Ridley Pearson - Middle Of Nowhere

"Abby Flek," Boldt said, adding no editorial.

"Guy has flipped out."

"What was your business with him?"

"Me? No business, man."

Gaynes encouraged a closer intimacy with the brick wall. "Think harder," she said.

"No business with him."

Gaynes leaned her knee between the man's legs, and then lifted her leg sharply. "That gun you were carrying is going to cost you a year. The lieutenant here has run out of patience, and so have I. You want the year, you keep telling us you had no business with him, because we're too busy to give you a second chance. Got it?"

"Hardware," the man said.

"Weapons," Boldt said.

"Let's just say I'm connected, okay?"

"Let's just say you're a collector," Gaynes corrected. "Sound good? Nothing illegal about collecting a few weapons."

"Whatever. Abby has lost it, okay? The guy will start a fight over anything. He comes to me, I'm not about to say no."

"Of course not," Gaynes said.

"But I couldn't say yes either, because… my connections," he said, straining to meet eyes with Gaynes. "My collection…" he corrected, "… I didn't have what the man was looking to score."

"Which was?" Boldt asked.

"Semi-auto long rod. Russian-built was okay, but he wanted a particular German scope."

"A sniper's rifle?" she asked incredulously.

"Way out of my league," the guy said.

"And then some," Boldt said, wondering if he was the intended target. He added, "When was this?"

"Three, maybe four o'clock."

"Today?" Boldt gasped. They were only eight hours behind the man.

"And you referred him to a fellow collector," Gaynes said, leading him on.

"What would you have done?"

"And the name of this individual, this fellow collector?" she said.

"Macallister," the guy whispered so quietly that Boldt wasn't sure it had come from his lips.

"I know Macallister," Gaynes told her lieutenant. She slammed the suspect's groin again and warned, "This blows up in our hands and we're coming after you. Understood?"

"Yeah, I got it."

" 'Cause if Macallister hasn't heard of this guy, right or wrong, it's your ass we're coming after. And there will be no second chances. So take a moment to contemplate your existence, my friend-to ruminate-because you gotta be good with this, and I'm smelling that this is some bad shit you're peddling."

"Manny Wong," the man corrected. "Not Macallister, Manny Wong. Down in the District. Most of his stuff is Chinese, but Abby said Chinese was okay as long as he got that German scope."

"Don't know him," Gaynes warned Boldt. "Never heard of him."

"That's all right," Boldt answered. "I know someone who knows everyone down there."

The woman reminded Boldt of Orson Welles in a muumuu. She wore a piece of black embroidered silk big enough to wrap a small car. On her shoulders pink hummingbirds flew toward vivid red blossoms. Tiger faces with sequined eyes roared from her ribs. Ivory bone buttons speared through silk loops and strained at her enormous girth. He felt grateful she wore her teeth, for in the past he had found it hard to understand her pidgin English without them. Her eyes appeared as black half moons beneath the arcing Chinese curve of her painted eyebrows, her face in a permanent blush behind the applied rouge, puffy cheeks reminiscent of Dizzy Gillespie.

Mama Lu sat enthroned in a huge rattan chair, a gigantic rising sun woven into the chair back above her, looking like a second head. Two black enameled chests flanked her, their surfaces as lustrous as mirrors. The second-story room where she met them was rather dingy, accessed by a narrow stairway from the butcher shop of the Korean grocery store below, but the room's contents belonged in a museum collection, as did this woman.

"Mr. Both," she said. She had never pronounced it correctly.

"Great Lady," he said, "allow me to introduce one of my detectives, Roberta Gaynes."

"Mama Lu," Gaynes said, using the woman's street name.

"Roberta," Mama Lu returned. To Boldt she said, "I heard of Ya-Moia. Sent small gift to hospital."

Boldt imagined something grandiose despite her surface modesty.

Placing a pudgy, swollen pale hand on her enormous bosom she said, "Heart made sad by this."

"It's why I've come," Boldt explained.

"Sit," she instructed.

"We won't be staying," Boldt said, "but thank you."

"You must eat," she said, looking him up and down. "You are not eating. Why? A woman, or work?"

Boldt felt his face flush and wished that Gaynes was not there to witness it. He said quickly, "We're after the person who did this to LaMoia."

"And Mama Lu can help?" the woman inquired hopefully.

"A gun dealer named Manny Wong. We think he's had contact with the individual responsible for LaMoia."

Gaynes added, "We mean no trouble for Mr. Wong."

When Mama Lu squinted at a person, it felt as if all the lights in the room were dark, and a hot spotlight switched on in their place. Gaynes took a small step backward.

"Police always trouble," Mama Lu informed her. To Boldt she said, "Present company excepted. What is offer?"

"She's right," Boldt said, indicating Gaynes. "No tricks. All we want to do is talk to Manny Wong. Far as I'm concerned, when he walks out of that interview room I forget his name and ever having heard it."

"Me too," Gaynes said, though Mama Lu didn't want to be hearing from her.

"Just questions," the Great Lady repeated, testing them.

"That's all," Boldt confirmed. "Answers to those questions."

She had to physically turn her wrist with her other hand. The watch face hid in a massive gob of silver and pieces of turquoise the size of quarters. "You will be at Public Safety in one hour?" she checked with him.

"That'll work," Boldt agreed.

"He comes in voluntarily," she reminded. "If he's helpful, you return favor next time he may need it."

"I can do that," Boldt assured her. The trade-offs bothered him and always would-they kept him awake at night, this long list of favors owed, but he never let them affect his negotiations. You couldn't work the streets based solely on principle; it just wasn't possible. Deals begot deals.

Mama Lu sucked at her front teeth. Boldt feared they might be about to fall out, and he wanted to spare himself the sight, as well as her the embarrassment. She said, "I do this for Ya-Moia and Peggy Wan." Addressing Gaynes, she explained, "My niece. She like Ya-Moia very much."

Gaynes nodded. Boldt noticed the beads of sweat on her upper lip. Not much could make Gaynes break out.

"Soup?" She tried again.

"Rain check?" Boldt asked, but then thought she wasn't familiar with the expression. "Another time," he said.

She pouted and nodded. "You wait too long to visit poor old woman," said one of the richest women in the city. "Soup always hot," she offered.

Boldt looked at his own watch for the sake of reminding himself. "One hour?" he asked.

"No worry, Mr. Both. Mama Lu not forget." She smiled, the dentures pearly white. "Not forget anything."

Manny Wong carried his large head on bent, subservient shoulders, and peered out of the tops of his eyes, straining to catch some of the glass in his smudged bifocals. His forehead shone. His ears, too large for his body, looked like small wings. Boldt sensed a wolf in sheep's clothing. The man had thin, moist lips and bad teeth that whistled with some words.

"A sniper rifle," Gaynes said. The news that Flek had possibly acquired such a rifle had been included in the Be On Lookout as a matter of safety. Rumors were al ready circulating that Boldt was the intended target. "Chinese manufacture." She looked remarkably fresh; if she felt fatigue, she didn't show it. "This is the man who purchased it." She slid a mug shot of Bryce Abbott Flek across the table and in front of Wong. She held it in place with outstretched fingers. Wong wouldn't touch it-hadn't touched anything since he'd removed the driving gloves. He wasn't going to give police any prints they didn't have. And they didn't have his. Never would, as far as he was concerned.