Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

Even with those hidden bonuses, it had been a stretch, living-and dressing-to the heights he desired on his government salary. And Betty had been expensive, surprisingly so. She’d been a waitress when they met, making jewelry on the side, seemingly down-to-earth and low-maintenance. But once he was disentangled from his wife and family, Betty’s needs grew and grew.

Then it had all gone to shit in a way he could never imagine. A tip had come into the Bureau about a possible terrorism suspect, a dark-skinned man photographing bridges around New York on a curiously regular schedule, almost like clockwork. Who wouldn’t have jumped on the guy, brought him in, hammered away at him? He was a young Egyptian, a college student allegedly, and he claimed he was taking the digital photos for a school project, but Columbia University had never heard of him.

Turned out the kid went to Columbia College , in Chicago. He was in New York on spring break. Oh, and he was a Christian, too, not a Muslim. Jenkins might have ridden out the private embarrassment of it all, but then the media had gotten it. Once it was public, someone had to take the fall. The Bureau couldn’t blame Barry for the investigation itself, which had been totally by the book, but they found a way to discredit him. They started going over his expense reports, questioning every line item. In the end they never found enough to fire him, but they found enough irregularities and missing documentation to send him back to a make-work job in Baltimore. To add insult to injury, his new colleagues treated him like a short-timer, a man of no worth. He was given bullshit duties, things that didn’t use 30 percent of his brain. At his lowest he had thought of putting a gun in his mouth a couple of times, but then he met Bully, who’d been even more thoroughly screwed by his bosses-but wasn’t so defeated by it. Bully’s fury had stoked his own, gotten him to take his tail out from between his legs and reclaim himself.

“There’s the articles of incorporation for her business-”

The dumb shit was still babbling. Figured. Guy had wilted in front of the old cripple, but now he couldn’t shut up. Collins hadn’t said a word since he placed his order. Jenkins loved that about Collins, the way he didn’t talk unless he had something to say.

“Look, we have what we need,” Jenkins said, cutting the kid off. “Don’t get carried away.”

“I’m just saying that there’s still more ways to get at her.”

“We had her,” Jenkins said. “The point was trying to get her to tell us today, to keep this from turning into some huge public deal. That’s why I told you not to go after the reporters, because that would have been all over the newspapers the minute you even questioned them.”

“Well, what about the information that Bully developed?” Collins frowned at Gabe’s use of his nickname, but the kid was too insensitive to notice. “What do we know about the dead kid, Le’andro, his known associates? Why not jack up Bennie Tep, lean on him?”

“Brilliant,” Collins said, and Gabe beamed, not hearing the sarcasm.

“We go to Bennie, we alert him that we know he’s involved,” Jenkins said. He was no longer trying to disguise his exasperation. In fact, he was amping it up, hoping that the kid would finally understand how badly he had screwed up. “He’ll kill half of East Baltimore rather than risk being linked to the murder of a federal prosecutor.”

“But he’s such a small-timer in the scheme of things, and you said he’s always tried to avoid violence-”

“He’s small by design. Like a boutique, you know? He keeps his business close in order to reduce risk. He doesn’t like to kill, but he will if he has to.”

“Oh,” Gabe said, getting it at last, or seeming to. “Well, there’s nothing hard and fast about the timeline. We can wait to bring her back in. If anything, it will probably make her even jumpier. Sword of Damocles and all that.”

“Sword of damn what?” Jenkins asked. He was a college boy, too, but that one got by him.

“He was a man who sat under a sword, hanging by a thread,” Collins said. Gabe, the poor sap, couldn’t hide how impressed he was. Bad form. Bully wouldn’t forgive him that.

“You learn that in college?” Gabe asked.

“High school. Dunbar.”

“Right-you were a Poet .” Fuck, the kid was teasing Bully now, making “poet” sound like “faggot.” But Collins wouldn’t even waste a look on the guy.

Crow’s body was completely disoriented. He had stayed up until 3:00 A.M., which was the new 4:00 A.M., then gotten up at the new 10:00 A.M., which was the old 9:00 A.M. Drinking three PBRs on a practically empty stomach hadn’t helped matters much. He should probably grab a meal before heading back. Or maybe stay here, get a good night’s sleep, rather than risk nodding off at the wheel. Was he honoring his body’s needs or postponing the reunion with Tess, who would be full of questions he couldn’t answer? He felt foolish, running away to protect Lloyd only to lose him in a Salisbury nightclub. Some protector he’d turned out to be.

A dusty gray minivan was idling in one of the spaces on the side street along FunWorld. For one stupid, panicky moment, Crow worried that the authorities had caught up with him. But he was pretty sure no law-enforcement agency used minivans.

“Mr. Crow?” a woman called from the car.

“Just Crow,” a familiar voice corrected. “He’s not a mister.”

“I found Lloyd hitchhiking this morning, and he said he lived here. But I didn’t want to leave him until I saw a grown-up.” The driver, a full-faced black woman with a serious Sunday hat-a tall, golden straw concoction that deserved to be called a crown-looked him up and down. “I guess you count.”

The side door slid open, and Lloyd climbed out of the minivan, at once sheepish and defiant. “Where were you last night, man? You left me.”

“I left-” But Crow saw that insisting on this technical point might cost him something larger. “I’m sorry. I went to buy new cell phones. It didn’t occur to me that you would be looking for me before closing.”

“We fed him a good lunch,” the woman said. “My, he does have an appetite.”

“And he smells!” a little girl’s voice called from within the depths of the minivan, provoking peals of childish laughter. Crow thought the insult would throw Lloyd into his worst defensive posture, that he might ball up his fists or say something inexcusably obscene. But he just mock-scowled and said, “Not as bad as you, Shavonda Grace,” which earned another round of delighted giggles.

“Looks like you made some friends,” Crow said after the woman at the wheel-Mrs. Anderson, he had learned, of Dagsboro-made a three-point turn and headed back to the highway.

“Naw. More like acquaintances.”

“Acquaintances can become friends.”

“If you say so.”

Did Lloyd mean to imply that Crow was more acquaintance than friend? It didn’t matter. His actions undercut his cruel adolescent words. He had come back here. On his own, free to choose, he had directed Mrs. Anderson to bring him here. Perhaps he trusted Crow after all.

Tess woke up about 7:00 A.M., her head fogged from restless dreams. They hadn’t been real dreams, more a state between consciousness and unconsciousness in which her mind was stuck in a single groove, like a car spinning its tires in the sand. Crow’s secret account, Crow’s secret account, Crow’s secret account. The fact nagged at her not only in its own right but because it was pointing her somewhere else. She did the only thing she knew to clear her head, the thing she would have done anyway on any weekday morning from mid-March to Thanksgiving. She went to the boathouse.