'Her place.'
'So come and get me,' Lucas said.
After talking to Kennett, Lucas sat with his hand on the phone, thinking about it, then picked it up again, dialed the operator, and got the area code for Charleston. He had no idea how big the city was, but had the impression that it was fairly small. If they knew assholes in Charleston the way they knew them in the Twin Cities…
The information service got him the phone number for the Charleston police headquarters, and two minutes later, he had the weekend duty officer on the line.
'My name is Lucas Davenport. I'm a cop working out of Midtown South in Manhattan. I'm looking for a guy down your way, and I was wondering about the prospects of finding him.'
'What's the problem?' A dry southern drawl, closer to Texan than the mush-mouth of South Carolina.
'He saw a guy get shot. He didn't do it, just saw it. I need to talk to him.'
'What's his name?'
'Cornell Reed, nickname Red. About twenty-two, twenty-three…'
'Black guy.' It was barely a question.
'Yeah.'
'And you're from Midtown South.'
'Yeah.'
'Hang on…'
Lucas was put on hold, waited for a minute, then two. Always like this with cops. Always. Then a couple of clicks, and the line was live again. 'I got Darius Pike on the line, he's one of our detectives… Darius, go ahead…'
'Yeah?' Pike's voice was deep, cool. Children were laughing in the background. Lucas identified himself again.
'Am I getting you at home? I'm sorry about that…'
' 'S okay. You're looking for Red Reed?'
'Yeah. He supposedly witnessed a killing up here, and I'm pretty hot to talk to him.'
'He came back to town a month ago, the sorry-ass fool. You need to bust him?'
'No, just talk.'
'Want to come down, or on the phone?'
'Face-to-face, if I can.'
'Give me a call a day ahead. I can put my hands on him about any time.' • • • Now he had to make a decision: Minneapolis, Charleston. Two different cases, two different leads. Which first? He thought about it. He wouldn't be able to get down to Charleston and back in time. The New School trap was the next night; if they didn't get Bekker, then the trip to Minneapolis was critical. Bekker was killing people, after all. Charleston might shed some light on Robin Hood, and Robin Hood was killing people, too-but those were mostly bad people, weren't they? He shook his head wryly. It wasn't supposed to matter, was it? But it did.
Lucas made one more call, to Northwest Airlines, and got a seat to Minneapolis-St. Paul, then a triple play, Minneapolis-St. Paul to Charleston to New York. There, that was all he could do for now. It all hinged on tomorrow night.
When Lily called from the front desk, he'd changed to jeans and blue T-shirt. He went down, found her waiting, eyes tired but relaxed. She was wearing jeans and a horizontally-striped French fisherman's shirt that might have cost two hundred dollars on Fifth Avenue, and an aqua-colored billed hat.
'You look like a model,' he said.
'Maybe I oughta call Cruising World. '
'Yeah, you look kinda gay,' he said.
'That's a sailboat magazine, you dope,' she said, taking a mock swipe at him.
Kennett was waiting in the passenger seat of a double-parked Mazda Navaho, wearing comfortable old khakis and a SoHo Surplus T-shirt.
'Nice truck,' Lucas said to Lily as he crawled in back.
'Kennett's. Four-wheel drive must help testosterone production,' Lily said, walking around to the driver's side and climbing in. 'You've got one, don't you?'
'Not like this: this is sort of a Manhattan four-wheel drive,' he said, tongue in cheek. To Kennett he said, 'I didn't think you could drive.'
'Got it before the last attack,' Kennett said. 'I think the price is what brought the attack on. And don't give me any shit about Manhattan four-by-fours, this is a fuckin' workhorse…'
'Yeah, yeah…'
They left Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel, emerging in Jersey, took a right and then followed a bewildering zigzag path back to the waterfront. The marina was a modest affair, filling a dent in the riverbank, a few dozen boats separated from a parking lot by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Most of the boats were in concrete slips, halyards clinking softly against the aluminum masts like a forest of one-note wind chimes; a few more boats were anchored just offshore.
'Look at this guy, putting up his 'chute,' Kennett said, climbing down from the truck. Lucas squeezed out behind him as Lily climbed out of the driver's seat. Kennett pointed out toward the river, where two sailboats were tacking side-by-side down the Hudson, running in front of a steady northwest breeze, their sails tight with the wind. A man was standing on the foredeck of one of them, freeing a garish crimson-and-yellow sail. It filled like a parachute, and the boat leapt ahead.
'You ever sailed?' Kennett asked.
'A couple times, on Superior,' Lucas said, shading his eyes. 'You feel like you're on a runaway locomotive. It's hard to believe they're barely going as fast as a man can jog.'
'A man doesn't weigh twenty thousand pounds like that thing,' Kennett said, watching the lead boat. 'That is a locomotive…'
They unloaded a cooler from the back of the truck and Lucas carried it across the parking lot, past a suntanned woman in a string bikini with a string of little girls behind her, like ducklings. The smallest of the kids, a tiny red-headed girl with a sandy butt and bare feet, squealed and danced on the hot tarmac while carrying a pair of flip-flops in her hands.
Lily led the way through a narrow gate in the chain-link fence, Lucas right behind her, Kennett taking it slow, down to the water. Here and there, people were working on their boats, listening to radios as they worked. Most of the radios were tuned to rock stations, but not the same ones, and an aural rock-'n'-roll fest played pleasantly through the marina. Few of the boats actually seemed ready to go out, and the work was slow and social.
'There she blows, so to speak,' Kennett said. The Lestrade was fat and graceful at the same time, like an overweight ballerina.
'Nice,' Lucas said, uncertainly. He knew open fishing boats, but almost nothing about sailboats.
'Island Packet 28-it is a nice boat,' Kennett said. 'I got it instead of kids.'
'Not too late for kids,' Lucas said. 'I just had one myself.'
'Wait, wait, wait.' Lily laughed. 'I should have a say in this.'
'Not necessarily,' Lucas said. He stepped carefully into the cockpit, balancing the cooler. 'The goddamned town is overrun with nubile prospects. Find somebody with a nice set of knockers, you know, not too smart so you wouldn't have to worry about the competition. Maybe with a fetish for housework…'
'Fuck the sailing, let's go back into town,' Kennett said.
'God, I'm looking forward to this,' Lily said. 'The flashing wit, the literary talk…'
Lily and Lucas rigged the sails, with Kennett impatiently supervising. When he was bringing the sails up, Lucas took a moment to look through the boat: a big berth at the bow, a tidy, efficient galley, a lot of obviously custom- built bookshelves jammed with books. Even a portable phone.
'You could live here,' Lucas said to Kennett.
'I do, a lot of the time,' Kennett said. 'I probably spend a hundred nights a year on the boat. Even when I can't sail it, I just come over here and sit and read and sleep. Sleep like a baby.'
Kennett took the boat out on the motor, his fine white hair standing up like a sail, his eyes shaded by dark oval sunglasses. A smile grew on his tanned face as he maneuvered out along the jetty, then swung into the open
