Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

“No,” he said. “And he doesn’t know how to call me, because I switched burners last night, dumping the other phone. I suppose he could try to call FunWorld if he knew the number, or get your listing from directory assistance. But why would he call? He clearly wanted to get away.”

“You know I was a cop, right?”

“Yeah. A cop, but also a friend of Spike’s. You held his liquor license, in fact. What was that about?”

“Spike has a past. The kind of past that keeps you from having a liquor license. Not even his family knows about it. He was…a little out of control as a young man. I locked him up.”

“You locked him up, but then you helped him get a liquor license when he got out?”

“What he did-Look, it’s not my story to tell. One day you’ll have a past and you’ll want people to keep it to themselves. Trust me.”

“I already have a few mysteries in my life,” Crow said.

Ed snorted, as if Crow didn’t know from secrets, and he had a point. Most people would think that Crow’s secret was a cause for joy and celebration, but Crow felt marked by it, shamed and unsure. “Anyway, let’s just say I could see the bigger picture, see that maybe Spike didn’t have any choices in what he did. So when he did his time and wanted a fresh start, I helped him out.”

“What’s your point?”

“I don’t know. I kind of lost it.” He scratched a pale, freckled calf. “Oh, yeah. Like I said, I was a cop. The boy?”

“Lloyd.”

“Yeah, him. He’s hiding something, too.”

“He was in hiding because he had stopped hiding something.”

“I get the distinction, but that’s what I’m telling you. He ain’t told you everything he knows. That’s why he’s so jumpy-like. There’s another shoe going to drop with him. Maybe you’re better off, not being around him. Someone wants to kill the kid, you’re trying to protect him, and he’s not straight with you. That means he’s risking your life along with his.”

Crow wanted to indulge the older man, but he didn’t think a retired cop’s instincts were worth much.

“Well, I guess we’ll never know. I don’t think I’ll ever see Lloyd Jupiter again.”

“You want a beer?”

Ed was drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, which had enjoyed a brief, strange vogue among the wannabe hipsters that came to the Point. Crow was pretty sure, however, that Ed had been drinking PBR since before those kids were born and would still be drinking it after some of them died.

“Sure.”

They sat in companionable silence, pretending the day was suitably warm and sunny, and listened to the callers on WBAL, whose signal was faint but clear here on the shore. It was the happiest, most optimistic day of the baseball season, with the Orioles fans convinced that they were going to go 162-0. Hey, it could happen. Anything could happen.

Tess dug the cell phone out of her laundry hamper and called the only number on the message list. No answer. How else could she get in touch with Crow? She examined the phone, which had more bells and whistles than hers-pictures, video, Internet access. She could e-mail him, then. She went to her computer and sent Crow a message headed SIX INCHES FOR YOU, a long-standing joke with them.

Call me. Urgent.

All she could do was hope he would check the e-mail via phone-he was clearly too canny to use a computer that could be traced. Oh, she had raised her little spy boy well. Spy boy made her think of flag boys, and she put on a CD of the New Orleans music that Crow loved so much-and kept booking into the club, despite mixed results. “Jockamo fee-NO-MONEY,” her father had complained privately to her.

My flag boy told your flag boy…

She should forward those photos that Whitney had taken of the three caballeros, she decided, although if that trio got close enough for Crow to identify, it would be too late. But at least he would recognize his hunters should they come for him, understand how serious things were. Not that it mattered. Tyner figured she had perhaps seventy-two hours before she would be charged officially and faced with the choice of giving up Lloyd Jupiter or rolling the dice on the federal charge. Of course, once she identified Lloyd, they would still have to find him, and she couldn’t help them with that. Would they believe her? Or would they deny her the promised immunity, thinking she had reneged?

As for Crow’s disappointment when she caved-well, who was Crow to be disappointed with her? Crow, who had listened to her fret about money while he sat on his secret nest egg. She didn’t believe that Crow would be involved in anything illegal, but then-she had never thought he would be cruel or selfish either. He had been playing poor. She really was.

Tess downloaded the three photos, then sent them as e-mail attachments. The nausea came back, and she couldn’t think of anything to do except to lie on the floor, although what she really needed to do was put something, anything, in her stomach. The dogs came over and comforted her, pressing their damp, cold noses to her neck and ears. She was touched-until she realized they were simply petitioning her to take them for their afternoon walks. Man’s best friend, sure, as long as your interests were congruent with theirs.

Her restless, association-prone mind leapfrogged back to the motto she had invoked the first time the happy trio had come for her. It was one beloved by her father, a longtime public servant. What’s the most frightening sentence in the English language? he would ask her when his friends came over. Other kids did the itsy-bitsy spider, but this was Tess’s shtick.

She’d lisp back, We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.

Her father’s friends, most of them employed by the city and state and feds, would laugh until they were bent double.

Jenkins was so frustrated that he didn’t trust himself to speak. Dalesio was an inept asshole. If Jenkins had controlled the interview from the start…ut he hadn’t wanted to do that. He needed that stubborn bitch to focus on Gabe, wanted her to see him as the enemy. Thing is, good cop-bad cop worked only when the bad cop was good at being the bad cop. He should have left Gabe out of it, worked this exclusively with Bully. But the DEA agent was a little too good at playing bad cop. Plus, verbal wasn’t Bully’s strength. Poor guy. He’d never really found his niche after they had taken him out of the undercover unit.

No, the kid had folded, weak and ineffectual. Jenkins had told him repeatedly that they needed to extract the information now , that it was imperative to get her to give it up without going for the actual charge. They didn’t want to do this in public. Her lawyer would certainly leak details of an official deal, if only to embarrass them. Sure, Schulian would go for charging Monaghan; she was furious about the way the Youssef case had played out in the press. She’d be happy to throw the full weight of her office toward obtaining the lead. Hell, she might even be proud of Gabe Dalesio, which was all he really cared about, his own career and standing. But then there would be too many players, too many people in the loop. This asshole kept ignoring Jenkins’s admonition to keep this close, among the three of them.

“There are some other leads in the paperwork,” Gabe was burbling now, not getting how badly he had screwed up-or else covering for his embarrassment. They had gone for a late lunch at a steak house in the harbor, where the misty weather had held down the usual weekend crowds, and while the place wasn’t bad, it made Jenkins wistful for the joints he’d known in New York. Keane’s, Peter Luger’s. The New York office was considered a bum assignment by most of the agents, but it was the only place Jenkins had wanted to be, and it had outstripped his fantasies. The best way to live in New York was to be rich, of course, but there was a second way to do it-having a job that encouraged people to shower you with perks. Access to restaurants and clubs, forgiving owners who let you slide on checks because you were FBI, you were keeping the city safe.