'Man, could you recognize yo' mama? Kind of a question is that?
Man is five-eleven, one hundred seventy pounds, real light brown hair, has eyeglasses with brown plastic frames. Wearin' black leather lace-up shoes an' navy pants and a blue zip-up jacket. An' about the lamest sport shirt you ever saw.
Blue an' white checks. Could I recognize him? Man, if I could draw I'da drawed him. You put me with that artist you was tellin' me about, we'd wind up with somethin' looked more like him than a photograph.'
'I'm impressed.'
'Yeah? Car was a Honda Civic, sort of a blue-gray, a little beat up.
Up until he got into it I figured I'd follow him right back to where he's stayin'. He snatched somebody, right?'
'Yes.'
'Who?'
'A fourteen-year-old girl.'
'Motherfucker,' he said. 'I knowed that, maybe I tag him a little closer, run a little faster.'
'You did fine.'
'What I think I do now, I check out the neighborhood some.
Maybe I see where he park his car.'
'If you're sure you'd recognize it.'
'Well, I got the plate number. Be a lot of Hondas, but not too many got the same license plate.'
He read it out to me and I jotted it down and started to tell him how pleased I was with his performance.
He didn't let me finish. 'Man,' he said, exasperated, 'how long we gonna go on this way, with you bein'
stone amazed every time I do somethin' right?'
'IT'S going to take us a few hours to get the money together,' I told him when he called again. 'It's more than he has and it's going to be difficult to raise it at this hour.'
'You're not trying to lower the price, are you?'
'No, but if you want the whole amount you'll have to be patient.'
'How much do you have now?'
'I don't have a count.'
'I'll call in an hour,' he said.
* * *
'YOU can use this phone,' I told Yuri. 'He won't be calling for the next hour. How much have we got?'
'A little over four,' Kenan said. 'Less than half.'
'Not enough.'
'I don't know,' he said. 'One way to look at it, who else are they gonna sell her to? If you tell him this is all we got, take it or leave it, what's he gonna do?'
'The trouble is you don't know what he's likely to do.'
'Yeah, I keep forgetting he's a lunatic.'
'He wants a reason to kill the girl.' I didn't want to stress this in front of Yuri, but it had to be said.
'That's what got them started in the first place. They like killing.
She's alive, and he'll keep her alive as long a she's their ticket to the money, but he'll kill her the minute he thinks he can get away with it, or that he's lost his shot at the money. I don't want to tell him we've only got half a mil. I'd rather show up with half a mil and tell him it's the whole thing, and hope he doesn't count it until we've got the girl back.'
Kenan thought about this. 'The trouble is,' he said, 'the cocksucker already knows what four hundred thousand looks like.'
'See if you can raise some more,' I said, and went off to use the Snoopy phone.
THERE used to be a number you called at the Department of Motor Vehicles. You gave your shield number and told them the plate you wanted to trace and somebody looked it up and read it off to you. I no longer knew that special number, and had a feeling it had long since been phased out. Nobody answered the listed number for DMV.
I called Durkin but he wasn't at the station house. Kelly wasn't at his desk, either, and there was no point in paging him, because he couldn't do what I wanted him to do from a distance. I remembered when I'd been in to pick up the Gotteskind file from Durkin and pictured Bellamy at the adjacent desk, having a one-sided conversation with his computer terminal.
I called Midtown North and got him. 'Matt Scudder,' I said.
'Oh, hey,' he said. 'How you doing? Joe's not around, I'm afraid.'
'That's okay,' I said. 'Maybe you can do me a favor. I was riding around with a friend of mine and some son of a bitch in a Honda Civic clipped her fender and just plain took off. Most flagrant thing you ever saw.'
