Robert Ferrigno - Scavenger hunt

"We haven't got time for this," said Sugar, his lips brushing against the pink shell of her ear. "Your little girl is going to be home soon. You don't want me to be here when she comes in through the door." He felt her shudder. "She's going to walk in, call your name, maybe ask why you weren't there at the bus stop-and then she's going to see me, and I'm not going to be able to stop myself."

Stephanie whimpered and pulled away. She was stronger than she looked. "Why are you doing this?"

"Don't concern yourself with that. It's your little girl you should be worried about."

"Please don't hurt her."

"I'm not a monster. It's Jimmy you should be mad at, not me." Stephanie scratched at him, but he turned his face away and held her close.

"You keep that up, you're just going to make it worse." Sugar's voice was calm and steady. He had taken a course in hostage negotiation once; the instructor said he had the perfect voice, reassuring and nonthreatening. "If you keep fighting, you're going to bang yourself up, and you're not going to make a believable suicide. That changes everything. Then it's got to be a break-in; I'll have to spend time rifling the house, going through your purse, and when your daughter walks in and finds me here-"

Stephanie sagged. Please-please, don't." You would have thought someone had pulled a cork in her belly and her insides had poured out onto the floor. It never ceased to amaze him how it worked sometimes. "Please don't hurt her."

"That's up to you." The gas smell was stronger now, even with the oven door closed. His head was throbbing. "If your little girl comes home when I'm still here-well, it's going to give me indigestion for the rest of my life. Don't do that to me."

Stephanie's fists beat against his chest. She might as well be hitting him with flowers.

"You're a good mama. I could see that the moment I walked into the house."

Stephanie was sobbing now.

"I'll make sure I leave the doors locked. I won't let your little girl walk in and see you. There's someplace she can go if she can't get in, isn't there? Some friend down the street?" Sugar felt her nod. "It won't be so bad. You just lay your head down on the pillow, take a few deep breaths. You'll just go to sleep and dream forever."

"What did I ever do to you?"

"Not a darned thing." Sugar rocked her and felt her heart fluttering against him as the oven hissed away. The room was heavy with gas. "Not a blessed thing."

"Please-"

"You want to blame someone, blame Jimmy Gage. He's the one responsible."

"Jimmy? I-I hardly talked to him. A half-hour, that's all."

Sugar lifted her off her feet. Stephanie lay limply in his outstretched arms as he carried her toward the stove. "Lady, once upon a time it took just five minutes to turn my life upside down. Five minutes." He flipped open the oven with a fingertip. "A half-hour is forever in my book." "I'm just tired," said Jimmy. "No, I'm fine, Jane, I'll see you tonight." He snapped the phone shut and tucked it away. The breeze shifted, and he wrinkled his nose, catching a whiff of the koi pond. He finished the beer, hefted the long neck, and considered standing up to make the throw, see if he could bounce it off the little piggy fifty or sixty yards below. Then he remembered Walsh's body floating in the same spot, swollen like a zeppelin, the skin blistered and split, pecked by crows. Katz had needed dental records to make a positive ID, but Jimmy had known it was Walsh as soon as he saw the devil tattoo on the corpse's shoulder.

Jimmy riffed through the phone records on his lap. He ran a finger down a column of Walsh's phone calls, wanting to remind himself of the last call that Walsh had made. Vacaville. Of course. Phoning home. He stopped and checked the notes he had written earlier after talking with the professor. He stared at the phone log again, not believing it.

The last two calls had both been to Vacaville, the state spa where Walsh and Harlen Shafer had done time together. Jimmy hadn't thought much of it when he and Rollo first went over the records; Walsh had called the prison every few weeks since he first got out, short calls to the main switchboard, forwarded to some paid-off guard probably. No way to trace that. Walsh was just contacting his cellies, leaving word that he had kept the promises that most cons made when they got kicked: checking up on wives and girlfriends, maybe taking a kid to the zoo in place of his three-strikes daddy. That's what Jimmy had thought at the time. Not anymore.

If the professor was right about the time of death, those last two calls had been placed after Walsh was already dead. Somebody else had called Vacaville while the fishes were fighting over Walsh's soft parts. Jimmy considered the possibility that Boone's time-of-death estimate was the right one, but he didn't consider it for long.

Flies floated over the koi pond, a dark cloud in the distance. Jimmy sipped his beer, thinking, glad that he couldn't hear the buzzing from where he sat. He had enough noise in his head.

Walsh had been murdered. Jimmy had been right about that, but the good wife's husband wasn't behind it. Those regular calls Walsh had made to Vacaville weren't to his bunkies-he was playing for time, tap-dancing for some O. G. with a grudge, somebody who could reach out through the bars and touch him. Touch him dead. It wasn't love or jealousy that did Walsh in. He had gotten whacked over an unpaid carton of smokes, or for talking during Baywatch, or maybe just for looking at the wrong guy the wrong way. With Walsh's mouth it was a wonder he had lasted seven years inside without getting shanked.

The last two calls made from Walsh's phone had been placed by his killer, the first one passing on the news that Walsh was dead, the second one-it had lasted barely a minute-confirming that the message had been received. This prison honcho had probably used Harlen Shafer to set up the hit, used him as a stalking horse, getting Walsh so stoned he couldn't fight back. Shafer himself had probably been killed for his trouble.

Jimmy wanted to be wrong, because if he was right, all his efforts trying to find the good wife and the husband-none of it mattered. Walsh had been in a panic that night in the trailer, full of tales of love and vengeance, his bravado collapsing with every noise outside. There was a jealous husband all right, there was always a jealous husband with a guy like Walsh. Whether it was Danziger he was afraid of, or his prison karma catching up with him, at the end all Walsh had left was his fear. Leave it to Walsh to think that a screenplay would save him. To be white hot once again. Untouchable. The return of the golden boy.

Jimmy tipped the bottle to his lips. The beer was warm and bitter now. Why did the killer wait around so long afterward? Do it and go, run away, that's what Jimmy would have done. But the man who had killed Walsh had been in no hurry to leave. Probably took a shower afterward, went through Walsh's refrigerator. He owned the place. He had waited two days to make that second call, searching the trailer, seeing if there was anything he wanted, cleaning out the rest of the dope and booze. Showing his yard cool.

Jimmy smacked the beer bottle on the ground, angry at himself. That's what had happened to Walsh's screenplay. Jimmy had been convinced that the missing screenplay proved that the husband had been behind the killing, but the killer had taken it. Grabbed it as a souvenir. Or maybe, knowing Walsh had once been famous, he thought it had to have value. Helen Katz was going to laugh her ass off when he told her. He could hear her now, telling him to leave the police work to the police, that amateurs always made crime more complicated than it really was.

Jimmy stood up and hurled the beer bottle at the koi pond, putting everything he had into the throw, but it landed short.