I rounded the corner at the rear of the house, and goddamn if there wasn’t a creep coming out the back door. At least I thought it was a creep, but the species has so many faces that this was only a guess on my part. Until, that is, a sneaky, startled look gave him away.
“Hey!” I yelled, to see what would happen.
The guy jumped off a low back porch and ran—so, yep, creep.
I took off after him, eight yards behind when he darted around the far corner of the house, headed for the street, camera on a strap banging against his hip, and found a fence with a locked gate in his path. He was hiking himself over when I caught his belt and hauled him back, threw him against a garbage can, hard. He bounced off the can, spun, and landed on the ground half buried in a shrub. The garbage can fell over, dumped orange peels, coffee grounds, soiled paper towels, and other crud onto a concrete walkway.
“Hey, don’t . . . don’t do nothin’ you’ll regret, man,” said the creep, holding his hands out defensively.
“So far so good,” I replied. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Celebrity News.”
Celebrity News? The only thing that came to mind was a sleazy tabloid that wouldn’t make decent toilet paper. Which didn’t make a bit of sense—but being a gumshoe, I thought it might be a clue. To what, I didn’t know. Things were still fishy.
“What’s your name?” I asked, glowering at him as if I owned the place. He rolled out of the shrub and hiked himself backward until he was sitting on the ground against the side of the house. If he worked for the News, he might be leaving an oil slick on the siding. I would have to check that later.
“Bill,” he said. His camera was on the ground. He picked it up and held it protectively in his lap.
“Bill who?”
“Hogan. Bill Hogan. I’m an investigative reporter.”
“A reporter?”
“Yeah.” He glowered at me. “Investigative.”
“For Celebrity News? The tabloid.”
“News magazine. Yeah.”
“Tabloid. Means you’re a Gutter Press investigator.”
“If you say.”
I let that sink in for a few. Son of a bitch was going to give us genuine investigators a bad name.
“Wallet,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Your wallet. Let’s see it.”
“Got a warrant?”
“Trust me, dimwit. My warrant leaves scar tissue, so you don’t want to see it.” I kicked his foot and put enough steel in my voice to make a lug wrench.
The steel thing worked because he dug in his jeans and tossed his wallet to me. I pulled out a driver’s license. Vincent Ignacio. And half a dozen business cards for Celebrity News, also in the name of Vince Ignacio. Fucking things actually said Investigative Reporter. I kept one of the cards.
“Looks like you stole Vince’s wallet, Bill. Maybe I should get the police over here, get you into some of those polymer flexi-cuffs, see if the News likes you enough to make your bail.”
“Shit,” he said, leaning back, giving up. “Okay, so I’m Vince Ignacio. So what?”
“There isn’t any ‘what,’ Vinny. There’s only truth, justice, and the American Way. I didn’t think the News had reporters. I thought they just made shit up, like with a dartboard.”
Maybe my voice had gone a bit soft because he smiled, sort of, and said, “They do, mostly. Space alien stuff, Loch Ness, Yetis seen dragging a moose down Main Street in a remote town in Maine. Sometimes we go after a real story, get it on the front page to get some credibility.”
“And you think there’s a real story here, at my place?”
“Shanna Hayes? Hell yeah. You kidding?”
Shanna Hayes. Didn’t ring any bells with me, but now was not the time to hesitate and give this scrawny little weasel a toehold. But that last comment made me wonder.
“What about her?” I asked, giving the weasel a toehold big enough to launch him onto the roof of the house.
He gave me a long look, digging in with his eyes, evaluating, detecting ignorance, the investigative creep. “You don’t know? How well do you know Shanna, anyway? Like you once saw her across a parking lot and almost said hi?”
So, he wasn’t stupid. Time to roust the sonofabitch. I grabbed the front of his shirt and lifted him off the ground. He was maybe twenty-six years old and a spindly little shitbird, five-six, a hundred forty pounds in wet clothes. His hair was stringy, over his ears, nose big and pointy, lips thin, eyes close together, and he had acne scars on his cheeks. I didn’t like the guy. Danya said he looked creepy, and I didn’t disagree.
“Shanna and I are engaged, asshole,” I said, putting my nose two inches from his. “That’s how well I know her.”
He laughed. “Yeah, right. Means you don’t know nothin’ about her. Anyway, she’s so far outta your league, dude—”
When someone ten inches shorter and seventy pounds lighter laughs in your face, you know you’ve stepped in it. How deep, you don’t know, but once you’ve got a bluff going you’ve got to keep at it or die, so I slammed him up against the side of the house hard enough to make his teeth click and his eyes snap open.
“You saying she’s dumb, man, marrying me?” I snarled. “That what you’re saying?”
Sensing that death might be closer than he’d thought, he said, “No no no, hey—”
I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep this going. I had the feeling I’d already blown it, so I popped the SD card out of his camera and put it in a pocket. “Mind if I keep this? Shanna’s into photography. Might see something she likes,
