He glanced up the alley at a man squatting beside a brick chimney, muttering to himself, tucked into an old bricked-up basement window arch converted to a furnace-room vent — maintaining his claim to high-quality real estate for the coming winter, central heating and shelter from the wind. Add a packing crate to keep out the rain and snow and call it home.
Daniel took a couple of steps in that direction and paused. "Dead kid, eh? Damned shame."
The man looked up, bleary, gray-stubbled, balding, wrapped in a filthy ragged army overcoat that probably dated back to 'Nam. The boots sticking out from under it had holes large enough that Daniel saw black toenails sticking through them. "Tina? Fuckin' thief, kill you soon as look at you. No loss."
Daniel blinked at that. "Thought you told the cop you didn't know her."
"Cops."
The single word spoke volumes. Morgans might have been pirates and thieves for generations out of mind, but they lived in society. Profited from society. Society, rich society, was where you sold the loot. Morgans always were polite to cops — cops were friends, cops helped protect your plunder once you'd stolen it. Morgans hadn't lived on the streets since streets first came to Maine.
This man, to look at him you wouldn't think he'd have anything worth stealing. He had "victim" written all over him, not a threat to anyone. Yet to him, cops were enemies. You don't give information to the enemy. And cops wouldn't be around if someone like Tina came looking for the source of ill-chosen words.
"Thief, eh? Killer? Looked like a kid, maybe high school."
"Older'n that, her and her sisters. On and off the streets since I been here. Cops know who she is. Just trying to find who saw her last." He glanced around as if he expected to see a big blonde girl with a switchblade striding down the alley, grinning death at him.
"All of 'em mean as mad dogs. I saw Tina cut a man for a bottle once. Cut him bad, then laughed. Only had a couple of swallows left in it. She'd a cut me, too, if she knew I'd seen her."
Daniel staggered further along the alley and squatted down, far enough away he wasn't threatening, close enough for talking. Close enough to smell the rancid territory of a drunk too far gone to walk to the end of the alley when he needed to piss. This was the third or fourth time he'd heard mention of girls paired up to prey on men made stupid by sex or booze or drugs.
"Sisters?"
The man stirred in his little window niche, pulling himself together and slipping one hand into a pocket of that overcoat. Antisocial, maybe paranoid schizo like a lot of the street people. Daniel wondered what the pocket hid, if anything. He swirled the bottle in his right hand, listening to the gurgle of it, and then looked from the bottle to the man and back again. Bait.
The man knew. His whole body focused on that brown paper bag. Daniel leaned forward, reached out as far as he could, and placed the bag on the broken asphalt between them.
Then he squatted back on his heels. "I'm new around here. Just wonder what to watch out for. What you said, sounds like something a man ought to know."
"Yeah." The man eyed that bag for about a minute, thinking, and then leaned over until he could reach it. Lifted it, weighed it in his hand. That answer should satisfy him, Daniel had only drunk two swallows from it. One to scent his breath for the cop, the second to catch the eye of his audience.
The bum peeled the bag down past the bottle's neck, uncapped it, and wiped the glass with his sleeve. Daniel shuddered. Well, maybe the muscatel had enough alcohol in it to disinfect the cloth . . . . Anyway, the old man took a long swallow, two Adam's-apple bobs worth of judging the quality of the bribe, and sighed. It wasn't whiskey, but it wasn't Pepsi, either.
"Don't think they were sisters. Called each other that, but prob'ly not. Last couple of months, Tina'd been going around with a big blonde, even bigger'n her, bigger'n most men. Mean as hell. Short hair, nasty scar on the side of her head. Catch you in a corner, beat you up. Beat the shit out of you for the pure hell of it, not even search your pockets after."
He paused and took another swallow, longer, three bobs this time, and the sigh seemed more relaxed. "Few years back, it was a shorter kid, thin and tense as a wire, all sorts of weird hair colors. You know, green, purple, orange, that kind of thing, all done up in spikes. Kid would play hooker, Tina would bust in and shake the John down. Don't know if the kid ever did any tricks. Been a couple of other girls, they didn't last long. Tina probably killed them. Kids disappear."
Jane White again, most likely. Hell and damnation, why did Gary have to inherit Ben's habit of thinking with his dick? Every word Dan had found, that girl was poison. On the street or off.
Dan lurched to his feet, and the bum shrank back into his window niche, hugging the bottle close. The free hand was buried in its pocket again, gun or knife or rock. Daniel wouldn't learn anything more here. He stepped back, and the man relaxed.
One bit of confirmation he might get . . . "Those the girls used to hide out upstairs at the Paramount? Heard about them. Bad
