“He’s not that kind.”
“How bad is he?”
“Hit in the leg, above the knee.”
“In the hospital?”
“Yeah, for a couple weeks. Actually, it’s not that far from where we wanted him, only now he’s gonna have a limp.”
“This isn’t what we wanted,” Parker said. “We didn’t want the law looking at him, wondering what he’s been up to lately, what did he have on the fire, who’s he been hanging around with.”
“That’s true,” Dalesia said. “We also didn’t want Jake’s reading on the thing.”
“Reading? What do you mean, reading?”
“Well,” Dalesia said, “he thinks you did it.”
TWO
1
Gwen Reversa had decided to change her first name from Wendy even before she knew she was going to be a cop. The name Wendy just didn’t lend itself to the kind of respect she felt she deserved. Wendys were thought of as blondes, i.e., airheads. Well, Gwen Reversa, now Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa, Massachusetts CID, couldn’t help it if she was a blonde, but she could help being a Wendy.
It was in a name-your-baby book that she learned that Wendy wasn’t even a proper name all by itself, though that’s what her mother had picked for her and that’s what it said on the birth certificate. But Wendy was actually a
Well. Once she’d discovered that, it was nothing at all to switch herself from a nickname without gravitas— Wendy—to a nickname with: Gwen. She was now twenty-eight, and at this stage in her life only her immediate family and a few early pals from grade school even remembered she’d once been a Wendy, and she was pretty sure they usually forgot.
“Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa, CID,” she told the wounded man in the hospital bed, and he wheezed a little, nodded his head on the pillow, and said, “Glad to see ya.” Would he be glad to see a Wendy? Nah.
“You feel strong enough to talk, Mr. Beckham?”
“Sure, if I had anything to say,” he told her. “They missed my lung by about three feet.”
She laughed, mostly to put him at his ease, and pulled over one of the room’s two chrome-and-green-vinyl chairs. Since he was a crime victim, and the perp might be interested in a follow-up question, Mr. Jake Beckham was in a private room.
Gwen took two notebooks and a pen from her shoulder bag, then put the bag on the floor and moved the chair so the shoulder bag strap looped around one leg, which is how you learned to keep control of your bag when you had a gun in it. Then she sat on the chair, opened one of the notebooks, and said, “Want to tell me about it?”
“I don’t know a hell of a lot about it,” he said. He was fiftyish, heavyset, weak and a little dour from having been shot, but there was nevertheless something boyish about him, as though, instead of lying around here in a hospital bed, he’d much rather be out playing with the guys. He said, “I was just coming out of work—”
“Trails End Motor Inne.”
“Yeah, that’s where I work, assistant manager. I was coming off my shift, I went out to my car—they want us to keep our cars out at the end of the parking lot—”
“Sure.”
“I was on my way, I felt this sting first, my right leg”—he rubbed it beneath the hospital sheet and blanket—“I thought it was a bee sting, something like that, I thought, Jesus Christ, now I’m getting stung, and then, at the same time— See, I didn’t hear the shot at first. I mean, I heard it, but I didn’t pay any attention to it because I was distracted by this bee sting, whatever it was. Then I realized, my leg’s going out from under me, that’s something more powerful than a bee, and
“Did you hear a car drive away?”
“I didn’t hear or see a goddam thing,” he assured her. “I’m on my back on the blacktop, I’m suddenly weak, now I’m getting sudden-like light flashes around my eyes, I’m thinking, I was shot with a poisoned bullet! I gotta get outa here! That’s what I’m thinking, and I try to roll over, and that’s when I passed out, and woke up in the ambulance.”
“The bullet came from behind you.”
“Yeah, behind and to my right, cause that’s where the bullet went in, halfway up between the knee and the top of the leg. They tell me the bullet’s still in there, but it didn’t hit any bone, they’ll take it out in a couple days.”
There’d been very little to write so far in this first notebook. Gwen now opened the second, which contained the details she’d already collected, and said, “So whadaya think? This the past catching up with you?”
He looked almost angry at that. “Past? What past?”
“Well, Mr. Beckham,” she said, tapping the notebook with her pen to let him know she had the goods, right in here, “you have been known to hang out with the wrong kind of people.”
“Not any more!”
“You’ve done time—”
“All over!” He was agitated, determined to convince her. “I did the minimum, got all my good behavior, that’s
“You’re on parole right now.”
“Perfect record,” he insisted. “You could check with Vivian Cabrera, she’s my parole—”
