Colin noted what he didn’t say, and didn’t like what he did say. “Look into it?” the San Atanasio cop echoed. If he sounded affronted, he sounded that way because he damn well was.
Randall Atkins just sighed. “’Fraid so, Captain. You need to understand—things aren’t real good around here right now. We’ve got swarms of folks in town who’re just out of the camps, and it’s like they’re cons just out of prison. They don’t give a shit—pardon my French—about anybody but them. Stealing’s second nature to ’em. That and turning tricks are about the only way you can get stuff in those places. They’ll lift anything that isn’t nailed down, and they’ll try and pry up the nails if it is. They’d sooner steal food than work for it, not that there’s much work to get around here.”
“I hear that,” Colin said, remembering Victor Jennings and others like him.
“Yeah, I bet you do,” Lieutenant Atkins said. “But anyway, that’s where we’re at. Somebody’s actually opening up a business instead of closing one, we won’t go after him real hard unless he grabs himself an AK-47 and starts shooting up the neighborhood.”
“He’s liable to,” Colin remarked.
“Say what?”
“I said, he’s liable to. Have you seen this dude, Lieutenant? He’s very bad news. I always figured he’d be more likely to knock over a bank than to rip one off with a laptop. When Yugoslavia came to pieces in the Nineties, he did some nasty things over there. I don’t know all the gory details and I don’t want to, but he did. You can see it in his eyes.”
“And he was going with your daughter?”
“It wasn’t my idea. He’s not any more—that’s for damn sure.” Colin sighed. “She’s old enough to make her own mistakes, and it’s not like she’d listen to me if I tried to show ’em to her. Not obvious she should, either, on account of I sure made my share of mistakes like that.”
Randall Atkins chuckled mirthlessly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man—and if you believe that, I’ll tell you another one. But seriously, as long as this, uh, Nedic keeps his nose clean around here, we aren’t gonna go after him real hard. We’ve got enough day-to-day trouble. We don’t sweat the other kind much.”
“What would happen if I asked your switchboard to put me through to the chief there?” Colin asked.
“Go ahead,” Atkins said. “Maybe he’ll do you a cop-to-cop favor. But I’ve got a hundred bucks that says he’ll tell you about what I just did.”
A hundred bucks wasn’t what it had been before the eruption, let alone what it had been when Colin was in the Navy—back in those days, a hundred bucks was serious money. But it still wasn’t nothing. Instead of calling the chief in Mobile, Colin hung up. Atkins had convinced him the Alabama town really didn’t worry about people like Bronislav as long as he stuck to his restaurant there.
“That sucks,” Gabe Sanchez said when Colin told him the sad story over lunch. “Sucks big-time, matter of fact.”
“Tell me about it,” Colin answered. “But I don’t know what I can do. Mobile’s not like the LAPD—I don’t get many chances to do them a bad turn if I owe ’em one.”
“You could mail ’em a package bomb,” Gabe said helpfully. “Make sure you put a long delay on the timer. The post office is as slow as Super Bowl losers in February.”
“Ha!” Colin heard the uneasiness in his voice. He would never do anything like that. But he didn’t plan to pass Gabe’s joke on to Vanessa. He didn’t think she would send Lieutenant Atkins something that went boom! when you opened it. He also didn’t think she would try that kind of payback on Bronislav Nedic. He wasn’t sure enough not to worry about giving her ideas. She was already righteously pissed off at the big, tough Serb.
Colin wished Vanessa were righteously pissed off at herself, too. She’d wasted years of her life on a man who saw her as… what? As a fuck toy and an ATM, that was what. But Vanessa had never blamed herself for anything that happened to her. No, it was always somebody else’s fault, usually a man’s, once in a while her mother’s.
“If the city cops won’t do anything, maybe you can get hold of the Alabama highway patrol or state troopers or whatever the hell they call ’em over there,” Gabe said. “If Bron-whatever’s doing anything bent outside of his fancy new restaurant, they could land on him for you.”
“Huh.” This time, Colin’s grunt was thoughtful. “You know, you may not be as dumb as I look.”
Gabe had opened his mouth to come back with a zinger of his own. He coped with self-mockery without shifting gears: “Jeez, I hope so!”
“Me, too,” Colin said. “I honest to God may put a flea in somebody’s ear about that place. Nedic never struck me as the kind of guy who stayed inside the rules all the time. Hey, he spent a while doing Christ knows what in a place where you made your own rules with an AK. He lived through that. What do you want to bet he thinks he can live through anything?”
“Sounds reasonable.” Gabe nodded. Then he looked sly. “Suppose he did enough of that shit so you could get his ass in a sling on a war-crimes rap?”
“I doubt it. Far as I know, he was just a spear-carrier,” Colin answered. “On the off chance, though, I’ll poke around online.” He didn’t mention that he spoke not a word of Serbo-Croatian. Gabe already knew that. Colin couldn’t even cuss in it, the way Vanessa could. And the Serbian half of the language was written in an alphabet he didn’t read. Details, details…
“Have you told Vanessa the Mobile cops are sitting with their thumbs up their asses?” Sanchez could find the most intriguing questions.
“Not yet.” Colin wasn’t looking forward to that, any more than he would have looked forward to another not-social-enough call on Dr. Stan Birnbaum. Sighing, he went on, “Wish I could get out of it. Won’t happen, though, not when she was the one who found Nedic when he surfaced.”
“She was?” Gabe raised a shaggy eyebrow. “Either she takes after you or she’s been reading too much Sherlock Holmes.”
“Bet on the Holmes,” Colin said dryly. There were ways Vanessa took after him. He didn’t notice all of them. Neither did his daughter: one more way she resembled him.
“You know where this guy is at now, anyway.” Gabe gave what consolation he could. “If he does go bad, the Alabama cops will bust his sorry ass. And if he starts banking profits, well, maybe you can find your own hacker to make ’em disappear.” He grinned.
He could grin—it wasn’t his problem. It wasn’t really Colin’s, either, but Vanessa was his daughter in spite of everything, so he wound up stuck with it. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe I can.” He only wished he believed that. If Bronislav Nedic wasn’t the kind who stashed his cash in a coffee can or between his mattress and box spring, Colin had never seen anybody who was. You didn’t need a hacker for that kind of job. You needed a strong-arm man. And any strong-arm man who bumped into the tattooed Serb might find out his arm wasn’t so strong as he’d figured.
The apartment Rob Ferguson shared with Lindsey Kincaid—after a lot of hemming and hawing, she’d kept her own last name—enjoyed all the modern conveniences. It enjoyed the conveniences that were modern when the nineteenth century segued into the twentieth, anyhow. It had running water… when the pipes didn’t freeze. Some of the time, it had hot running water. The icebox kept food fresh. The stove, which would burn wood or coal depending on how you adjusted the grate, not only cooked food but also did its share in heating the place.