The music was loud at this end of the hall, but not so loud that Wesley didn’t hear the cheers-and some of the jeers. He crept up behind Mr. Grable and looked out between the legs of the stool. The stage was splashed with harsh white light. He saw her then. Naked in front of all the men. The music pulsing through him.
She moved perfectly with the music. As if it had been written and recorded just for her. He watched and felt entranced. He didn’t want the music to stop. It was perfect. She was perfect and he-
He was suddenly grabbed from behind by the back of his T-shirt’s collar and yanked backward down the hall. He managed to look up and see it was Alma.
“You are a very bad little boy!” she scolded.
“No,” he cried. “I wanna see my-”
“Not now, you don’t!”
She dragged him back through the beads and into the dressing room. She pushed him down onto the pile of feather boas and silk scarves.
“You are in big troub-What is that?”
She was pointing at him, finger aimed low. At the place where he felt strange feelings begin from.
“I’m a good boy,” he said.
“Not with that, you aren’t,” Alma said. “Let’s see what you’ve got there.”
She reached down and put her hand under his belt. She started to pull his pants down.
“You little pervert,” Alma said. “I’m going to show you what we do with perverts around here.”
Wesley was frozen in terror. That word she called him. He didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t know what to do.
The sharp knock of metal on glass cut through the music and the dream. Carver jumped up in his seat. Momentarily disoriented, he looked around, realized where he was, and pulled the buds out of his ears.
He looked out the window, and there was McGinnis, standing in the street. He was holding a leash that led down to the collar on a little pip-squeak dog. Carver saw the fat Notre Dame ring on his finger. He must have hit the window with it to get his attention.
Carver lowered the window. At the same time, he used his foot to make sure the gun he’d placed on the floor was out of sight.
“Wesley, what are you doing here?”
The dog started yapping before Carver could answer, and McGinnis shushed it.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Carver said.
“Then, why didn’t you come up to the house?”
“Because I also have to show you something.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Get in and I’ll take you.”
“Take me where? It’s almost midnight. I don’t under-”
“It has to do with that visit from the FBI the other day. I think I know who they’re looking for.”
McGinnis took a step forward to look in closely at Carver.
“Wesley, what’s going on? What do you mean ‘who they’re looking for’?”
“Just get in and I’ll explain it on the way.”
“What about my dog?”
“You can bring it. We won’t be long.”
McGinnis shook his head like he was annoyed with the whole thing but then walked around to get into the car. Carver leaned forward and quickly grabbed the gun off the floor and put it into the rear waistband of his pants. He’d have to live with the discomfort.
McGinnis put the dog in the backseat and then got into the front.
“It’s a she,” he said.
“What?” Carver asked.
“The dog’s a she, not an it.”
“Whatever.
“Don’t worry. She just went.”
“Good.”
Carver started driving out of the neighborhood.
“Is your house locked?” he asked.
“Yes, I lock up when we go on walks. You never know with the neighborhood kids. They all know I live alone.”
“That’s smart.”
“Where are we going?”
“To where Freddy Stone lives.”
“Okay, so now tell me what is going on and what it has to do with the FBI.”
“I told you. I have to show you.”
“Then tell me what you’re going to show me. Have you talked to Stone? Did you ask him where the hell he’s been?”
Carver shook his head.
“No, I haven’t talked to him. That’s why I went to his place tonight, to try to catch him. He wasn’t there but I found something else. The website the FBI was asking about. He’s the guy behind it.”
“So as soon as he hears that the FBI came by with a warrant, he takes a hike.”
“It looks that way.”
“We need to call the FBI, Wesley. We can’t look like we were protecting this guy, no matter what he was into.”
“But it could hurt the business if it blows up in the media. It could bring us down.”
McGinnis shook his head.
“We’ll just have to take our lumps,” he said emphatically. “Covering it up will never work.”
“All right. We go to his place first and then we call the FBI. Do you remember the names of those two agents?”
“I have their cards at the office. One was named Bantam. I remember it because he was a big guy but his name was Bantam, like the bantamweight class in boxing, which is the small guys.”
“Right. Now I remember.”
The lights of the tall buildings in downtown Phoenix spread out before them on both sides of the freeway. Carver stopped talking and McGinnis did likewise. The dog was sleeping on the backseat of the car.
Carver’s mind wandered back to the memory the music had conjured earlier. He wondered what had made him go down the hallway to look. He knew the answer was tangled down deep in his darkest roots. In a place no one could go.
TEN: Live at Five
I never left my hotel room Saturday, even when some of the reporters on the weekend shift called and invited me over to the Red Wind for cocktails after work. They were celebrating another day on the front page with the story. The latest report being on Alonzo Winslow’s first day of freedom and an update on the growing search for the trunk murder suspect. I didn’t feel much like celebrating a story that was no longer mine. I also didn’t go to the Red Wind anymore. They used to put the front pages of the A section, Metro and Sports over the urinals in the men’s restroom. Now they had flat-screen plasma TVs tuned to Fox and CNN and Bloomberg. Each screen adding insult to injury, a reminder that our business was dying.
Instead I stayed in Saturday night and started working my way through the files, using Rachel’s notes as a blueprint. With her in Washington and off the case, I felt uncomfortable leaving the profiling to nameless, faceless agents on the task force or as far away as Quantico. This was my story and I was going to keep out in front on it.
