‘I don’t want any friends here, thank you kindly.’
‘Then I guess we’ll get you to a motel. You got several choices: the Excellent, which isn’t, the Port Leo Inn, the Gulf Breeze. A bunch of B and Bs. There’s also a Best Western and a Marriott Suites, too.’
‘I can’t believe Pete is dead and I have to stay at a Best Western.’ She managed a sniffle and a slight smile, friendlier than just a moment ago. ‘Any room at your inn? I’m awful quiet and I don’t take up much space.’
‘You don’t want to stay with me. I’m a dork who lives with his dad,’ he said.
‘But at the Best Western I’ll be alone. I don’t do alone real well. I need a Plan B.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You got a phone in here?’
‘Yeah, a cell phone. Here.’ Whit dug among the tapes and CDs in the storage unit between the seats and handed her the phone. He clicked on the interior light so she could see to dial. Another bit of brightness caught his eye. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a pair of headlights jouncing, rapidly gaining on them.
Velvet dialed and waited. ‘Anson? Oh, good, you’re in town. Huh? Oh, okay. This is Velvet. Let me talk to Junior.’ A pause. ‘Junior, listen. I got real bad news. Pete’s dead.’ A longer pause. ‘I’m not kidding. He was shot. I’m okay. I’m holding up. I cried for a bit and now I am getting ready to cry some more. Then I’m gonna kick me some police ass if they keep saying he killed himself.’
Whit ran through his mental Rolodex of Port Leo, trying to place an Anson or a Junior. Velvet had mentioned a Junior Deloache as the boat’s owner.
‘I’m not leaving town till we know what happened. Judge Mosley says there’s gonna be an inquest. What? I gotta go to the police station. Pete was on your boat and it’s a crime scene and I’m booted. So I need a place to crash. Can I stay at your condo?’ She listened and hung her head slightly. ‘No, I don’t know when you get your stupid boat back. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, sure, I understand. Sure. I’ll just grab me a hotel room. Yeah, thanks for the generosity.’ She clicked off the phone. ‘Those bags.’
Whit glanced in the rearview mirror. The headlights behind grew larger.
‘No luck?’ he asked.
‘I hate that greasy little Junior Deloache. He’s this piggy-eyed stain, thinks he’s a stud. Yeah, with a dick stretcher and a case of Viagra, maybe.’ She shrugged. ‘I can’t get into their condo. They’re in Houston but are coming down tomorrow, so I guess I’ll hotel it.’
‘I thought you called a local number.’
‘It’s call-forwarding.’ She blinked at the bright headlights that dazzled behind them. The lights began to flash from dim to bright and dim again. ‘Somebody’s in a tear-ass hurry.’
Whit glanced back in the mirror. ‘He can go around me if he wants.’ The car stayed uncomfortably close. Then the lights flashed, dim, bright, dim.
‘He wants you to pull over.’ Velvet handed Whit the phone in the headlights’ glare.
‘No, thanks.’ Whit floored the accelerator. He pulled away from the car, and the pursuer dropped back dramatically to a more reasonable speed.
‘Asshole,’ Velvet commented. Whit checked the rearview mirror several seconds later and found the car was nearly gone.
‘My office is right across from the police station,’ Whit said. ‘I can give you a ride to the hotel after you give your statement.’
Velvet misunderstood his charity. ‘Look, I don’t do thank-you fucks just because someone shows common human decency.’
‘I can promise you I wasn’t asking for one.’
‘Why? You think I stink? Do you know how many guys have hit on me since I got here?’
‘Probably lots,’ Whit said.
Velvet hunkered down in her seat. ‘Lots is half right,’ she finally pronounced. ‘Tons is closer.’
Whit turned onto Main Street and pulled up in front of the Encina County courthouse. It was a sprawling, grand oddity, shaped by the Moorish architecture popular on the coast a century ago, three stories of heavy Texas granite, designed to survive storm surge and hurricane. The Port Leo Police Department stood across the street, a cracker-box of boring plain brick. They crossed the empty street together. The wind rustled in the drooping palms, and the clouds had dipped low, pregnant with rain.
‘They aren’t going to arrest me, are they?’ Velvet asked suddenly, stopping halfway across the street.
‘Did you kill him?’ Whit asked.
‘No. God, no.’
‘Then don’t worry. Tell them what they need to know. These are good people. They’re not going to hang you out to dry. I promise you that.’
She crossed her arms, bowed her head, and the tears came in shudders, and she bleated Pete Hubble’s name. Whit didn’t dwell on niceties or politics. He took her into his arms and let her cry against his shoulder, like old friends consoling each other in the terrible reality of sudden grief. He couldn’t stand there like a wooden post while a woman sobbed. She got his tropical-print shoulder wet and snotty, and when the shaking stopped Whit steered her into the brightly lit doorway of the police station.
7
The Blade watched his Darling and that goddamned good-for-nothing lecher of a judge embracing in the street. He tried to slow his breathing. He had drawn close to Whit Mosley’s Explorer and retreated when his headlights, and the Explorer’s interior lights, showed Velvet holding a cell phone. That wouldn’t do to have them announce they were being chased or to have a stranger on a cellular connection overhear the Blade doing his best work. He followed them into Port Leo’s town square and slowly parked, a block away in front of the black glass of the Gulfstream Bookstore, his headlights cut.
Watching them touch – watching Whit Mosley touch a woman that belonged to him – sickened the Blade. He cupped the knife against the round fleshiness of his palm, feeling the bite of its edge. He took calming breaths and tried not to cry in frustration. Patience was beyond a virtue. It was the most basic rule of survival, and to bend patience meant mistakes. Mistakes were not affordable. He had read, in the literature of his own kind, of the most abominable errors: John Wayne Gacy inviting the police keeping him under surveillance to join him for breakfast right when the odd smell floated from the crawlway; Dennis Nilsen showing the first policeman who knocked on his door the grisly plastic bags in his London closet. The Blade decided long ago that he would not lie down and die. So he fell back, and he watched, and he turned on the tape player, and the reedy Beach Boys tape that had been the player’s sole occupant for the last three years sputtered into life and the Boys, volume turned low, demanded he be true to his school. He prayed that his Darling would be true to him, singing along under his breath, taking the harmony line.
Mosley and Velvet went into the police station, and the Blade waited. A few minutes later, Mosley sauntered across the street to the courthouse.
You dirty little freak. You’re nothing, not worthy to touch her, know her tears. I’m not the nothing. You’re the nothing.
Mosley fiddled with the courthouse door and ducked inside the darkened building. A light flickered on a few minutes later in a first-floor office behind lowered blinds.
Perhaps Judge Mosley didn’t lock up after himself.
He ran to the courthouse steps and tried the door: locked. Damn.
But no, he told himself. Not now. He shivered. One death by violence in Port Leo tonight was remarkable. Another the same night would bring the police out in droves. He walked away from the courthouse. Let Whit Mosley continue to breathe – for now – and let him rule that Pete Hubble died a suicide. He congratulated himself on his self-restraint.
The momentary pride evaporated when he saw the flyer hanging in the bookstore window. Only the dim shimmer from the streetlight illuminated the girl’s face, printed on light blue paper taped to the inside of the window. The Blade blinked, his guts coiling like a frightened snake.
The eyes of his last Darling watched him from the flyer. She was smiling broadly. He had not seen her smile,
