when a cruiser wheeled out of a parking slot in front, screeched in reverse over the double yellow line, and gunned up beside the 'Stang.
'You,' the cop said through his open driver's window. 'You've been roaming around town all day today, haven't you.' It wasn't really a question.
'Yes sir, I have,' Crease said. He let it roll easily off his tongue, the way he did when he was in uniform.
'Alone. Most folks who come through here are with their families. Who are you?'
Crease gave him the other name. Until he said it he wasn't even sure that he remembered it, although he'd been using it for more than two years. The cop would already have his tags and the name would match up to them.
'Who are you?' Crease asked.
'I'm Sheriff Edwards.'
Crease kept his face blank but it startled the hell out of him. He couldn't believe it. Edwards appeared to have aged twenty years over the last ten. The broken nose had never been set right, and it had been broken a couple more times since Crease had tagged him. He'd gone to seed, had gone so soft that Crease couldn't do much besides study him, noting all the disagreeable details. The wet, alcoholic puffiness in his face distended his features like a balloon stretched too thin. He looked more than a little like Crease's father at the end.
God damn.
'So let me ask you, son,' Edwards said. 'What, are you doing in my county?'
'Visiting a friend.'
'And just who might that be?'
You had to give it to him, the man could smell intent, his senses as sharp as an animal's. 'Rebecca Fortlow.'
'I know most of Reb's friends. She doesn't have many of them.'
'Regardless, I am one.'
'Then you're definitely up to no good. That girl is nothing but a mess of trouble.'
Crease kept silent.
'Why don't you get on out of here now, son? Reb's had enough problems without all you boys chasing her farther off the narrow path.'
Crease kept silent.
'You hear me, son?'
'Yes, sir,' Crease said.
Edwards sat back in his seat and sucked his teeth, eyeing Crease closely. This was the moment when it could go either way. Edwards seemed about to make a move and then decided against it. He was going to play it smart and wait and see just what kind of trouble Crease brought to town.
'Now you drive careful in this county.'
'I will, sir.'
'Oh, I know you will.'
Crease drove slowly away and watched Edwards in the rearview wheeling across the double yellow again and backing into his spot. Crease wondered what the man would've done if he'd told him his true name.
Chapter Four
When he got back to Reb's house he saw that she'd spruced the place up. She'd spent some time on herself, used better-applied makeup to cover the worst of the bruises. The swelling was almost completely gone. He knew she was already trying to tempt and bait him for whatever she might be able to get, and he liked the fact that their relationship had such clearly marked parameters. You were safe so long as you knew where you stood.
She moved to him with an easy grace today, sweeping along like she was dancing. It was the way she used to move, how he remembered her coming into his arms when they were teenagers and spent most of their time talking in whispers against each other's necks.
'What did you do today?' she asked.
She didn't say it the way Joan used to say it, like he might actually be able to tell his wife what he'd done on the job. She'd be standing there in the kitchen stirring batter in a bowl, expecting him to discuss a strangled baby in a bassinet or some crack whore who'd been selling her children out of the back room. Joan just smiling so beautifully and vapidly at him, the bleached white apron trailing across the bottom of her sun dress. The batter whipping around and around and around. It would make Crease so nauseous he'd have to back away into the bathroom.
Reb asked with a real understanding, aware that he was on the hunt, that he had to chase something down. He told her about the cemetery, Dirtwater and the boy, running into the sheriff.
'Why didn't you kill him?' she asked. 'That's what you wanted, right?'
He looked at her. 'You're having fun, trying to get into my head, aren't you? I can tell you're enjoying yourself.'
'You're a break from the usual, I'll say that much.'
'I never said I wanted to kill him.'
'You never said you didn't either. If you don't want him dead, what's the point of coming back?'
'I don't know.'
'You are a very confused soul.'
His course seemed very clear, he just didn't know to what purpose, what he might get out of it in the end. 'I want to know who kidnapped Mary Burke and what happened to the money.'
'And if your father really shot her.'
'He said he did. I believe him.'
'My god, killing a child.'
'Yeah.'
The man was already on the downturn, but that night finished him. Maybe because of shooting Mary Burke, maybe just because he'd missed his chance at the fifteen grand score. Crease had tried to give the memory of his father the benefit of the doubt, but the more he thought about it, the longer he was a cop, the less he figured icing the kid had anything to do with it. His father had wanted that fucking money.
He sat on the couch and Reb drew up alongside him, slinky and soft enough to get his head turning to other thoughts. Like he didn't have enough on his mind, all he needed was another woman, maybe another kid.
'Did you rob him?' she asked.
'Now who we talking about?'
'The dealer you were pals with. Did you steal any of his cash or his drugs?'
'No,' Crease said.
That stopped her. She drew her chin back, giving him a quick once-over like she had to reassess. Then she grinned. 'I don't believe you. I bet he's after you right now because you stole a briefcase that belonged to him. Stuffed with cash. How much? A hundred grand? Two hundred?'
'He used to offer me that much to go kill competitors, guys using the harbor a little too freely, but I always turned him down.'
It was the truth, but not all of it. Crease used to walk side by side with Tucco and Cruez into apartments where they knew the competition had closets full of uncut coke, maybe a thousand vials of crack. In the bathroom a do-it-yourself meth lab. He never took money for it, but he did it anyway. One day he helped Tucco take down a five-man Colombian crew that was edging into his turf. They got the name of a major connection. Crease wouldn't take any cash for it, but he did spend the night with three of Tucco's ladies, thinking of Morena the whole time. It was a bad night. Three days later, the commissioner decorated him in a private ceremony, shook his hand, patted his back, gazed on him fondly. Cameramen took photos that could never be printed. Crease thought that if his father was only half as confused as he was himself, it was no wonder the old man had gone over the big edge.
'Then why do you think he'll be coming after you? If you didn't take anything from him?'
'You wouldn't understand.'
