one he’d used to take the dead headless girl to the river.
All we have now is the big Ford van. I don’t want to use it.
So we need another minivan.
And Abuela’s looks like it’d work just fine. Price is right.
Delgado got out of his Tahoe and walked toward Quintanilla.
He told him, “The keys are in my truck. You get in it and wait till I text you when and where to go. Got it?”
Delgado saw Quintanilla’s vacuous eyes staring back.
“Got it?” he repeated.
Quintanilla nodded, then handed over the envelope. “It worked. License is in with the cash.”
Delgado took the envelope and looked around. No one was paying them any attention. And the elderly woman, who wore a rumpled tan sack of a dress, was just getting her door open and unbuckling her seat belt.
He folded the envelope and stuffed it in his back pocket.
“Follow me to the truck, then get in it.”
“Okay.”
Delgado walked quickly toward the Tahoe, then turned toward the Chevy minivan. The woman didn’t hear him approaching.
“Abuela!” he called out affectionately, as one would one’s grandmother. “Hola!”
She turned in her seat in time to feel Delgado stepping into the minivan and quickly shoving her across the bench seat.
She screamed.
The keys were still in the ignition, and he fired up the engine, then threw the gearshift into drive.
She screamed again.
Two blocks later, Delgado pulled to the curb. He motioned for her to get out. She quietly complied.
As he drove off, Abuela screamed again.
Delgado drove another two blocks, then pulled to the curb and sent a text message to Quintanilla.
[TWO] 823 Sears Street, Philadelphia Thursday, September 10, 9:21 P.M.
Detective Anthony Harris pulled Sergeant Matt Payne’s white rental Ford sedan to a stop in a parking spot behind a bright blue BMW M3.
“That’s Chad’s coupe,” Payne said.
“And 823’s right there, across the street,” Sergeant Jim Byrth of the Texas Rangers said from the backseat. He had The Hat on his lap.
As he got out of the car, he put on The Hat.
With Payne’s announcement that they might have found the girl’s head, Byrth was anxious to add another piece to the puzzle that would help hunt down El Gato.
Harris and Byrth were halfway across the street when Byrth looked back at Payne. He was standing at the curb, checking his phone.
“You coming, Marshal?”
When they had approached the rental car at the Roundhouse, Harris saw that Payne had his cell phone out. He appeared to be anticipating either a call-or, more probably, a text message-at any moment.
“Give me the car keys, Matt,” Harris had said with mild disgust. “You’re damned dangerous with that phone. Can’t believe what it’d be like with you on that and trying to drive, too.”
“I’ll take my usual spot in the back,” Byrth said, looking at Payne. “You, Marshal, can ride shotgun.”
Harris drove from the Roundhouse over to Sixth Street and took it toward South Philly.
With one eye on his phone, Payne went over with Jim Byrth the little bit of information Chad Nesbitt had told him in the diner by the Philly Inn. And he gave Byrth more background on his relationship with Nesbitt and Skipper Olde, both long-term and specific to the previous day.
He glanced again at his phone.
Nothing! Dammit!
He checked to make sure it was still on, that the damned battery hadn’t crapped out or something. It was still on, but the battery was low.
It had been almost a half hour since Matt had sent that text message to Amanda. And she hadn’t replied. And that worried him.
Did I say something wrong?
Did I open a wound, one of those things that caused that pain in her eyes?
Jesus, her silence is killing me.
And that’s the part of text and e-mail conversations I absolutely hate-the silence of no reply.
In person, if they’re silent you can read the eyes and face. On the phone, you can pick up on their tone of voice.
But e-silence is e-fucking deafening.
And if I send another, it might annoy her more.
That is, if she’s annoyed.
How’s that saying go? “When you find yourself in a hole, Payne, stop with the damn digging.”
Matt thought that the message had been pretty simple and straightforward.
But women are always trying to read between the lines.
What could she possibly read into mine?
Or maybe it was too simple… it’s damn hard communicating emotion in a text or e-mail. Even a missing comma can have a huge impact.
“Let’s eat, Grandma” changes a helluva lot without the comma.
Then it’s “Let’s eat Grandma”-who probably won’t willingly come to the table.
He scrolled back in the string of messages and reread what he’d sent, which simply had repeated part of the earlier text: you never answered… why the change of heart?
Maybe that’s it. I’m pushing…
Then suddenly his phone vibrated.
And his heart automatically began beating faster.
When Matt looked at the text message, he was at first shocked at its length.
Jesus! It’s a tome.
What in the world did I trigger?
That’s what took her so long.
It’d take me days to thumb-type one that long on my phone.
Then he remembered seeing her cell phone at Liberties.
It was one of those really new ones, actually more of a small computer that happened also to be a phone. The computer-phone was one and a half times the size of a playing card, and damn near as thin, and if you tapped the icon labeled TEXT, a window with a facsimile of a typewriter keyboard popped up. It was a qwerty one, like a real full-size keyboard only smaller, and allowed for much faster writing than most cell phones.
Phones such as Payne’s.
He read Amanda’s text:
609-555-6221
Hi…
I have to be honest. (If only because without that, why have a relationship?) Didn?t get much sleep last night, what with all this running through my head.
See, I was-maybe still am-afraid of getting close to a cop.
I remember, not exactly happily, all the sacrifices my father made to be a cop. How hard it was on our family, especially my mother, seeing him every day walk out the front door for work and not knowing if that would be the last we?d see him alive.
