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  “That all you want?”

  “That’s it. Some information,” I said. “It shouldn’t be this freaking hard.”

  B-Dog licked his lips and glanced down. Half of his shirt was balled in my fist. I’d shook him with every other word as I spoke. I let go and took a half-step back, but kept my gun out. Give and take. If I let him pick his dignity back up off the ground, maybe he’d talk. B-Dog straightened his hat and glanced out at the street, but he didn’t move off the horse.

  “Three, four months ago, some Spic muthafuckas start driving through the ’hood. Every day, they come through, driving slow, checkin’ out the park. The street. Never cause no trouble. Just watchin’. But that mean they lookin’ for an opening. They gonna close us down or take a cut.”

  “What do you mean, Spics? Mexicans? Cubans? Salvadoran?”

  “I don’ fucking know. Spics, man.”

  “How would a Hispanic gang take a cut in a black neighborhood?” I asked. “Would that ever happen?”

  He shrugged. “Crackheads buy from anybody that got product.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Tyrone getting to his feet. He stood and shook his head like a bull moose, then looked around. He spotted us in the park and started to move our way. I turned a little in place so he could see the gun about the same time B-Dog put a hand out. Tyrone stopped and watched us from a distance.

  I turned back to B-Dog. “You know who they were? Which gang?”

  “Fuck if I know. One of them Spic gangs. Logan Circle, Woodbridge, Bowie. They everywhere, man.”

  “What then?”

  “My boy Tone tell us, get ready for a war.”

  “Tone is your boss,” I said.

  A head tilt. Maybe yes, maybe no. B-Dog didn’t want to think he had a boss, even though he was the one that stood on a street twelve hours a day dealing crack. “Tone get an idea and he tell T about the Spics. Tell him if he don’t want a war in his ’hood, maybe he should do something about it.”

  “It warms my heart to see citizens cooperating with local law enforcement,” I said. “So, Tone sicced Witherspoon on these other guys, hoping he’d do his job for him.”

  B-Dog said nothing.

  “Did it work? You guys didn’t look like you were ready for a war when I showed up, you don’t mind me saying.”

  “Things was tense for a while. Dudes stop coming ’round. Maybe a month ago, Tone say all clear and we go back to dealin’.”

  “Who killed T, then?”

  Shrugging seemed to form a large part of B-Dog’s repertoire. “Spics, man. He put the squeeze on them and they took him out.”

  “That matter to you?”

  Shrug. “We didn’t off him. And he be after us if he wasn’t on them.”

  “Sentimental, too,” I said. “So what’s happening now?”

  “Bidness as usual. We see any more dudes, we s’pose to tell Tone.”

  “And that hasn’t happened?”

  “Nope,” B-Dog said.

  “Why is business so slow?”

  “Man, I look like I got an MBA? Fuck if I know. Maybe the crackheads still scared there gonna be a war.” B-Dog was getting some of his swagger back now that his eyes weren’t streaming anymore. He glanced out at the street again. “We done yet?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But you’ve been very helpful.”

  He reached up and rubbed his forehead. It was puffy and swelling. “Man, you ain’t a cop, what the fuck are you?”

  I thought about it. “That is a really good question, Bertrand.”

  i.

  It was his favorite thing to do, playing the scenes over and over in his mind, rolling them back and forth. Watching himself in his mind’s eye from a distance, like a camera in a movie. He liked remembering how things went down, how he’d acted, how cool he was during it all. Each time he killed, it was a little different, but they all spooled out in his mind like an action flick and he loved sitting there and letting them play.

  This one, though. It had been too easy. Disappointing.

  The lock had been no problem. Torres thought he was a bad motherfucker and had only locked the knob. There were no roommates and it was still early on a Saturday morning, no random visitors to worry about. Nosing around the apartment carefully and quietly, he’d found Torres passed out on the floor with half a case of beer cans lying next to him, on the coffee table, and on top of the TV that was still playing its sports channel wrap-up show. The cop had on camo shorts and an ash-gray tank top that showed off the Superman tattoo high on his shoulder, glowing against the pale skin. Belly down, his face turned to the left. A thin line of drool hung from his lower lip and beaded on the rug, quivering in time with his snores.

  Looking down at Torres, he wondered if he should wake him up, let him know what was going to happen and why. No. That wasn’t why he was here. He had a purpose—a mission—and it didn’t require any explanations. The piece of shit could go to his grave wondering why he’d been snuffed. Just then, Torres groaned and rolled onto his side, revealing a short, snub-nosed .38 tucked in his waistband. Decision made. This was no time for talk.

  Using a pillow to muffle the sounds, he knelt next to Torres and put two shots in the side of the cop’s head. The body jerked with each one, then was still, lying just like it had ten seconds before. Tossing the pillow aside, he listened intently for five minutes. Ten. Nothing.

  He reached into the backpack he’d brought and pulled out rubber gloves and a set of rain gear he’d picked up at a thrift store. He slid on a pair of safety glasses, but just then the sports show started their baseball segment. He liked baseball, so he sat on the couch and watched a few minutes of the coverage.

  He swore when they announced the Rangers had beaten the Angels. He didn’t care about the Angels. He just hated the Rangers. Blood from Torres’s head seeped into the carpet as he watched and he moved his foot to keep it from getting on his shoe.

  At a commercial break, bored, he got up and prowled around the apartment. A set of high school football trophies took up space on a dresser in the bedroom, sitting beneath framed medals and ribbons from other past glories. The biggest trophy had a marble base. He picked it up and bounced it in his hand a few times. It had a nice heft to it, so he took it and went back to the living room.

  He turned the AC down to its lowest setting, then kicked the beer cans out of the way. Torres lay almost exactly as he’d found him. If you ignored the little holes. He planted his feet carefully, like a batter. Tilting his head first to the left, then to the right, he chose his spot carefully, then raised the trophy in both hands. He looked over his shoulder, winked at an imaginary camera, then brought the trophy down as hard as he could.

  Chapter Nine

  Over the next twenty-four hours, I sat in my office with my phone and let my fingers do the walking. I might not have anyone who’d be my best man if I decided to get married again, God forbid, but thirty-plus years as a homicide cop in the same town gives you contacts. And it was time to use some of them.

  I’d thought about my next steps carefully and decided what I needed was an introduction. The delay made me anxious and I once again had the feeling that time was slipping past me but, while meeting with Libney Garcia and Florence Witherspoon had been easy enough to arrange, at some point I was going to have to talk to the cops that these guys worked with. And while I didn’t mind cold-calling the different forces and departments and seeing how it went, I’d waste a lot less time if someone could vouch for me before I got there. So, I opened my little black book and started calling the captains, lieutenants, sergeants, beat cops, and DAs I knew from back in the day. I left hearty voice mail messages reminding them who I was and what great times we had and could they call me back about a very vaguely worded case I was working on, please? I wrapped up with a call to Bloch to let him know what I was doing and that I hadn’t used his name or the words “HIDTA” in any of my messages.

  After the last call, I put on a pair of ripped jeans
and a t-shirt and got to work re-painting my kitchen. I wasn’t wasting time, I was being realistic. If you asked any of the guys I’d called, I’m sure they’d remember me fondly, but my messages wouldn’t be a top priority. Things like extortions and robberies and Presidential motorcades were a bit more pressing than my out-of-the-blue request for help. And this wasn’t something I could rush. They’d call me when they could. And if I didn’t want to give myself an ulcer wondering where Bloch’s killer was while I waited, I needed to keep busy.

  In my kitchen, I stared awhile at the pile of brushes, rollers, drop-cloths, and paint I’d picked up at the hardware store weeks ago and had successfully ignored since then. I’d never painted a wall in my life. And never would have, but while cleaning up a family-style Easter lunch, Amanda had suggested it would be good for me.

  “You need a fresh perspective, Marty,” she’d said. “It’ll give you something constructive to do with your time. Instill a more positive outlook.”

  “What it will instill in me is a backache and a profound lightness in my wallet,” I said.

  She lifted a piece of peeling wallpaper—yellow with a pattern of quaint Amish buggies—with a fingernail. “This stuff is brown in the corners. And it’s peeling at every seam. How old is it, anyway?”

  I thought about it. “It’s been here…a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Years.”

  She gave me a look. “How many years?”

  “Eighteen,” I said. I diverted my gaze to floor, ashamed. Hopefully she wouldn’t ask about the linoleum. It had been there twenty.

  “Oh my God, it has to go,” she said, pinching a curling corner of the paper and pulling away a two-by-two swath without effort. I said, “hey!” in protest, but she balled it up and threw it in the trash. “Even if it were a week old, you’d have to get rid of it. It’s screaming seventies.”

  “That’s because it is seventies.”

  She put her hands on her hips and did a half pirouette, assessing the room. “Okay, we’ll need some buckets for hot water and some scrapers to get this crap off. Come on, chop-chop.”

  Out with the old, in with the new. We managed to get the paper off by working the remainder of Easter Sunday. Not the day of rest I’d been hoping for. Scraping the glue off the wall ruined the next Saturday. The work left me exhausted, but that had been weeks ago and now I needed to make some progress or Amanda would stop talking to me. Patches of glue and wallpaper residue spotted the wall, giving the kitchen a glum, diseased look. Not the fresh, dynamic change Amanda had been looking for. But ripping stuff off a wall was easy. Painting was hard.

  My cat Pierre set up camp at the doorway to the dining room and watched while I got ready. I moved the chairs and table, wrestled the drop-cloths into place, taped the edges of the ceiling, and opened the legs of a step ladder. I mixed the primer and poured it into a plastic cup to start what a DIY magazine had called “cutting in.” I climbed the ladder, dipped the brush in the cup, and the phone rang.

  I closed my eyes briefly, came back down the ladder, and answered it. It was Bloch.

  “Singer,” he said. “I got your message.”

  “Good. I wanted to keep you up to speed. And warn you if you hear about me through the grapevine. I called in a few favors to help me run this thing down.”

  There was a staccato tapping on the other end of the line. It took me a second, then I realized it was a sped-up rendition of the pencil-tapping habit a lot of people have when they're on the phone. Bloch’s version was sent into overdrive by his need for nicotine, apparently. “That’ll make it tough to keep the investigation quiet.”

  “I need to get on the inside of these departments, Bloch. Which I can do if some of the people I called vouch for me. But I have to tell them something about why. And I’m going to have to tell the cops I talk to something.”

  He didn’t say anything, so I tried to push the point home.

  “How would you like it if some boob showed up at your office one day and told you he needed to talk to some of your officers because he happened to be running his own homicide case? All outside regular channels and with a very foggy mandate from a local law enforcement agency that he would rather not name.”

  “What are you going to tell them?”

  “I don’t have to lie. I’ll tell my contacts that I got called in to do a favor for a task force. Which is true.”

  “If they press it?”

  “I’ll tell them to call you. Which none of them will do, because it’s too much work and they trust me and they’ll have heard of HIDTA. Five will get you ten that they’ll just pick up the phone, call a lieutenant or sergeant they know, and ask them to play nice with me.”

  Tap, tap, tap. “What about the cops they get you in to see?”

  “Same thing, different angle. Their lieutenant or captain will have already told them I’m one of the good guys and they should cooperate. If they push it, I’ll tell them it’s related to a case from your department, but that I’m not going to get in their way or step on any toes or write any reports.”

  The tapping slowed down. “A grain of truth goes a long way.”

  “Exactly.”

  “All right. Sorry. It seemed okay to speculate and think about how to tackle this, but then when it actually happens, and you start calling people, I realized…”

  “That your job could be on the line?” I finished.

  “Yeah.”

  “Try not to think of it that way,” I said. “We’re doing a good thing, as you pointed out to me. If we’re careful not to piss anybody off along the way, and don’t give them cause to think we’re trying to upstage them, there’s no reason they won’t play ball. And let’s not forget, we’re working on someone else’s timeline. Anything we can do to head off the next killing, we’ve got to take.”

  He blew out a breath and, in that one sound, I could hear all of his pent-up anxiety and fear. “Do what you have to do, Singer. And thanks.”

  He hung up. I sympathized with him. It was one thing to vent to a former colleague, sharing fears and frustrations. It was an entirely different thing to authorize that colleague to start poking sticks in hornets’ nests. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be helped. If he wanted answers and we were going to stop whoever was killing cops, I’d have to introduce myself to the people who knew the victims best: family, friends, and other cops.

  I grabbed the cup of rapidly congealing primer and headed back up the ladder. After a few minutes, I caught on to the rhythm of the strokes, taking my time, perfecting the movements. Painting was a pleasantly empty activity that lent itself to a wandering mind and I found myself thinking about the murders. Considering how I would tell the cops I would be meeting that someone was out there, methodically killing anyone with a badge. Wondering if I was right about what was going on.

  Hoping that, for once, I wasn’t.

  Chapter Ten

  I put the car in park and stared out my windshield across a miserable field of cars, trucks, trailers, and Dumpsters. Blue Plains wasn’t the prettiest place in the world. Not far to the west, the Potomac flowed fresh and clean, but you’d never know it looking at the eight-foot cyclone fence and razor wire that guarded the city’s approximately eleven zillion impounded cars. Somewhere along the fence, I’d heard, was the site of one of the original District boundary stones, placed there two hundred years ago by L’Enfant himself. The stone was moved during construction in the fifties and stolen or lost. In typical DC fashion, there’d been a replacement, but it had been buried under eight feet of fill when Blue Plains was graded to create the impound lot. The only way you could see it now was by peering down a concrete pipe.

  I was pondering our region’s on-again, off-again love of history when Bloch pulled up in a blue Elantra. I got out and walked over. He motioned for me to get in the passenger’s seat.

  “This where you bring all your dates?” I asked.

  “Only the ones that want to get their car back,” he said, grinning.
Some of the weariness and worry seemed gone from his face. I perked up. Only a breakthrough would give Bloch a lift like that.

  “What’s up?”

  He reached into a jacket pocket and handed me a white business-sized envelope. It was addressed to Danny Garcia, but at HIDTA, not his home. It was from the DC Department of Motor Vehicles. I peered at Bloch, who just raised his eyebrows and motioned for me to open it. I scanned the contents quickly. It was an impound notice for a 1979 Toyota Camry. The reason for its impoundment, it said in the cryptic lettering reserved for government correspondence with the public, was two unpaid parking tickets over sixty days old.

  “Oh, ho,” I said. “This come to your office?”

  He nodded, then jerked a thumb towards the lot in front of us. “This starting to make sense?”

  “You betcha,” I said. “You have the original dates of the tickets?”

  “Took some running down. The DC DMV doesn’t exactly run like clockwork.”

  “Unless you like your clocks to be broken,” I said. “Though even they’re right twice a day. What did they tell you?”

  “The tickets were from three and five days after Danny’s body was found, respectively,” he said.

  “You know my next question.”

  “The registration address was the HIDTA office. Which is why the impound notice was sent there, of course.”

  “He have other cars?”

  “Two,” Bloch said. “A Corolla and a Bronco. Both registered to Danny and Libney Garcia.”

  I closed my eyes, thinking, remembering. “The Corolla was at the house when I talked to her. The son could’ve had the other one. You didn’t call and ask her about the Camry?”

  He shook his head. “Not until we have a chance to look at it.”

  “What are we waiting for?”

  Bloch got a crime scene kit out of his trunk, then we went to the gate where he flashed his badge. We were ushered through to a trailer where, behind the counter, a bored-looking black lady with five-inch fingernails stopped looking at her cell phone long enough to glance at Danny’s impoundment notice. Bloch told her it would be best if we went to the car rather than having it brought to us. She sighed and picked up an office phone. She said three or four syllables and hung up.