“As an attorney—”
“You’re assumed to be a liar. For hire. Almost rhymes, don’t it?”
“I do not respond to insults.” He was repeating his material and he tilted his chin up again. McKenna felt his right hand come halfway up, balling into a fist, wanting so much to hit this clown hard on the point of that chin.
“You knew to go looking for Jorge in jig time. Or maybe for the people who knew him. Why’s that?”
“I—I’m going to walk away now.”
“Not if you’re smart. One of those who knew him is an illegal, too. Maybe you wanted to use that to shut her up?”
“That’s speculative—”
“Not really, considering your expression. No, you’re working for somebody else. Somebody who has influence.”
“My clients and cases are Bureau—”
“Confidential, I know.”
“I have every assurance that my actions will prove victorious in this matter.”
McKenna grinned and slapped an open palm against the briefcase, a hard smack. The lawyer jumped, eyebrows shooting up, back on the playground during recess. “I—I have an attorney-client relationship that by the constitution—”
“How ’bout the Bible?”
“—demands that you respect his… protection.”
“The next one who dies is on you, counselor.”
In a shaky voice the lawyer pulled his briefcase even closer and nodded, looking at the floor as if he had never seen it before. A small sigh came from him, filled with gray despair.
It was a method McKenna had worked out years ago, once he understood that lawyers were all talk and no muscle. Good cop/bad cop is a cliché, only the lawyer keeps looking for the good cop to show up and the good cop doesn’t. Bluff is always skin deep.
The lawyer backed away once McKenna let him. “You better think about who you choose to represent. And who might that be, really?”
“My client is—”
“No, I mean who, really? Whose interest?”
“I… I don’t know what you mean. I—”
“You know more than you’ve said. I expect that. But you still have to think about what you do.” A rogue smile. “We all do.”
“Look, we can handle this issue in a nice way—”
“I’ll try being nicer if you’ll try being smarter.”
McKenna slid a business card into the suit handkerchief pocket of Dark Glasses Lawyer. “Call me. I find out the same stuff before you do, and that you knew it—well, I’ll be without mercy, Counselor. No quarter.”
McKenna stepped aside and let the lawyer flee from the playground. Dark Glasses didn’t look back.
McKenna’s supervisor leaned back and scowled. “And you did this because?…”
“Because two drowned men with strange scars don’t draw FBI without a reason, for starters.”
“Not much to go on.”
“The ME says he can’t identify the small puncture marks. Or what made those funny welts.”
His supervisor made a sour grin. “You know how much physical evidence is worth. It has to fit a filled-in story.”
“And I don’t have enough story.”
He spread his hands, the cuff sliding up to expose part of his arm tattoo, rosy barbed wire.
McKenna had read somewhere that an expert is one who has made all the possible mistakes in a narrow field. A wise man is one who has made them widely. It was supposed to be funny but it was too true for that.
So he followed his good ole friend Buddy Johnson home from work that evening. Buddy liked his pleasures and spent the first hour of his night in a bar. Then he went out back to smoke a joint. It was dark and Buddy jumped a foot when McKenna shined the flashlight straight into his eyes.
“Gee, that cigarette sure smells funny.”
“What? Who you?”
“The glare must be too much for you. Can’t you recognize my voice?”
“What the—Look, I—”
McKenna slipped behind him, dropping the flashlight to distract him, and got the cuffs on. “We’re gonna take a little ride.”
McKenna took him in cuffs down a scruffy side alley and got him into Buddy’s own convertible. Puffing, feeling great, he strapped Buddy in with the seat belt, passenger side. Then McKenna drove two quick miles and turned into a car wash. The staff was out front finishing up and when they came out McKenna showed them the badge and they turned white. All illegals, of course, no English. But they knew the badge. They vanished like the dew after the dawn.
Game time, down south.
Even with cuffs behind his back, Buddy kept trying to say something.
“Remember letting the air out of my tires?” McKenna hit him hard in the nose, popped some blood loose and Buddy shut up. McKenna drove the convertible onto the ratchet conveyor and went back to the control panel. It was in English and the buttons were well-thumbed, some of the words gone in the worn plastic. McKenna ran up a SUPER CLEAN and HOT WAX and LIGHT BUFF. Then he gave a little laugh and sent Buddy on his way.
Hissing pressure hoses came alive. Big black brushes lowered into the open seats and whirred up to speed. They ripped Buddy full on. He started yelling and the slapping black plastic sheets slammed into him hard and he stopped screaming. McKenna hit the override and the brushes lifted away. Silence, only the dripping water on the convertible’s leather seats.
McKenna shouted a question and waited. No answer. He could see the head lolling back and wondered if the man was conscious.
McKenna thought about the two drowned men and hit the buttons again.
The brushes hardly got started before a shrill cry came echoing back. McKenna stopped the machine. The brushes rose. He walked forward into the puddles, splashing and taking his time.
“You’re nearly clean for the first time in your life, Buddy. Now I’m gonna give you a chance to come full clean with me.”
“I… They ain’t gonna like…” His mouth opened expectantly, rimmed with drool. The eyes flickered, much too white.
“Just tell me.”
“They really ain’t gonna like—”
McKenna turned and started back toward the control board. The thin, plaintive sobbing told him to turn around again. You could always tell when a man was broke clean through.
“Where’d they go?”
“Nearly to Chandeleur.”
“The islands?”
“Yeah… long way out… takes near all night. Oil rigs… the wrecked ones.”
“What’d you take out?”
“Centauris. Usually one, sometimes two.”
“The same one?”
“Who can tell? They all look alike to me. Pitscomb, he bowed and scraped to the Centauri and the Feds with him, but he don’t know them apart either.”
“Pitscomb have anything to do with Ethan’s death?”
“Man, I weren’t workin’ that night.”
“Damn. What’d the rest of the crew say about it?”
“Nothin’. All I know is that Ethan was on the boat one night and he didn’t come back to work next day.”
“Who else was with the Centauri?”
“Just Feds.”
“What was the point of going out?”
“I dunno. We carried stuff in big plastic bags. Crew went inside for ’bout an hour while we circled round the messed-up oil rigs. FBI and Centauri were out there. Dunno what they did. Then we come back.”
McKenna took the cuffs off Buddy and helped him out of the car. To his surprise, Buddy could walk just fine. “You know Jorge?”
“Huh? Yeah, that wetback?”
“Yeah. You’re a wetback too now.”