Chapter 30
I didn’t get much privacy over the next few days, or much sleep. By the time it was all over I looked back on that hour long stretch of unconsciousness Honey had left me as a parting gift with something like nostalgia. They didn’t arrest me, but they did hold me for questioning for a couple of days until they could assemble my story, and the stories of Finke’s surviving scumbags, into a more or less coherent whole. The tape I’d provided them from Officer Logan’s cruiser probably helped some, Officer Friendly’s plea bargaining certainly helped thin the ranks of the local PD.
Gina White’s unexpected involvement helped too.
She went to bat for me, maybe out of lingering affection. We had our time together, which she ended because I couldn’t put the Redwolf business behind me. To me it had never been anything more than a desperate kind of comfort. I don’t know what it was for her. She’d been a victim and had learned to cope, but I never could.
I spent those restless days in Paradise Valley PD’s interrogation room or sequestered in a nearby safe house. The safe house was the Hillary Hotel, the kind of tumbledown shithole where the maids cuss you out in rapid-fire Spanglish, the guy in the next room spends most of the night in violent disagreement with his television, and the cockroaches scamper right over the top of your bare feet if you’re foolish enough to walk to the toilet without putting your shoes on. I can’t complain too much. The room was free, and my armed babysitter mostly stayed out of my hair. If not for the good opinions of John Reynolds and Gina, my unpaid vacation would have been much longer and the safe house would have had lots of steel bars.
What saved me from prosecution in the end, I’m almost sure of it, wasn’t that search and rescue divers found the bodies of Mr. Tattoo, the bad cop, and Candice Reynolds, plus a few bonus corpses I didn’t know about, exactly where I said they would, or that I’d helped bring down a drug ring that the local law had never been quite able to get a firm grip on and highlight a wider ring of bad guys and girls that spanned the globe, but Sleeping Ugly’s confession. There had been a lot of good stuff in it, and they’d been able to use a lot of it to their advantage in the following days.
There were also a lot of records, PDF documents, audio from recorded phone calls, and an extensive list of contacts on the Droid phone one of Miss Lizzie’s guys had used to open my garage door.
Those Droids have an application for everything. I need to get me one of those.
My name was not on the Droid’s contact list.
Neither did my name make it into the local paper, or my face on the local television news. The can of worms I’d opened that night was still spilling over, would likely continue to do so for a long time, but all of the Paradise Valley worms were either squashed or bottled up, and none of the bottled worms knew my name. There was likely a large price on the head of the fictional Rondo Hackman, my favorite alias up in smoke, but Butch Quick would be safe enough, or as safe as he ever was.
As for Honey...
The fine men and women of the Paradise Valley PD did not see her leaving the scene that night, did not catch her sneaking back into her flat to pack the bare essentials before vanishing into the night like a shadow, never laid so much as a finger on her.
After bonking me on the head, Honey simply evaporated.
I haven’t seen her since.
There is the postcard though.
Laughlin, Nevada at night, a dark river highlighted in the rainbow colors of casinos, a huge neon-lit riverboat called Colorado Belle—hotel and casino in one—captured in a moment of stark and decadent beauty.
The message was short and sweet.
Look me up some time, hero. You’re an interesting date. Give Mr. Blue a kiss for me. I miss the little fellow.
H
I paid Mr. Blue a visit the afternoon I received that postcard. Not at Mr. DA’s house, the bird had lasted less than a week in that home before his colorful vocabulary had offended one of Reynolds’s important friends. His new home was at the office of Higheagle Classics.
The bird seemed happy to see me, hopped in his cage and greeted me with a cheery “Here comes trouble!”
“Damn straight,” my uncle enthused, then laughed heartily as he thumped me on the back. “I love that bird.”
“I can tell,” I said.
So did I, tell the truth, but I never was very good with roommates. No reason to sour a good relationship.
“Got some work for you, big boy. Bail jumper, peeping tom with an eye for the young’uns.” He scooped a file folder from his cluttered desk and pressed it into my hands. “Scrawny little fellow called Leon Mears.”
I tucked the folder under my arm without opening it.
“Why the hell not. Got nothing else to do”
“It’s a cakewalk,” my uncle assured me. “Got a good lead on his location. You’ll probably be back by dark.”
He patted me on the back again, surreptitiously guiding me toward his open office door. “My promise to you, big guy, nothing to worry about.”
Yeah, right.