent a sideways glance. A muscle ticked in his jaw. He stepped closer to Pantalone, smiling. “Mr. Pantalone, my name is Trent Razmus. I’m a detective with the Philadelphia Homicide Unit. This is Jocelyn Rush. I just have a few questions for you. How about if you come with us where we can talk in private?”
Pantalone didn’t respond. Slowly, as if he were in a standoff and they’d told him to put his weapon down, he lowered the screw gun to the floor. The uneasy feeling in Jocelyn’s stomach intensified. A voice in her head screamed, This is going to go bad!