“Damn.” Tony rubbed the back of his neck. “That hurt, man.”
“Who set it up?” Will jammed his finger into Tony’s shoulder. “Tell me, you little shit.”
Tony slapped his hand to his shoulder. “I don’t know. Two guys at the bar came up and asked did I wanna make some money.”
“Last night?”
“Yeah, after work.”
“You knew them?”
“I seen ’em around.” He started rubbing his shoulder. “You seen ’em, too. Them guys who hang back in the special corner.”
The VIP section of Tipsie’s. Will had seen it all right. It was about as welcoming as the shower room at the state pen. “How much money did they offer?”
Tony turned shifty.
Will put his hand on Tony’s chest and pushed him back against the door. There was no force behind the hold, but the threat was enough to get the little man talking.
“Fifteen hundred bucks.”
Will pulled back his fist. “You mother—”
“They told me we’d be safe!” Tony yelled, his hands going up. “They said we just needed to stand out in the street like we did. Nothin’ to it.”
Will kept his fist at the ready. “So you get a thou and I get five bills?”
“I was closest to the house.” He gave a halfhearted shrug. “My spot was more dangerous.”
Will let his fist drop. “You knew it was more than a robbery.”
Tony opened his mouth, then closed it. He checked again to make sure they were alone. “I ain’t gonna lie to you, Bud. I knew there was some people in the house might get hurt. I swear on a stack of Bibles I had no idea they was cops. No way I woulda taken that job, let alone bring you into it. We’s friends, right?”
“My friends don’t throw me in the shit when I’m already on parole.” Will’s shirt had pulled out from his jeans. He tucked it back in as he looked up and down the hall. “This better not blow back on me.”
Tony wasn’t as stupid as he looked. “Why’d you wanna go in the house so bad anyway? What was up with that?”
The million-dollar question. Will had figured out his answer on the ride down. “I need the money. Dead men don’t pay.”
“I hear ya,” Tony said, but he was obviously not buying it. “You sure did run in there like a bat outta hell, though. Near about took my head off. I was only trying to help you.”
Again, Will checked the hallway. “I got an ex, all right? Girl up in Tennessee. She’s got a kid by me. I didn’t believe her, but the test came back.” Will tried to put some anger in his voice. “Bitch said she’d file on me if I don’t throw down five K before the baby comes.” He said the phrase he’d heard from many a con. “I can’t go back to jail again, man. I can’t do it.”
Tony nodded his understanding. Will had gathered from various conversations at Tipsie’s that the DNA tests they feared most were the ones that proved paternity. What was harder to believe was that the slang Will had picked up from watching an outlaw biker show on cable was actually working.
“I hear ya, man.” Tony scratched his arm, a nervous habit that had left permanent red streaks on his skin. “You want, I could run up there with you, give her a talkin’-to.”
“You wanna keep your voice down?” Will asked. “Every pig in the county’s upstairs. That cop might not make it. You wanna guess what happens then?”
Tony kept scratching his arm. “So, what’d you see?” Again, he checked the hall. “Inside the house. What’d you see?”
“One dead guy, one on his way out.” Will tried to fight back the bloody image of Lena straddling Fred Zachary, preparing to break his spine in two. “Some crazy chick with a hammer.”
“She see you?”
“You think she’d be alive if she did?”
Tony lowered his voice. “I heard she used the claw.”
“You know her?” Will clarified, “The cop. She ever bang you up?”
“Shit no. Ain’t no bitch takin’ me down, bro.”
Will guessed an eight-pound Chihuahua could take down Tony Dell. “Why’d they wanna kill two cops? They on the take?”
“Dudes didn’t say and I didn’t ask.” Tony backed himself against the door rather than let Will put him there. “Honest, Bud. I got no idea.”
Will considered what a guy like Bill Black would be worried about in this situation. He asked, “What’d you do with the van?”
Tony was obviously not expecting the question. “It’s cool. I know some guys.”
“Whatever they paid you, half of it’s mine.”
Tony tried, “I didn’t get much.”
“Bullshit.” Will grabbed Tony’s arm to make sure the man was paying attention. “I’m only gonna ask you this one more time: Who do they work for?”
“I got no idea, dude. Honest.”
“Well, you better think hard about it, because you and me are looking a hell of a lot like a couple of loose ends right now.”
“You think they’ll come after us?”
“You think whoever set this in motion is just gonna trust you not to talk?”
“Holy Christ.” The color drained from Tony’s face. “It’s gotta be Big Whitey. He’s the only dude I can think of who has them kind of balls.”
Will tightened his grip around Tony’s arm. It was a hell of a lot easier to interrogate someone when you could scare the crap out of them. “Why do you say that?”
“Because he’s killed cops before. Everybody knows that. Hell, man, I heard he took out a federal agent down in Florida.”
Yet another murder to look into. Will asked, “You sure you didn’t tell them my name?”
“Hell no, brother. Hell no.”
“If I find out you did …”
“I promise!” Tony’s voice went up a few octaves. “Lookit, man. I ain’t no snitch. I’m tellin’ you straight up.” He used his free hand to dig into his back pocket. “Look, all right?” He pulled out a wad of cash. “This is all I got for the van. You take it, all right? We’ll call it even. Okay?”
Will took the cash. It was moist, which he tried not to think about as he counted out the bills. “Six hundred bucks. That’s all you got?”
“That’s more than you thought you’d get last night.”
Will grunted. Bill Black would be satisfied with the amount. “Lookit.” Tony scratched his arm again. “Big Whitey’s a businessman. We can go talk to him. Try to reason with him.”
“There’s no way I’m—”
“Just listen to me, hoss.” Tony kept scratching, even though he’d drawn blood on his arm. “I told you I got a pill thing going here. You and me could double it up and—”
“No,” Will said. “My PO got me this job. Who do you think they’re gonna look at when a ton of pills start going missing?” He loomed over Tony again. “What’d you say to the police when they rang your doorbell this morning?”
The furtive look was back. “How’d you hear about that?”
“That nurse. She’s probably told the whole damn hospital by now.”
“Cayla,” Tony provided. The soft way he said her name rang a bell. Cayla Martin was the girl Tony wouldn’t shut up about on the drive to Lena’s last night. It made sense that a pill freak would want to hook up with a pharmacy nurse.
Tony asked, “She say anything else about me?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Will was getting tired of this. “She offered to cook me supper.”
Tony took the news harder than Will anticipated. He tucked his chin down to his chest. “Are you gonna go?”
“Tell me what you said to the cops this morning.”
Tony didn’t answer. “I thought you were my friend, Bud. I can’t believe you’re going out with her.”
Will couldn’t believe he was having this conversation. “What’d you tell the cops, Tony? Don’t make me beat it out of you.”
He still sulked, but answered, “That the car musta been stolen. They asked me to come down
to the station and file a report.”
“You stay out of that station,” Will warned. “They get you in there, you won’t ever come out.”
“I ain’t tellin’ ’em nothin’.”
“You think that matters? Two cops were almost killed. They’re gonna pin this on the first idiot they can find.”
“They got the idiots,” Tony said. “Them two guys from last night—one’s dead. The other one can’t even move, and they’s no way in hell he’ll open his mouth. I keep tellin’ you—Big Whitey, he’s got reach. He’ll take ’em out in the hospital. In the jail. In the prison. Ain’t nowhere Big Whitey can’t get to you. Trust me, man. He’s a bad dude.”
Will gritted his teeth. Every conversation he’d ever had with Tony Dell tended to turn down Big Whitey Way at some point. Something about that didn’t feel right, and Will’s instinct was to shut it down. “Whatever, man. Just keep me out of it.”
Tony sensed he was losing his audience. “We could talk to him. Let him know we ain’t gonna rat. Maybe get on the payroll.”
“No.” Will picked up his helmet off the floor. He wiped the scuffs with the back of his sleeve. He tried more biker talk. “I gotta kid to pay for, my PO’s up my ass. I don’t need to be looking for more trouble.”
“It don’t gotta be like that.”
“Whatever, bro. Just keep my name out of it.”
Will yanked open the door to the locker room. The space was empty. Blue lockers ran down the walls and divided the room into three sections. He waited a few seconds, wondering if Tony Dell would follow. When the door stayed closed, Will headed toward the lockers on the back wall.
Bill Black’s name was written on a piece of masking tape stuck to his locker. Will had used a Sharpie to cross it out and write BUD. Three letters. It wasn’t pretty—Will’s handwriting had never been stellar—but it beat the locker next to his, where someone had drawn an ejaculating penis that had only one ball.
Will assumed it was an inside joke.
To secure his locker, Will had bought a luggage lock instead of a combination dial. Left and right had never been easy, but Will was good with numbers. He spun the four digits to the date he’d first kissed Sara. Or, technically, the date Sara had kissed him. The lock didn’t need to know the details.
Will hung his helmet inside the locker and took out his folded work shirt and pants. Maintenance duty wasn’t a bad job as these things went. Will was good at fixing things. The forms they made him fill out were designed for someone with little grasp of the English language. There were only five boxes to check or not check, and only one long line with an X beside it, which made it easy when it came time to sign his name. Not that Will signed his name. He wrote two capital letter Bs and left it at that.
Will took off his street clothes and dressed for work. He wore Bill Black’s photo ID on a lanyard around his neck. A security card and set of keys were attached to a retractable wire on his belt. A flashlight hooked through a metal loop on the side. Will transferred the still-moist cash from Tony Dell into the front pocket of his work pants, hoping the bills would be dry when he logged them into evidence later. In a blue Velcro wallet were a few of Black’s credit cards, a copy of a speeding ticket that served as his license, and some receipts that indicated Mr. Black preferred to do all his shopping at the RaceTrac near the mouth of the Ocmulgee Trail.
He checked the battery on his iPhone. Will didn’t use a smartphone in his real life, but Bill Black was a little more sophisticated. Not that the device was the sort of thing you had to be a rocket scientist to operate. Will had figured out most of the programs on his own as he whiled away the hours at the fleabag efficiency motel where Bill Black rented a room by the week.
Black’s primary email account was on the hospital server. The secondary account was through Gmail. The inbox contained some increasingly nasty messages that appeared to have been written by an angry pregnant woman in Tennessee. There were a few mildly racist forwards from some dummy accounts, but Bill Black didn’t have many friends. The bulk of his mail consisted of junk sent from mailing lists that advertised hunting gear and naked women, and coupons for things like beef jerky and Old Spice.
Black’s musical tastes ran toward country, with some Otis Redding thrown in as a hat tip to the singer’s hometown of Macon. There were some pictures of scenic views taken from the highway. Black was a hunter, so it made sense that he would appreciate woods and trees. Black also liked the ladies. There were several risqué photos downloaded from the Internet. Blondes and Asians mostly. Will had briefly considered putting a few redheads on there, but that felt weird because of Sara. And also because of Sara, he knew they weren’t really redheads.
The tech specialist at the GBI had done the rest of the heavy lifting, adding some stealth features to the phone. The apps ran in the background and were invisible to anyone who didn’t know exactly what to look for. One of them automatically erased all phone numbers and texts going in and out. Another turned the speakers into a recording device when you tapped the power button three times. Yet another provided a rolling phone number in case Will had to make a call and didn’t want his location to come up. The most important app patched the device into the military’s tracking system—not the GPS available to the entire world, but the real-time global positioning used for things like targeting drones and delivering bombs.
This last app was the reason Will kept checking the battery. Amanda was right about many things, but none more than the belief that there was a link between Will’s investigation into Big Whitey and the attack on Lena Adams and Jared Long. Even Tony Dell had made the connection.
Will didn’t want to go off the grid because he forgot to plug in his phone.
The door banged open. Will turned around. He was half expecting to find Tony Dell, but the new guy was beefy looking with a full head of hair and a jaw that was sharp enough to cut glass.
Will knew a cop when he saw one. He did exactly what Bill Black would do—slammed his locker closed and headed toward the exit.
The cop held up his badge. “Detective Paul Vickery, Macon PD.”
Lena’s partner. That made sense. Will still didn’t acknowledge him. He kept his beeline toward the door.
Vickery grabbed Will’s shoulder and spun him around. He was a few inches shorter than Will, but he had a badge and a gun and obviously felt that gave him the right to be an asshole. “Where you going?” He glanced at the name stitched on Will’s shirt. “Buddy.”
Will tried to calm things down. “I don’t want any trouble, all right?”
Vickery bounced on the balls of his feet, obviously spoiling for a fight. “Well, you’re about to get it, motherfucker. Where’s Tony Dell?”
Will shrugged, thinking Lena’s partner didn’t need to be face-to-face with the guy whose car was left outside the house where Jared Long was almost murdered. And Lena, too, for that matter. “I dunno, man. Ask at the front office.”
“I’m asking you, fuckball. You’re Bill Black, right?” Vickery wasn’t looking for an answer. His eyes scanned the hospital ID hanging around Will’s neck. “Your boss says you and Dell are real tight. Thick as thieves.”
Will imagined Ray Salemi would’ve said anything to get Paul Vickery out of his office. “It’s not exclusive,” Will said. “We’ve both agreed to see other people.”
“Funny, asshole.” Vickery moved closer. “Where were you last night? You with Dell when him and his crew tried to take on my partner?”
Will had already arranged his alibi. “Ask my parole officer. He dropped in on me around midnight.”
“I’m gonna do that.” Vickery’s beady eyes narrowed even more. “Something ain’t right with you, asshole. I can feel it in my gut.”
Will avoided the obvious joke.
“You’re chest-high in this shit. I can smell it on you.” Vickery sniffed, as if to illustrate the point. “Dell’s a professional snitch. Just a matter of time before he rats you out. Why don’t you beat him to it? Tell me what
happened last night and I’ll keep you outta jail.”
“Sorry I can’t help, Officer.” Again, Will tried to leave, but Vickery’s hand went to his chest, stopping him.
Vickery warned, “You got one more chance to tell me where your boyfriend is or I start taking it out on you.”
“I said I don’t—”
Vickery punched him in the face. Will saw it coming, but there wasn’t enough time to get out of the way. Will’s head swiveled. His jaw popped. He tasted blood in his mouth. Automatically, Will’s fists went up.
He had to force them back down. Vickery was Lena’s partner. Will didn’t have to think long to consider the number of stupid things he’d do if someone threatened Faith and her family.
“Come on, Buddy.” Vickery slapped Will’s face with his open palm. “You wanna hit me, Buddy?” He whistled like he was calling a dog. “Come on, boy. Come on.”
Will peeled his fingers from his palms to get them to unclench. Instead of beating the ever-loving shit out of Paul Vickery, he said, “You know there’s a security camera in here, right?”
Vickery’s eyes flicked upward to the corner. The camera was pointed straight down, its red light flashing. He seemed to be considering whether or not beating Will to death was worth losing his badge over.
Apparently not.
Vickery told Will, “This isn’t over.” He kicked the door open and stormed out with his hands fisted at his sides.
Will glanced up at the camera, which ran on a nine-volt battery and wasn’t connected to anything because the Supreme Court had ruled that employees had an expectation of privacy when they were in a locker room.
You’d think a detective would know that.
Will checked his reflection in the mirror over the sink. Vickery hadn’t done any visible damage. Will used his tongue to find the source of blood in his mouth. The inside of his cheek had cut against his teeth. He turned on the faucet and sipped some water. The wound started to sting. Will swished the water around until his spit was only slightly pink.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He used the earbud to listen to the email from Ray Salemi, his helpful boss. Will read the words along with the tinny computer voice. He gathered Faith had found a way to get him and Lena in the same room together.
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