“And Pencil Crawfurd caught a few,” he added. He looked at Jose, then Frank.
Frank raised his empty mug for a refill, pointedly saying nothing.
Adair took the hint and gave up on the fishing. Sighing again, he handed Jose the Tabasco and collected both mugs. “Whoever zapped those shits,” he said, returning with the refills, “did us all a favor.”
“Isn’t hunting season for humans yet in the District,” Jose said.
“Too bad,” Adair replied over his shoulder as he walked away, down the length of the counter.
Jose and Frank picked at their hash browns. More out of needing something to do than being hungry. Leaving their plates half full, they drank their coffee without talking. Adair had gone to a booth at the back, where he sat working on the books.
Just the three of them in the place.
Night traffic sounds from outside joined with the gurgling of hot water in the coffee urns.
Jose looked around. “Lonesome is an empty diner at night.” He took another sip of his coffee.
“Skeeter was what… thirty-four, -five?”
“Six. Thirty-six.”
“Old to be living at home.”
Jose considered this, then shook his head. “Advantages… Pretty much come and go as he wanted. Besides, with Mama and Marcus there, he could tomcat around town all he wanted and come home to twenty-four/seven room service and security.”
“That, and a twenty-four/seven alibi,” Frank conceded.
“Sure was into high-tech.”
The flat-panel TVs, the circuit boards, the scanner, and the secure phone.
“Pac-Man generation,” Frank said, still putting a follow-on thought together. “You think about it, Hoser… how much Skeeter’s business depends on communication. He can get stuff at Radio Shack or off the Net… scanners, bugging equipment, scrambler phones… stuff that’s years ahead of anything we’ve got.”
“What’s more,” Jose said, “he doesn’t need a court order to use it. Something else…?”
“Yeah?”
“Notice how eager Mama Lipton was to get his car back? We oughta have R.C. take it apart.” Jose said, adding it to a mental checklist. “ ’Nother thing-Skeeter’s organization.”
“Who’s gonna inherit?”
“Yeah. Takeovers in that line of work get messy.”
“Might tell us who had the motive and the balls to go after him,” Frank said.
Jose scribbled a reminder in his notebook, then sat pensively as though something else was calling for his attention.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “The chair.”
“Chair?”
“Babba Lipton. The chair she was sitting in… with the big round back.”
“Yeah?”
“Remind you of something?”
It wasn’t until Jose asked that a memory flashed to Frank like a falling star. He struggled with it, trying to give it definition, time, place.
“Huey Newton,” Jose hinted.
Instant clarity: The Black Panther poster. Huey Newton. Black leather jacket. Black beret. Shotgun in one hand, spear in the other. Sitting in a thronelike wicker chair. Brooding hate and malevolence.
“When we came in,” Jose continued, “I knew she knew. The way she was waiting for us, sitting in that chair.”
Frank put down his mug. “Yeah. She had a hard time. She’s a tough lady.”
“Yes. No.”
“Yes? No?”
“Yes… she had a hard time. No… tough is raising a good kid. It’s easy to do what she did.”
“What’d she mean by that crap about her looking at Skeeter’s killers?”
Jose shook his head. “Partner, I done finished with my psychoanalysis for the night. We got to get back to detecting.”
Frank drank the last of his coffee. “Might not be too hard.”
“How?”
“Guy who did Skeeter’s out there somewhere”-Frank thumbed over his shoulder-“still on a high… pupils still dilated with excitement… king of the world. Absolutely…”
“Out there feelin’ bulletproof,” Jose said.
“Absolutely bulletproof.”
Jose tried to picture the killer, but Teasdale’s living room came on instead.
Teasdale in his button-up sweater sits in his Barcalounger. TV reflections flicker across the big man’s broad face.
Somewhere off in the distance, he heard Frank. “And he’ll talk,” Frank was saying.
Bedtime. Teasdale fires the remote at the TV. The tube dies.
“He’ll talk…”
Teasdale gets up. He checks the locks. The curtains are closed. But Teasdale pulls them tighter anyway.
“… absolutely have to talk…” Frank batted his empty mug between his hands. Back and forth over the countertop. “… get credit for the score… big man… capping Skeeter Hodges…”
Jose caught his own image in the mirror opposite the counter. “What kind of life is that?” he asked himself quietly.
Frank closed his hands, capturing the sliding mug. “What?”
“Oh,” Jose said, “thinking about… how we have to live.” He stood and reached for his wallet. “How much we owe?” he asked Adair.
Frank shot him a puzzled look. “You forget,” he said, “it’s my turn.”
THREE
T rumpets… church bells… ghostly voices… a Morricone score out of an old Clint Eastwood spaghetti western.
In semidarkness, a crouching figure holds the pistol in a two-handed combat grip, aiming it into even darker shadows. A lightning flash. Skeeter Hodges sits in the Huey Newton wicker chair.
Motionless as a manikin, he sits… waiting.
Blood erupts. Skeeter’s head explodes.
In slow motion, the shooter turns.
The bells and the voices surge.
And the figure faces him. And a lone trumpet searches his soul. The pistol finds his eyes. And the bore of the muzzle reaches out and engulfs him, and he stares into the darkness at the end of the world.
The trumpets… the bells… the voices… pound in a hellish apocalyptic crescendo…
Frank opened his eyes as the first jet of the morning from Reagan National screamed overhead, clawing its way north above the Potomac.
He lay twisted in the sheets. Motionless, he stared at the ceiling. His pulse beat furiously in his throat. The jet engines faded and his pulse slowed and the dream fragments drifted away.
He rolled over and shut his eyes, but his legs had cramped during the night, and his lungs felt musty, like a room that’d been shut too long. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. He yawned, stretched, and looked around the bedroom, eyes coming to rest on the two windows overlooking the courtyard garden at the back of the house. Blue sky framed a sun-dappled oak. Plaster walls and heart-pine floors glowed from sunlight coming down the hallway from the front of the house.
