wiry muscle. His leather jacket hung loose, a slight bulge on his right hip I took for a holstered gun. He was willing, that much was for certain, and he was for hire, my gut telling me it didn’t matter for which side as long as the money made it into his account. Not my type.
“I’ll pass,” I said, turning my back and stepping off the curb.
“I found Mendez. He wants to talk to you.”
The light turned red again. I came back to the sidewalk. “Why would he talk to you, and why does he want to talk to me?”
Quinn smiled. “Two questions, same answer. He realized it’s in his best interests.”
I didn’t like Quinn, and I liked it less that Kate had gone behind my back telling him enough to get Mendez’s attention, information that could give Mendez more of an edge than he already had.
“How do I know you didn’t tell Mendez too much and that we aren’t walking into a trap?”
“This isn’t my first dance. Besides, I’m guessing you were about to go hunting him. What were you going to do? Set a trap and use yourself as bait?”
The really annoying thing about guys like Quinn was that they were too often right and they knew it.
“How’d you find Mendez?”
“I’ve done some work with gang task forces. I knew who to ask and where to look.”
“What did you do? Invite him to meet you at Starbucks so you could buy him a latte?”
He shook his head, letting out a long breath. “Kate was right. She said you’d make this difficult, so I’m going to make it easy. I’ve been following you since you left the jail. You’re shaking and wobbling, just like Kate told me you would. She said that you wouldn’t listen, that you’d turn me down, and that when you did I should tell you that the moon is pink, whatever the hell that means.”
I chuckled. “She said that?”
“She did. And she said to tell you that if you try to do this on your own and get yourself killed, Joy will never forgive you, and she won’t either.”
“And how are you going to keep me from getting killed?”
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an orange. “With this.”
“A piece of fruit?”
He opened his coat, showing me the butt of his gun. “In case the orange doesn’t do the trick.”
Chapter Sixty-seven
Quinn drove a stripped-down black SUV wrapped in dark tinted windows, stick shift and rubber mats, no sound system for talk radio, top forty, or hard rock, the cup holders stuffed with gum wrappers, loose change, and wadded scraps of scribbled paper. There was a canvas bag on the front passenger seat that smelled like old sweat but rattled like it was packed with steel when I moved it to the back.
“More oranges?” I asked him.
“Odds and ends,” he said, settling behind the wheel and tossing me the orange. “Whose orange is that?”
“Yours, I guess.”
“Don’t guess.”
“Okay. It’s yours.”
“Based on what?”
“You gave it to me.”
“Whose name is on it?”
I rotated the orange, finding the familiar stamp. “Sunkist.”
“My name Sunkist?”
He was making a point that began to dawn on me. “No, and neither is mine.”
“Exactly. So you’ve got the orange. That gives you a possessor’s rights. Maybe that’s enough for you to keep it, maybe not. But I want the orange. I tell you it’s mine, that I bought and paid for it and I want it back. Naturally you say bullshit because you’ve got the orange and I don’t have a receipt for it and my name isn’t Sunkist. Now make peace.”
I laughed. “When my kids were little, I’d tell them to work it out or I’d take the orange and neither one of them would get it. They’d both be mad at me, and I’d end up with an orange I didn’t want.”
“And,” Quinn said, “if you were Solomon, you’d tell them to cut it in half.”
“But you wouldn’t.”
“Nope. They’d still be mad. The real is question is, why do you want the orange?”
I shrugged. “I’m hungry. I want to eat it.”
“And I want to use the peel to bake a cake.”
“You don’t look the type.”
“I’m not. I prefer moon pies. But if I was, we can both get what we want. You can have the fruit, and I can have the peel. We can make peace because knowing why we want what we want lets us expand the pie and meet both of our needs.”
“That’s swell, Dr. Feel Good, but suppose I don’t give a shit about you or your cake and I want the whole thing because I don’t share well with others.”
He smiled. “That’s when we find out how hungry you are and how badly I want to bake that pie.”
“What are you, an ex-cop, a lawyer, a shrink, or just a guy who sells fruit?”
“My father is a psychiatrist and my mother is a psychologist, which means every time I farted when I was growing up, I got analyzed. I broke their hearts when I applied to the police academy instead of Harvard. I spent six years on patrol, another ten as a detective, went to law school at night, passed the bar but never practiced. Couldn’t see selling slices of my life measured in tenths of an hour. Stayed a cop and ended up a hostage negotiator until I quit the force and opened up my own fruit stand.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“They gave me a choice. Quit or get fired.”
“Why?”
“When the fruit is rotten, someone has to take the fall. It was my turn, which was only fair because it was my fault. Two people died. One of them was a hostage, and one of them was a cop.”
“But they still use you as a freelancer?”
“The department ran out of negotiators, which made it easy for them to forgive even if they didn’t forget. Kate told me what she knows and thinks she knows about your case. I need you to tell me the rest.”
I started to talk, but my vocal cords froze, my chin bobbing, my torso following suit, the words finally coming in a stutter.
“It’s not a short story. Be better if we stopped somewhere for a few minutes.”
“No problem. Mendez won’t start without us.”
“Are we on a schedule?”
“Anytime after dark. I’ll send him a text message when we’re ready.”
“You must be good if you’ve got him sitting by the phone waiting for you to call.”
“I let him pick the place as long as I got to pick the time. Turf is a big issue for him. It’s one of the ways he defines himself. I’m not into real estate, but going in unprepared can get you killed. This way he’ll feel like he’s in control and we’ll be ready.”
A powerful spasm jerked me forward, bending me at the waist, twisting me clockwise. I grunted and braced myself, one hand flattened on the dash, the other on the passenger door, taking a deep breath when it passed, looking at Quinn, wondering if he was having second thoughts. He didn’t blink, smile, or frown, his eyes doing all the work, boring in, deciding how, not whether. I was another problem to be solved, more water off a duck’s back.
“You have some place in mind we can go?”
“Yeah. You look like you could use some religion.”
He parked behind a small, two-story church in Northeast, the first floor ringed in limestone, the second in dark red brick. There were no lights on and no other cars in the one-row parking lot. I followed him out of the car to
