and sketched, and scoured the area for evidence, and an hour later, they were watching the forensic techs wrapping up the crime scene. The department wrecker was hooking up the Taurus. Tomorrow, all that’d be left would be glass on the street from the shot-up car. The glass would stay awhile, but eventually it would be gone too.
“Teasdale was right, you know,” Jose said, still looking at the glass. He heard Frank say something in reply, but not exactly what. Jose surveyed the small houses with their neat yards that lined Bayless Place.
Once you had your street taken over by assholes like Skeeter, you were in for trouble. Even if you got rid of Skeeter, the damage was done. He had shown that Bayless Place could be had. Blood in the water. And there was always somebody else out there, circling, watching, searching out the cripples, the easy pickings. That’s why Teasdale had seemed so angry. Teasdale knew what would come next. What for certain would come next.
Jose felt a weighted despair. Getting looked at that way went with the job. They pay you to be the thin blue line between society and the animals. But the Skeeters roamed free and the Edward Everett Teasdales stayed off the streets and made sure they locked their doors.
“You ready to go?” Jose asked Frank.
He’ll live. He might not be able to do anything useful with that left arm, but I suspect he wasn’t trying out for Olympics gymnastics before he was shot.”
Dr. Sheresa Arrowsmith, a stocky woman with a glossy ebony complexion, was an expert on gunshot wounds. “Didn’t plan it that way,” she’d explained to Frank and Jose when they had met her years before, “but you work trauma in the District, you get a lot of practice digging out slugs.”
“Officer on the scene said it looked like he took it in the shoulder.”
Arrowsmith nodded. “He did. But the bullet was tumbling when it hit him. It may have ricocheted off something in the car… may have been one that went through his friend’s head.”
The three began walking toward Intensive Care.
“He’d have been better off if it had hit him full force,” Arrowsmith continued. “Would have drilled right on through the shoulder. Tumbling like it did”-she made a circling motion with an index finger-“it pretty much smashed up the rotator cuff.”
She stopped in front of one of the ICUs.
Through the glass door, Frank saw Pencil Crawfurd, chest bandaged, a tangle of tubes running in and out of his body, his bed surrounded by electronic monitoring equipment.
“He’s still out,” Arrowsmith said.
“Any guess how long?” Jose asked.
“Maybe another two, three hours.” Her eyes fixed on the motionless figure. She sighed, as if acknowledging how powerless all the tubing and electronics were to affect what would happen. “Maybe a couple a days.”
“He starts coming around…” Jose offered Arrowsmith a contact card.
She laughed. “Save your card. All these years, Jose, I got your number.”
TWO
Frank turned off Florida Avenue onto M Street, NE.
A dingy assortment of run-down row houses lined both sides of the street. The stark glare of mercury-vapor lamps washed over battered doors, raw-dirt front yards, plywood-patched windows sprayed with gang graffiti. A gutted mattress lay on the sidewalk. Farther on, a Safeway shopping cart, minus a wheel, leaned against a long- dead tree.
“Looks like all the shit in the world nobody wanted’s been dumped here,” Jose said.
“Little urban renewal needed.”
Jose grunted. “A little nuclear bomb.”
“Here we are.” Frank pulled over to the curb.
The two-story brick row house stood out from its crumbling neighbors: bright yellow with white trim, azaleas and climbing wisteria. A black ornamental cast-iron fence set the property off from the rest of the neighborhood.
The gate opened and shut quietly. At the door, Jose rapped with the polished brass knocker. He was about to knock again when the door swung open. A compact black man in a black suit, white shirt, and black bow tie stood like a statue in the doorway.
Marcus was into his never-blink routine. Deciding against a stare-down standoff, Frank held up his credentials and badge.
“We’re here to see Ms. Lipton, Marcus.”
Marcus’s eyes moved almost imperceptibly, first taking in the credentials, then scanning Frank’s face as though he’d never seen him before.
“Wait.” Marcus’s shearing whisper was like a razor cutting through stiff paper. He swung the door shut. It made the heavy, cushioned sound of a vault closing. The snicking of a deadbolt followed.
Frank glanced out at the empty street, then at Jose. “I thought he was still in Lorton.”
“No,” Jose said. “Maybe a month, two months ago, I heard he was out. Nice uniform.”
“Looks like he got religion.”
“If you can call it that.”
More time passed.
Impatient, Frank rolled his shoulders. “Think he’s coming back?”
“I don’t hear anything.”
Jose had the knocker up when the deadbolt slid back. Another second and the door swung open. Marcus did a short rerun of the statue game, then motioned Frank and Jose in with a twist of his head.
Walking with feline grace, he led them down a narrow hallway and into a glassed garden room filled with potted palms, orchids, and climbing vines.
Sharon Lipton, a large, exotic woman, sat in an even larger wicker chair. Like a throne, the chair back swept out and up, forming an oval frame for her face. Beside her, a similar chair, empty.
“Thank you, Marcus.”
Marcus gave the slightest nod. He waited for a moment, eyeing Frank and Jose in warning, then left.
Lipton watched him leave, then turned to Frank and Jose.
They offered their credentials.
With the back of her hand, she waved them off. “Sit.”
The two men took seats on a small sofa. Lipton looked them over as if they were up for auction.
“You… you’re Josephus Phelps… Titus Phelps’s boy. And you”-she shifted to Frank-“you’re Frank Kearney.”
She continued looking at the two detectives, collecting more thoughts. She pursed her lips. “You the two who set up Johnny Sam.”
Jose shrugged. “Johnny set himself up.”
Lipton ignored him. “You said you wanted to talk to me.” She settled back in the chair and rested her hands on the arms. “So… so talk,” she commanded.
The thought came to Frank: She knows. She knows why we’re here.
Jose did it. Without preamble, he did it. “Ma’am, somebody shot and killed your son, James.”
Lipton’s expression didn’t change.
“It was over on Bayless,” Jose continued, “and Pencil-”
Lipton cut in. “I know.”
Her voice came from a dark cavern of grief and anger. It hung in the still air of the garden room. A heartbeat or two passed; then she brought her head forward a fraction of an inch. The motion carried an impression of searching.
“Where is he?”
“Medical examiner’s.”
“They gonna cut him up… my boy.” The final, flat way she said it, it wasn’t a question, it was an
