I tried to focus, but my vision was blurred. My head hurt, and I closed my eyes. I could hear people, so that was a good sign. I opened my eyes and looked up at a gigantic individual with a tricornered hat looking down on me. It was only when I saw it was a statue and that the title on the base had way too many consonants that I collapsed against the cement and tried to breathe.
“Sir?” I felt somebody gently pull at my right shoulder in an attempt to turn me over. “Sir, are you alive?”
I rolled onto my back and watched as whomever it was backed away when they saw the big Colt in my hand. “It’s all right…” I coughed and cleared my throat, my voice sounding like somebody else’s. “I’m a peace officer.” The face returned, and I looked at his uniform. “You a cop?”
He shook his head. “I’m the bellman. I been here since the hotel opened, and that was the most dramatic entrance to the Four Seasons I ever seen.” I laughed weakly and felt a pull at my abdomen, curled in a little, and returned to my side where it felt better. He kept his hand on my shoulder and talked to me in a soft voice. “Don’t you worry, there’s help comin’, you jus’ lie there.”
I stared at the traffic and took shallow breaths, absorbing some of the cool from the sidewalk. I felt a little dizzy for a moment, but it passed with the adrenaline discharge, and I stared past the traffic at the fountain at the center of Logan Circle with the swans blowing jets of water thirty feet into the air.
And there it was, the Indian I was meant to go back to.
11
“So, you got the license plate number of the truck that hit you?” She sat on the back of the chair with her feet on the seat, the kind of posture that made teachers yell.
It was a cop convention at HUP. They had tried to take me to Hahneman, which was only four blocks from the Four Seasons, but I had told them I’d throw myself from the ambulance if they didn’t take me to the same hospital as Cady. After careful consideration and in light of recent events, they took me at my word.
“Like I told the fuzz, city plates, 90375.” The stitches at my jawline pulled when I talked. Dr. Rissman was looking at my ear, but he didn’t say anything so he must have figured that was old news. I guessed he had come down to take a look at me out of curiosity and that you could pretty much jump in anytime if you were a neurosurgeon.
Vic turned to look at the two detectives as Katz flipped his small notebook closed. “Stolen from the city lot two nights ago.”
Gowder looked at Vic, she looked at Katz, and I could tell that they had all three known each other for quite some time. Michael was leaning against a wall, and they had posted a patrolman outside the curtain.
Gowder stepped forward and held up a standard wants-and-warrants vita with a two-by-two photo of William White Eyes. He was slightly heavier, wore no glasses, and the hair was loose. “That’s him.”
Katz walked over beside Vic and adjusted his glasses, the red dots jockeying for a good seat on his nose. He was a handsome devil, and I could see Lena making the reach. “Released a week ago. After you mentioned him last night, we did a quick look-see. Any idea why he was following you?”
“We cowboys have that problem with Indians, even white ones.” Katz gave me a look. “Any word on Shankar DuVall?”
The two detectives turned and looked at Michael, who grinned. “Looks like he was the one that you ran into the other night. Turns out Fraser and the others couldn’t retrieve the gun, and he wasn’t carrying, so they had to let him go.”
“What about his connections with Toy Diaz?”
“We got a hit on an abandoned car in Atlantic City, but no Diaz.”
“I think I may have met Toy Diaz last night.” They all looked at me as Gowder continued to wait on the phone for the current address of one William White Eyes.
Katz cleared his throat. “Where?”
“At the shooting range; he was with Osgood. At least I think it was him, short guy, Latino, very precise, eyes like a snake?”
The detective nodded his head slowly. “That sounds like him.”
Gowder flipped his cell phone closed. “We’ve got an address.”
Vic sipped her coffee. “Asa, why would William White Eyes want to hurt Walt? If he’s the one that knocked on the Franklin Institute door, sent Devon to flight school, and wrote the note? We should focus on Toy Diaz.”
“Believe me, we are, but maybe the sheriff here was getting too close for comfort.”
“He could have run over him twice…” I shook my head and raised a single sprained finger. “Excuse me, once.”
Katz glanced back at me. “I think White Eyes did a pretty good job on him.”
“But he didn’t kill him.” She hadn’t said anything about the note I’d given her, and I thought maybe I wouldn’t say anything about it just yet. I reached for the fresh shirt that Vic had brought me from Cady’s. She said that she had met her mother there and that Lena was taking care of Dog.
Gowder was watching me. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“With you.”
He shook his head. “Oh no, you’re under house arrest until we get William White Eyes.”
I looked at the two of them. “So, the partnership is over?”
Gowder smiled as they left. “Looks that way.”
I waited till they were past the curtain. “What if I told you I got another note?” Vic took a sip of her coffee and snorted.
They stopped without turning, stood there for a moment, and then Gowder looked back at Vic, to Katz, and then to me. “Bullshit.”
“Vic?”
She took her time taking another sip. “Off the bridge at the crime scene.” She pulled the envelope from her pocket and held it up between her index and middle fingers.
I went ahead with putting on my shirt. “I also know where the next one is.”
Katz took the envelope, opened it, and read the card. “I don’t suppose it occurred to you two to have this dusted?”
“Were there any fingerprints on the other one? Any DNA sample from the envelope?” He didn’t answer, and I had mine.
Katz passed the note to Gowder and looked up at me. “Where?”
Vic climbed off her chair and stretched. “Does this mean the partnership’s back on?” She stepped over and helped me from the gurney. “So, did my little brother start his crush before or after your daughter was in a coma?”
Bodine Street was in an industrial complex five blocks north of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. I mentioned to Vic that it was convenient, since she was the only one in the car speaking to me. John Meifert, White Eyes’s parole officer, was going to meet us there, which was good, because without the tan sedan parked at the corner we might’ve never found the place.
He was heavyset with sandy hair and was waiting for us on the sidewalk. He made for the door next to a truck dock. I looked around, but I didn’t see anything that would have led me to believe the address was a residence. Meifert shrugged and pushed open a steel door that had a wire-mesh grate over the glass. There was an unused, beat-up counter in an entryway with a scratched Plexiglas divider that led to a freight elevator. We all stepped over the opening between the floors, and Meifert clanged the heavy metal sliding gate that closed from the top and bottom, dropped another safety grating from above, and hit the button to his left.
The whine of the counterweight system and the condition of the cables inspired little confidence, but the battered elevator rose to the sixth, where Meifert aligned the black spraypainted arrows on the gate with the ones on the adjacent bricks. He lifted the safety gate, and we walked out into a large, industrial loft that was surrounded by eighteen-foot glass-paned walls. The floors were hardwood, and there was nothing in the 5,000 square feet
