lady, the kid cuts his father a new orifice, the hooker shoots her pimp. The tough ones almost always go against the grain of common sense.
I walked out into the cool night air. The world looked peaceful, serene: all the synonyms for tranquillity. I walked west, then south, around the Inner Harbor toward Federal Hill. I finally settled on a bench overlooking the harbor.
The thought came again: What if these sons of bitches had killed Denise?
How could they have known about her? The book was the only possible motive and no one knew Denise had had it. Just Denise herself, Ralston and his doctor, Erin, and me.
I had another hunch, dark and full of trouble. Suddenly I feared for Koko. Koko knew things no one else knew.
My cop juice was finally perking. What if Denise’s killer had not been a two-bit Denver cockroach looking for pocket change? If the Burton had been the motive, the killer had turned into a much bigger cockroach. What if it had all begun here, not in Denver? Almost surely, then, Archer was in the middle of it. So were the Treadwells. Dante was their enforcer, and I had just put out big pieces of myself as roach bait.
And what about Koko?
The night was no longer young but under the circumstances, I didn’t care much about propriety. I stopped at the first phone booth I saw and punched in her number.
“Come on, Koko, answer the damn phone.”
I let it ring twenty times before I gave up, cursing the darkness.
CHAPTER 16
Forty minutes later the cabbie looked back over his shoulder and said, “What part of Ellicott City you want?”
“I don’t know. How big is it?”
“Not big—few thousand people, one main drag, buncha winding little streets. But it helps if you know where you’re goin‘. It can get dark here.”
I held up a paper and read my own writing in the glare of oncoming lights. “Where is Hill Street?”
“I can take you there.”
“Just wondering if it can be walked from downtown.”
“If you like to walk. It’s uphill both ways, as my kid likes to say.”
We crossed a river and were suddenly in Howard County. We clattered over a railroad track, passed a large stone building, and started to climb. “My wife comes from around here,” the cabbie said. “Her dad had a gas station.”
If I expected just another sprawling suburb, this was a surprise. Everything seemed to be narrow, winding, carved out of stone and at least a century old. Frederick Road had become Main Street, with stone buildings on both sides. What I could see in the night reminded me of Colorado. The town made me think of Central City.
The road took a turn and a moment later the cabbie said, “This is as downtown as it gets. Hill Street’s straight ahead on your left, maybe a quarter of a mile. It’s no skin off my nose to drive you there.”
“Thanks.” I thought about it, then said, “I’ll get out here and go on my own.”
I stood in the shadows of Main Street as the taxi disappeared back down the hill. It had to be eleven o’clock by then: pretty late to go groping through a strange land. I still felt jittery and I couldn’t shake the notion that I was being followed. I walked along a street flanked by pubs and eateries and various shops that had closed hours ago. Night-lights shone through darkened windows, and beyond the street I could see an occasional light higher up, as if on a hillside. The Central City image grew stronger as I walked past something called Church Road and continued up the hill.
I passed a fire station and a bar. Stopped for a moment and looked back. A few cars were there on the street behind me, a few people were out on the sidewalk. No one who seemed to care, no one who watched, no one who followed.
Near the top was an old church. Hill Street led away to the left, looking like a lithograph, like a country lane in the moonlight.
The climb continued with only the moon as a guide. Occasionally I could see lights from a house but most were dark, their people asleep for the night. I had no flashlight but I remembered what Koko’d said: the fifth house on the right and her name was on the mailbox.
I saw it then, a low, flat dwelling on a large piece of land, surrounded by trees. Surprisingly there was a light, a faint glow that might have come from a lantern or a gas lamp. I stepped along her walk and clumped up onto her porch. Knocked on her door.
I heard a bump. The house was quiet then for what seemed a long time.
