Billy joined me in less than five minutes. He'd retrieved his glass from the sink and sat down hard in a chair, saying nothing. I stood at the railing.
"Nice lady," I finally said. More silence.
"Brilliant," he answered without a hint of stutter.
When I looked at him he was staring at the moon. I didn't ask which he was referring to and after letting it set awhile he finally took a sip of wine and changed whatever subject we might have been on.
"How d-did you get that n-nasty bruise?"
I told him about the backwoods boys, the altercation in the parking lot and how Brown had held an obvious provenance in the Loop Road world.
"So d-do you really th-think they need you to take the heat off them?"
"No. There's something else working there. Blackman's angry, Ashley's sullen, Sims is caught in the middle and Gunther's carrying around a load of guilt," I said, trying to grind the stones down to their essence. "And Brown is trying to save them all."
"Man in a foxhole full of w-wounded," Billy said.
In the morning I called a local auto-glass repair service out of the yellow pages. They came to you, so I gave them the tower address and the model of my truck. When I hung up the phone, my cheekbone seemed to ache more. There was a knot in my left forearm that felt like a small group of marbles under the skin. I took another sip of coffee and called Fred Gunther's hospital room.
"Yeah. Sorry about that. Sometimes with strangers it can get a little rough out that way," Gunther said after I spilled a little venom on him about my parking lot encounter and the vandalism of my truck.
"Hell, they still talk about the time some city boy came out there and started calling somebody at the bar a Cracker. Before he knew what hit him he had a blade cut from his scrotum to his rib cage, right through his clothes. There was a barroom full of people and of course when the cops got there, no one saw a thing."
"They do seem to have a thing for knives," I said.
There was a silence on the other end of the line that seemed heavy with meaning but hard to read. I wished I'd gone to talk to Gunther in person so I could see his face. He had not yet asked what his "acquaintances" had told me.
"You'll have to excuse my denseness, Mr. Gunther," I finally said. "But I'm not real sure why you sent me out there or what your friends want me to do for them."
"Acquaintances," Gunther snapped, the first response so far that hadn't been chewed and measured in his head before letting it out of his mouth.
"You never worked with Blackman?"
"That was a while back," he said. "I worked with him some because he'd been here forever and knew every damn fishing hole and hog-hunting patch in the Glades. But he wasn't so good working with people."
"So you were his partner?"
I could feel myself slipping into my old police interrogation mode but couldn't help myself.
"We shared some clients," Gunther said, getting careful again. "I would help him out with outfitters and new equipment that came on the market. He flew with me sometimes so we could spot out places to take sightseers and such."
"And that ended?"
"He started getting hinky with people, was less tolerant of folks. Clients didn't like him. It started hurting my business more than helping."
"But you were still friends."
"Acquaintances. Yeah."
I could tell I was starting to lose Gunther's tolerance, or sense of indebtedness, or whatever it was that had motivated him to confide in me. But I wanted more.
"What's with this guy Ashley?"
"Nobody knows much about Ashley but Nate. He lives somewhere out near Myersons Hammock in the middle of the northern Glades and just seems to show up, usually to trade off skins and to let the guides know what the fish and game are doing. He lives like the old-timers. Supposedly he's related to the old Ashley gang but no one knows if that's true. He'd hang around with the group at the Loop bar if Nate was there, and listen to the bull. I don't even know why he was there to tell the truth.
"Hell, I'm not real sure why any of us were there," he added. I could feel him tasting his words. "Doesn't matter, I'm outta here anyway."
"Out of the hospital?"
"Out of the state," he said. "I've got family back in upstate New York and I'm going home."
Now it was my turn to measure my words. There was more going on in the big man's head than just getting out. Two days ago he was angry that someone had tried to kill him. Today he was chucking it all and running.
"Do you think any of your acquaintances have anything to do with these child killings?"
I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line.
"Thank you for saving my life, Mr. Freeman. Goodbye."
The line went dead.
I was putting my cup to my lips when the phone rang back to life and caused me to jump, sloshing hot coffee down my chin. The desk manager downstairs was on the line.
"Mr. Freeman, there is a gentleman from AA Auto Glass here. He is in need of your keys, sir."
When I walked outside through the front entrance, a step van with the Auto Glass logo was parked in the visitor's lot next to my truck. On the other side, Detective Diaz was leaning against the front bumper of his sedan.
He was dressed in his now familiar uniform: dark canvas Dockers and a white oxford shirt rolled up at the sleeves. His tie was pulled down, his sunglasses low on the bridge of his nose. He was talking with the glass installer like they were buddies, killing time in the shade of a bottlebrush tree.
"Good morning, Mr. Freeman," Diaz greeted me with too much familiarity.
"Detective," I nodded.
The use of his law enforcement title caused the installer to frown and cut his eyes at Diaz, who probably hadn't mentioned his status while asking the workman questions.
"What brings you way up here on such a hot and no doubt busy day for you?"
Diaz did not answer, and only motioned to the other man with a nod of his head.
I talked with the glass guy, gave him my keys. When he went back to his van I returned to Diaz, who was still leaning on his front bumper. He had backed into the parking space. It was standard practice for someone using an unmarked police car. If the detective needed to get his shotgun or bulletproof vest out of the trunk, his hardware wasn't so easily seen by passers-by.
"So what's up? You get any prints off that stuff?" I asked.
"No. None at all," Diaz answered. "They're still trying to trace the retailer on the GPS unit, but it could be hundreds of places and the guy would have paid cash. Hell, it was probably stolen anyway."
I nodded, waiting.
"So," I repeated. "What's up?"
"You have some trouble?" he asked, answering my question with a question, waving the back of his hand at my injured truck.
"Diaz," I said, losing patience. "What the fuck do you want?"
The windshield guy peeked up from his work. Diaz put his back to the workman and looked into my face.
"We've got a suspect, Max. He's in the house right now. Being interviewed."
The information wasn't something Hammonds would have necessarily shared with an outsider or that Diaz needed to drive here to tell me.
"Seems that during the interview, your name came up," he continued.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Hammonds wants you to join us down at the office."
"May I ask who this suspect is?"
"Name is Rory Sims. Some kind of environmental activist," Diaz said. "Familiar?"
I didn't answer. A new rock was in my head, its edges sharp and irregular. I uncrossed my arms and stood up.
"You want me to ride in front or in back?"
CHAPTER 17
I rode in front, but it was just as quiet as if I'd been stuffed in the back with a set of handcuffs looped through the D-ring on the floor.