“Hey, I’m trying to work here,” Levesque said. “You guys are on private property.”
“Oh my,” Hawk said.
Levesque glanced at Hawk. Hawk made him uneasy.
“My boss sees me talking like this, I could get fired.”
I looked around. We were near the corner of a big corrugated-metal lumber shed.
I said to Levesque, “Let’s go around the corner then.”
Hawk took hold of his left arm and I his right and we moved him pretty quickly around the corner so we were standing out of sight between the back of the warehouse and a hill full of weeds. We banged him hard against the back of the shed, and stepped back.
“What’s going on with you and Mary,” I said.
Levesque put his hand under his shirttail and came out with a gun. It was a squat black semiautomatic.
“You motherfuckers get away from me,” he said.
Hawk smiled. “You not saying it right,” he said. “Correct pronunciation be muthafuckas.”
The gun wasn’t cocked. On a semiautomatic you have to cock it for the first shot.
“Look at me,” I said.
He looked and Hawk took the gun out of his hand. Hawk is very quick.
“Don’t see so many of these,” Hawk said. “Forty-caliber.”
“Forty?”
“Yep.”
“For crissake,” I said.
I put my hand out. Hawk gave me the gun and as he did, Levesque turned and ran.
“You want him?” Hawk said.
I shook my head. I was looking at the gun.
“Nathan Smith was killed with a forty-caliber slug,” I said.
“There’s more than one forty-caliber around,” Hawk said.
“I know,” I said. “Still, most people don’t own one. Most people buy thirty-eights or comnines.”
“If he bought it,” Hawk said.
“Still a large coincidence,” I said. “Smith’s killed by a sort of unusual gun and one of the principals turns up with a gun that’s the same kind of sort of unusual.”
“Gonna take it to Quirk,” Hawk said.
“I am.”
“Then we know,” Hawk said.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
I had a picture of Marvin Conroy that Rita had gotten me from the Pequod Bank. Race Witherspoon and I took the picture down to Nellie’s and showed it to the third-floor bartender, whose name was Rick. The place was nearly empty. Two or three guys sat around at separate tables, and a party of four were drinking tequila sunrises at a round table near the stairs.
Rick was a tall thin guy with his thinning hair cut very short. He wore round eyeglasses with gold frames. There was a blue-and-red sea serpent tattooed on his left forearm. He looked at the picture of Conroy for a while, then looked at Race.
“He’s cool,” race said.
I smiled in a cool way. Rick studied me for a minute.
“Yeah, he was in here.”
“You remember him?”
“Yeah, sure. He was a straight guy, and he was asking me about Nathan Smith. And he had attitude.”
“How could you tell he was straight?” I said.
Rick looked at me and snorted.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s how. What did you tell him?”
“I told him I didn’t know Nathan Smith.”
“He press you?”
“Yes.”
“He say what he wanted?”
“No. I thought he might be some detective Smith’s wife hired.”
