bring what I need?” Dean asked.
Jack hefted the sack. “You wanted one more brick, I brought it.” “What the fuck?” said a female voice out of the shadows. Jack didn’t know who she was or what she meant, so he tossed the brick to Dean. A couple of the bikers flinched as the dormant explosive arced across the room, but Dean caught it casually and hefted it.
“What the fuck?” said the woman again, staggering into the lamplight. She was blond, in her late thirties, but with the used look of a much older woman. She blinked at Jack. “You’re not Dog!”
11. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 4 A.M. AND 5 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
“Who the fuck are you?” Jack said lazily.
“Deb!” she said indignantly. “I lived down ’round here back in ’94. Or maybe ’95. Something like that.” She blinked several times, and spoke in the overly enunciated speech of someone who is trying not to sound drunk. “I met him coupla times.”
“You mean you screwed him a couple times!” The fat biker laughed. So did everyone else, including Deb, who was clearly no delicate flower.
“You know Deb?” Dean asked. He was laughing, too, but Jack could feel the energy between them change. A wall had gone up between them.
Jack looked at her and shrugged. “I don’t know.
It’s like four o’clock in the morning. At this point I’m too shit-faced to know what they look like. And if I wasn’t shit-faced, I sure as hell wouldn’t choose this one.”
This elicited a roar of laughter from everyone except Deb, who was insistent. “No, no, I’m serious, Dean. I’m sure I met that fat slob before. This ain’t him.”
There were two directions: forward or backward. Jack wasn’t usually one for retreating. He strode forward and plopped himself down on the couch at a ninety-degree angle to Dean, and put his booted feet up on the old scratched coffee table. “Look, I got you the first batch of stuff. Then I hear from Peek that you want more. I brought it. You gonna let this split tail give me a bunch of crap?”
Dean was shrewd. He played the controversy very casually, but Jack, just as shrewd, knew that the biker leader was on his guard. “Nah, she can’t even remember what she looks like half the time,” he said. “Besides, you said you talked to Peek, right?”
Jack leaned back as though he didn’t care much as he corrected: “I didn’t talk to him. He left a message at the Killabrew.” That was how Dog did most of his business. And CTU had checked Smithies’s personal phone records. No calls that day or night from anyone that might have been connected to Peek the biker.
Before Dean could respond, Jack found Deb in his face, her skin leathered yellow, undoubtedly from years of smoking. “You’re way too good-looking. If I’d screwed you, I’d remember it.”
“If I did you, I’d do my best to forget it,” Jack answered. He put his hand on her face and shoved her backward. She fell sprawling on her backside, shrieked, and scrambled to her feet, coming at Jack like a harpy. Before Jack had moved, Dean was on her, catching her wrists in his big hands and shoving her aside.
“Give it a rest, Deb,” he said. “Hell, I did you last year and you hardly remember it.” To Jack, he said, “Thanks for bringing up the extra stuff. You want to help us use it?”
Jack nodded. “Yeah.”
Another door that Harry Driscoll did not want to open. This one, on Shoemacher Avenue, belonged to Father Sam Collins. But just as he had before, Harry knocked.
The door opened after a minute, and Father Collins, his eyes swollen from restless sleep, greeted him.
“Father Collins, Detective Driscoll. I hope I gave you enough time to—”
“Come in, come in, Detective,” Collins said with as much congeniality as four o’clock would allow. “Yes, thanks for calling ahead. I put on some coffee if you want it.”
Harry followed Collins’s words and gestures into the small, well-kept house. There was an intricately carved crucifix hanging in a place of prominence in the entryway, but otherwise the house gave no indication of belonging to a man of the cloth.
“What happened to your arm?” Harry asked immediately.
Collins touched his right hand gingerly to his left arm, which was bound up in a sling. “Oh, it’s been such a pain. Literally!” He laughed. “I was in an accident a while ago. My arm was really badly broken and I had to have surgery. I’m not sure how it’s gone, though. I have a checkup scheduled for next week, but it’s been hurting a lot.”
“What kind of accident?” Harry probed.
“Car accident. Coffee?” Harry accepted, and Collins poured two cups in the open kitchen, then brought them into the living room. “I barely remember it. I didn’t even wake up until after the surgery. I saw the X-rays, though. I have this huge plate in my arm.”
Harry nodded absently. “I’m sorry to have bothered you so early.”
Collins waved him off. Now that he was more awake, his face opened into a smile that Harry guessed was almost permanent. “It’s a wasted night anyway. My arm’s keeping me up, and I have a big conference today, and last night someone broke one of my back windows.”
Biehn, Harry thought. Biehn had said he was trying to break in when someone kidnapped him.
Collins had always been the weak point. The complication. Michael had known it from the beginning. But Yasin had insisted. He had wanted there to be three deliverymen — three, as an ironic joke for Yasin’s own amusement — and Yasin had wanted at least one of them to be ignorant of the package he was carrying. At first, Michael had argued against this last idea, and won. But after that idiot Ali had gotten himself blown up on an airplane, they had to replace him with someone, and Yasin had insisted on returning to his original idea of the unwitting messenger. They had gone to immense amounts of trouble to make that happen, and now, of course, that one unnecessary twist was about to become the snag that might unravel the whole plan.
Michael was parked outside Collins’s house again, just as he had been before, when Detective Biehn arrived. That last encounter had been sheer luck; this was foresight. Michael had bugged Collins’s phone weeks ago, so that he could monitor any calls the priest made to any doctors he might know. That surveillance had paid off when another detective had called, waking Collins and asking him if he could stop by for a few questions. Michael had driven like a bat out of hell through the foggy Los Angeles morning to arrive just behind the detective.
Yasin could go to hell, as far as Michael was concerned. The power Yasin had over them depended entirely on the keeping of a secret, and that secret was unraveling as steadily as their plan. Michael was going to have to eliminate Collins for everyone’s sake, and Yasin could go cry to Allah for all he cared.
“Father Collins,” Harry said, after spending several minutes asking simple questions designed to relax a suspect. “How well did you know Father Giggs?”
Collins sighed. “We were both priests at St. Monica’s, so I knew him pretty well, of course.”
“Were you both part of the youth program?”
Collins shifted ever so slightly. “Me? No, not officially. I helped out when I could. The program was popular, and Father Frank was sometimes overwhelmed.”
“Did you molest the children like he did?”
Silence engulfed the room like a tangible thing, a thick blanket of tension tangling them both. “Exexcuse me?” Collins said at last. He drank his coffee with a trembling hand.
“I said,” Harry repeated, staring directly into the priest’s eyes, “did you molest the children just like Father Frank did?”
Father Collins’s face flushed, then went very, very pale. His eyes could find no place to rest. They flitted like nervous birds from Driscoll to the coffee table, to the window, until finally they fell, exhausted, toward his cup. “I… no… Oh, Mary, mother of…” Something struck him and he looked up finally, his eyes filling with a fearful realization.
