The sheet containing the leads fluttered at Guerrera's side. Sweat from his hand had bled a half-moon into it. "Rack. I lied."
"About what?"
"The higher-probability locations. You were right. Nearer the mother chapter. Not Kaner's place." He offered the paper, looking uncomfortable under Tim's gaze. "Hey, they're just leads. Who knows. Maybe Thomas and Freed make the collar. Maybe none of us do. I just want to keep my backyard clean."
After a pause Tim swapped Guerrera's sheet for the one in his back pocket. "Why the change of heart?"
"I figure maybe Jim isn't the best guy to go through that door right now."
Tim arched an eyebrow. "Just Jim?"
A half grin. "Don't push your luck, white boy."
Chapter 65
Tim and Bear checked three bars, a strip club, and a pay phone outside a motorcycle-parts store. Boston and Precious rode along, tongues lolling; after his schedule over the past week, Bear insisted on playing guilty weekend dad. Out in the field, he and Tim fell back into the interrogation rhythm they'd perfected over the past years. They spoke to a bald bartender wearing a dog collar, a woman walking her calico on a leash, two gas-station convenience-store clerks, and an exotic dancer who insisted on replacing her nipple tassels-to Bear's evident discomfort-while describing her on-the-side clientele. The only hit they got in the first four hours came from a homeless woman living behind an adult bookstore, whose eyes lit up at Den Laurey's photo; she ID'd him as the guy from Gladiator.
The blue panels of the sixth pay phone gleamed in the glare of Tim's headlights. Scarred by restroom wit and cigarette burns, the unit was bolted into a sawdusty wall off the front porch of a freestanding country bar. Despite saloon doors and Loretta Lynn's jukebox lament about pappy a-hoein' corn, the bar suffered from a confused identity. A punk sporting an algae-green Mohawk tossed darts with a lip-pierced person of ambiguous gender, while four unaffiliated bikers nursed drafts at the bar. ESPN recapped Pittsburgh's trouncing in the Continental Tire Bowl, as if anyone cared. A girls' night out had somehow wound up in a corner booth, grating laughter radiating from a trio whose feathered hair seemed more vintage than retro. Wine coolers and buffalo wings dotted their table, and the saccharine scent of drugstore perfume was evident from the doorway. Only the bartender, an old guy wearing a Stetson Cattleman and a belt buckle the size of a Christmas platter, looked at home in the decor. Then again, they were north of the fish hatchery, out where the Fillmore citrus groves faded into God knows what, so a watering hole earned its nickname here. They'd passed a gas station a quarter mile back, but before that it had been a long run of dusty road, with scattered lights twinkling out from the dark hillsides like Ewok eyes.
One of the corner-booth gals offered Bear a giggly wave as he and Tim headed for the bar. Loretta gave way to "London Calling"-three guesses who'd dropped that quarter-and a kid in grease-stained Dickies shuffled out of the men's room, trailing the smell of weed and a streamer of toilet paper. The bartender worked his way down to them, polishing nothing much off the bar with a rag that looked as if it had stuffed a hole in a flue for about a decade.
"What'll it be?"
Bear tilted his hand, showing off the photo of Den cupped inside. To try to lessen the false positives, they'd chosen a different picture from the one that had been running on the news. "Seen this guy?"
"Nah."
The kid from the bathroom leaned over, concerned. "You guys cops?"
"Yeah, but no worries, Cheech. We're after bigger game."
"Like who?"
Bear flashed him the picture, and the kid's eyes widened about a millimeter, the closest approximation of surprise he could currently muster. "Yeah, I seen that guy."
Bear looked skeptical. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. He came into the station." He twisted on his barstool, pointing back up the road. "Needed a spark plug."
"What was he driving?" Tim asked.
The kid blinked a few times. He pulled something off his tongue and flicked it, then blinked some more. "Uh, nothing. He needed a spark plug."
"So he walked?"
"Cars don't work so hot without spark plugs." He laughed a slow laugh, then took a pull from his Coors. His eyes went longingly to the bags of chips clipped up behind the bar.
Tim snapped his fingers in front of the kid's eyes, and the dilated pupils pulled back into semifocus. "He walked? No one dropped him?"
"Yeah."
"When?"
"Yesterday. Maybe the day before."
"How many houses are within walking distance of there?"
"Not many." The bartender returned, trailing his rag along the counter. "There's a pocket community up a half mile north where the pass drops, but aside from that you gotta good run of ranch 'n' farmland either direction."
"How many houses in the community?"
"I'd say thirty."
"You forgot the new mods they put up on Grant," the kid said.
"Yeah, so thirty-five."
"Did this guy walk in from the north?" Tim asked.
The kid squinted up his face thoughtfully and nodded. "Went back that way, too."
Chapter 66
As the Explorer flew down the dark road, Bear tried to ease Tim's expectations. "We're working off the memory of a stoned kid. No one else in the bar recognized the photo."
"We got the location from both angles, Bear. It's a good, strong hit."
Uncle Pete had driven through the area only once, five and a half months ago. Tim hoped he'd done so to conduct some business at a Laughing Sinners safe house in the pocket community, a house where Den could now be lying low. They had Dana Lake placing a call to the bar's pay phone three days ago. The cross-ref had popped the location to the top of the list.
A reinforced-concrete barrier protected the patch of prefab-looking tract houses from the two-lane thoroughfare. Tim turned off into the small grid of streets, which terminated at the base of a forbidding hill. There were maybe five square blocks in all, and Tim moved through them systematically.
"Not a bad spot," Bear conceded. "You got no dead ends, and all roads dump out on the main road. Plenty of turnoffs within a mile either direction."
"Some open flats, too," Tim said. "If he got creative on a bike, it would be tough keeping up."
He circled the final block and pulled to the curb. Boston muscled in on Precious's space in the back, and Precious let him hear about it with a low growl. Bear turned around in his seat like an angry vacation dad, and they silenced.
Bear settled back into his seat. "I'd bet the safe house is gonna be forward on the first two streets. If the shit goes down, they don't want to get trapped at the base of the hill."
Tim killed the lights and cruised the first two streets again. One house amid all the others, virtually identical, caught Bear's eye. He pivoted, then indicated a side window barely in view above an empty, fenced-in dog run. A blanket, tacked from the inside, covered the glass.
Tim pulled past a few more houses, flipped around, and parked.
They sat for a minute, taking in the view. A dark house at the end of a dark block. A blanket blocking a window, providing some economical privacy. Just like at the abandoned meth lab where they'd run down Kaner.
Tim and Bear removed their watches, dumped their keys, and switched their Nextels to silent. Tim thumbed out the wheel on his. 357 and spun it, watching the casings twirl. He snapped it shut and climbed out. Bear tugged Precious from the back in case they decided on a kick-in and needed her to check the doors for explosives. Boston, the bigger dog, wasn't tactically trained; he whimpered at being left behind, but Bear gave him the stink-eye, and he lapsed back into carefree panting.