Chapter 26

I listened to Honey’s conversation with John Reynolds Esquire, AKA Candy’s daddy, with a sick kind of fascination. I could hear his part of the dialog, not as words, but a staccato squawking. It was more like the wa-wa-wa sounds the adults made on those old Charlie Brown cartoons than speech. No words, but his volume...well, it spoke volumes. Loud, clipped, curt. What few doubts I had about his resistance to belief were immediately squashed by Honey.

Honey handled him with more tact than I could have managed, even when his voice rose high enough to hurt her ears, she kept her cool with him. Not compassion, but a purely pragmatic empathy. She wanted him to understand, but not fall apart. She wanted him to grieve, but she wanted his grief on our side.

I reckoned that if she ever got tired of turning tricks and giving lap dances for a living, she’d make a fair headshrinker.

But Mr. DA was not buying it. He was angry at being awakened, angrier that someone would awaken him to pull such a sick and mean joke.

His voice rose a few more decibels, I could hear the words bitch and arrested clearly in a mix of incoherencies, and Honey held the speaker away from her ear, wincing as if she had a sudden headache. Her calm was beginning to break down. I could see anger creeping in to replace it.

I held my hand out for the phone and she passed it over without hesitation, looking relieved to be rid of it.

“He’s just as stubborn as she said.”

“Mr. Reynolds,” I said, raising my voice to match his, but not shouting. “If you think we’re fucking with you, why haven’t you hung up yet?”

Beside me, Honey looked shocked. More than shocked, appalled.

Mr. DA’s rant broke off in mid-streak, and I took advantage of his silence.

“Candy has a mark just below her belly button, shaped like a cherry. I thought it was a tattoo for a second, but it isn’t. Not a mole either, not hairy enough.”

A few more seconds of silence, then Mr. DA started again.

“Look, whoever you are, I...”

I cut him off.

“I have a picture of her with the macaw at the golf course.” I let go of the steering wheel for a second to pat down my breast pocket, wanting to make sure I did still have it. It was still there, along with the IDs I’d lifted from Tattoo and Musclehead. I remembered with a slight shock that those men were both dead now, I’d killed one and Honey the other, and somehow the thought of these laminated cards in my pocket brought a new dimension of reality to the night.

I have really stepped in the shit this time, I thought.

“There’s something written on the back,” I continued, “but I never got a chance to read it.”

Mr. DA did not interrupt, but his end of the line was not silent. His breathing was heavy, hitching.

“Do you know the picture I’m talking about?”

Total silence, held breath, then, “Yeah, I know it.”

Another break in the conversation, and this time I held my silence.

“What’s written on the back?”

He already believed us, but he needed to hear it, so I let the Ventura drift to the shoulder of the road, the gated entrance to the golf course just ahead. Not the golf course in Candy’s picture, which was a members only course for the very rich, this one was a recreation spot for the middle class, less expensive, less accommodating, and always stinking of the landfill it shared a hillside with.

When I’d pulled over and checked that no one was about to come from behind and clobber the old Ventura again, I turned on the dome light and pulled the picture from my breast pocket.

I turned it over, read what was there to read, and for a second was unable to talk. My eyes burned; my throat locked up as if I were choking on the grief that should have been Mr. DA’s. In a way I was.

“Team Reynolds’s big day. Who needs a trophy when I have you? Thanks for being there with me.”

I couldn’t finish right away. I had to stop. I had to remember to breathe. Breathing was suddenly very hard to do.

“With love, daddy.”

There was a very long pause.

I slipped the picture back into my breast pocket, turned off the dome light, and pulled back onto the road.

“It was the father-daughter tournament,” Reynolds said. “We placed fifth. A year later she left.”

Then he began to weep.

I couldn’t take any more of it. I passed the phone to Honey. “He’s all yours.”

I ignored the way she looked at me, stared straight ahead as I picked up speed. Only a few more miles to the office.

“Mr. Reynolds, we have the bastard who did it,” again her Natasha Fatale accent came shining through, “but he has a lot of friends, and they have been trying very hard to kill us. We don’t know who we can trust. We need your help.”

Honey did very little talking over the next few minutes, was silent except for the occasional answered question, and as I pulled up to the security gate and rolled my window down to key in my code, she passed the cell phone back to me.

“Yes?”

“Who exactly am I speaking to?”

I wondered if using my real name would fuck up the deal. It was only a few years past that he’d demonstrated a burning desire to see me fry or rot in jail. I decided to go for it. “Quick. Butch Quick.”

“Okay, Mr. Quick. We’re on the same team for now.” He was clearly struggling to keep his emotions under control, and the fact that he seemed to be winning the battle impressed me. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to be around when this was over and the floodgates finally opened. “This is going to take a little time but I’m going to make some calls. I’m only going to call the few people I know I can trust, and we’ll get the ball rolling.”

I felt my stress level fall a few notches. It was a great relief to have someone with a clear idea of where the fuck to start on my side, a greater one to have at least a little bit of this weird burden resting on a set of better qualified shoulders. It was also nice to know he’d apparently gotten past his desire to see me drawn and quartered, then throw the pieces into a prison cell to rot.

“Do you have a safe place?”

I answered in the affirmative, and when he asked where it was, I gave him my location and my pass code.

“One last thing, Mr. Quick.”

“Yes sir.”

The sir came with no forethought. The man on the other end of this troubled line somehow seemed to demand it.

“If you are in any way responsible for my girl’s death,” he was whispering now, and I could almost see him sitting in his quiet and dark study, casting an eye toward the bedroom where his wife still slept, “I will find out, and when I’m finished with you, you’re going to wish that Cameron Finke had killed you.”

“I understand.”

“You don’t understand anything,” clear contempt in his voice. “Until you’ve lost a daughter, you don’t understand.”

I keyed in my code, waited for the gate to slide open, said nothing. I was speechless.

He’d forgotten them, my girls, had let them slip from his mind, probably the day he realized he wasn’t going to be able to hang anyone for their murders. He was a big and important cog in Paradise Valley’s legal machine, but he might as well have been flipping burgers.

I wanted to put my hands around his throat and choke the life out of him just then. I think I could have done it with joy.

“Did you hear me?”

I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t want him to hear the murder in my voice when I did.

“Yes,” I said at last, and I thought I faked calm pretty well.

“Do you believe me?”

I thought about my own daughter again, my baby girl, still very young when I lost her. Forever young.

“Yes,” I said.

And of course, I did. Goddamn fucking right, I did!