“Apparently not enough, or else he’d be in your custody right now, wouldn’t he?”
Falco laughed sourly. “Anything else?”
He shook his head. “That’s everything I can remember.”
She rose. Her silent hulk partner stood, too.
She passed Corey a card. “If you have any more information that might help us, Mr. Webb, please give me a call.”
“I’ll be sure to do that.”
“We can’t do our jobs without the cooperation of honest, law-abiding citizens like you,” she said. “We’re all on the same team.”
“We sure are, at the end of the day,” he said.
She glanced down the hallway. “Oh, remember to take care of that vase before the lady of the house arrives. Otherwise, she might pitch a fit-oh, pardon that little pun again. I can be repetitive sometimes.” She smiled.
He smiled back, but inwardly, he felt sick. “I’m on it.”
The agents left the house. He stood in the doorway and waited until their sedan had driven off before he closed the door.
He went to the shattered vase.
Oh, pardon that little pun again. I can be repetitive sometimes.
Damn. Falco’s message was as clear as the pottery shards on the floor.
She knew he was lying.
20
I’m the man, Leon thought.
Puffing on a cigarette, wraparound sunglasses perched on his nose, he rode shotgun in the white Ford van while Billy drove and James Brown sang “The Big Payback” on the radio. All he could think about was how impressed he was with himself. He was frequently flattered by himself, of course, was dazzled daily by his own brash brilliance, but this fine morning of all fine mornings, referring to himself as the man wasn’t mere braggadocio-he deserved all the lofty accolades that he was heaping upon his crown.
He had never attempted a kidnapping, but he had performed like a champ.
The wifey had fought him like a lioness, to be sure, had almost cracked open a jumbo-size can of whip-ass on him in her mad motherly frenzy to save her little deaf girl, but a vase upside the cranium had slowed her roll, and a haymaker to that smooth tummy had cowed her, and while he hadn’t wanted to hit her-she was so fine that he would have been happy simply basking in her luscious loveliness-she had forced him to do it to get things back on track.
His throat and nut sack still ached, though, and her nails had left a jagged trail of red scratches on his face that had swollen up like tribal scars and made him look like goddamn Shaka Zulu.
Fuckin’ bitch, he thought.
He’d hit her again if she pushed him.
He’d do worse things than hit her if she tested him again.
It had been three weeks since he’d had sex, an eternity, and the prolonged period of celibacy made him jumpier than usual, reduced his tolerance for bullshit-one of the most difficult things about being on the lam, in addition to cash shortages, were pussy shortages.
A tumble in the hay with the foxy wifey might be just the thing he needed to unwind.
He twisted around. The wifey and the munchkin were snuggled together like war camp refugees on the shabby cloth bench seat, the wifey in a rumpled Minnie Mouse T-shirt, gray sweats, and Reebok sneakers, the cute little crumb snatcher in her pajamas and fluffy pink house slippers.
They were restrained at the wrists, the wifey with handcuffs, the munchkin with duct tape. Tape had been applied to their eyes, too. Do no evil, see no evil, and in the case of the deaf girl-hear no evil.
Earlier, the wifey had asked him where he was taking them. He had told her Shangri-la, and she had shut the fuck up ever since.
But as he looked at them, damn, his mind jumped back to how utterly amazing he was.
He’d stolen the van ad hoc and painted it to make it appear to be a service vehicle for a local HVAC company. Summoned home by Leon’s call, Corey had swerved into his driveway and hadn’t paid any attention to the van parked halfway down the block that happened to be holding his family. It had given Leon a good belly laugh.
Now, here they were, about to arrive at their safe abode, right on time, and he wasn’t much of a guy for schedules, plans, boring things of that nature-man proposes, God disposes and all of that-and that was partly why he was so impressed with his performance, too.
“Damn, I’m good,” he said to Billy. “I’m rapidly becoming the enfant terrible of the whole world, you dig?”
Beefy hands guiding the wheel, Billy took his gaze off the rearview mirror-he glanced in the mirror every few seconds to adore the munchkin-and gave Leon his dull-eyed look.
“Yeah,” he said in his rumbling voice, like a grizzly bear that had laboriously learned to speak.
“This kind of stuff is outside my modus operandi, but I think I’m good at it.” Leon exhaled a ring of smoke. “We might have another career opportunity opening up for us, amigo.”
“Sounds good,” Billy said, his response to most of Leon’s suggestions. He slurped from the sweaty bottle of Nesquik chocolate milk he kept braced in the juncture of his tree-trunk legs, and checked out the munchkin again with a lick of his lips.
Billy being Billy, he didn’t care much about money or the finer things in life. All he cared about was his chocolate milk and candy bars and perv kiddie pictures. Hey, to each his own.
Leon had met Billy a year ago on a house painting gig in Memphis. He knew virtually nothing about the guy’s background, but he suspected that Billy was a registered sex offender and had been forced to leave behind his hometown, wherever the hell that was, for a nomadic existence on the highways and byways of America. In that sense, they were like peas in a pod.
Billy had never asked why Leon was running, either, and Leon hadn’t told him. Their partnership was based on the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Leon would dispatch Billy into convenience stores, where they usually had surveillance cameras tracking visitors, and whenever they had to go through highway toll plazas Billy would drive and Leon would duck in the backseat of whatever vehicle he had boosted. But Billy never complained, never posed a problem. He was easy to control, and that made him a perfect partner.
Billy turned off the tree-lined road and into a subdivision. The big stacked stone sign at the wide entrance announced ARCHER LAKE in gold calligraphic letters. A blue-and-white sign standing nearby in the grass proclaimed: FROM THE 300S. NEW HOME SITES AVAILABLE!
It was a community of twenty-one upscale properties, gigantic brick houses on rambling islands of land. Corey’s McMansion would have fit right in there, and the irony of it made Leon grin.
Unlike Corey’s neighborhood, however, every one of these homes stood empty. None of them had even been fully built. They missed windows, doors. Others plots had no houses at all standing on them, were nothing but parcels of red clay cordoned off by orange construction cones and black plastic silt fences.
Leon could surmise what had happened there because he was abreast of all the business news, skimmed The Wall Street Journal and various mags just about every day. When the real estate market had tanked a little while ago during the subprime mortgage catastrophe, communities across metro Atlanta had fallen apart. Record foreclosures. Spiraling property values. People kicked out on the street like stepchildren with their furniture dumped on the curb. Housing subdivisions like this one stood vacant and incomplete for want of qualified buyers.
Too bad, so sad.
Such calamitous economic events were a strong argument in favor of the lifestyle he enjoyed. He wasn’t bound by a mortgage or a lease or a car note or furniture, not him. He walked the Earth like Caine from Kung Fu, came and went as he pleased, where he pleased, when he pleased. He didn’t owe anyone anything, not a damn thing; he was as free as a falcon in the great blue sky.