Bombshell (Devlin Haskell 4) (17 page)

“How can I help?”
I said, then checked my face in the rear view mirror.

“I left a couple of Leonard Cohen CD’s at your place. Any chance you could run them over,
tonight? Nicholas will be here
sometime after …”

I decided it wouldn’t be the best idea to tell her I’d tossed them both in the trash. You’d slit your wrists before yo
u
finished listening
to one CD from that guy,
let alone both of them, totally depressing.

“… to
prepare a special night
.
”

“I’d love to get them to you Carol, but I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t,” sh
e shot back, her
charming attitude suddenly gone.

“
Look, I’d like nothing better than to help with your love life, but
I can’t get them tonight.”

“Out with some bar floozy?”

“I only wish.
No, I…
”

She hung up, so much for Carol and Pepe le Pew.

Against my better judgment I found myself
on the front porch
ringing Louie’s doorbell less than an hour later. I
t
was a muggy, dreadfully still evening and the two front windows at Louie’s house were open with large fans roaring and clattering. The storm door stood open in a failed attempt to collect whatever breeze there wasn’t. I rang the front doorbell again, heard the thing chime
from somewhere inside. Further back in
the hous
e I could hear a woman
’s voice. She
sounded like she was pleading
. Whoever it was,
she was in trouble
.

“Hello,” I called, then heard a shriek.
I pulled on the screen door
,
but it was hooked.
I pulled hard, wren
ched
the thing
open
and tore
a part of the
door
as I did
, splitting the
wood where the hook had been a moment before
. I followed
the woman’s shrieks
down the hall
. Louie
was in his den, he sat
snoring in his ratty recliner, close to a dozen beer bottles scattered
around him on the floor. He had
passe
d out in front of his flat screen. Two large
women screamed as they tested the support sy
stem on a tandem bicycle that
careened down a s
teep hill
,
based on their size the thing had to
have
had
solid rubber tires.

I walked into the kitchen and
helped myself to a cold bottle of
Summit
from his fridge. Then
returned to Louie’s den, lifted the remote from the arm of his recliner, settled into an equally ratty couch and st
arted flicking through channels and landed
on a movie I’d only seen three or four times.

Louie woke me sometime after midnight.

“Want a
nother beer?” he asked, holding a cold bottle out in my general direction.

“Thanks.”

“No woman
stupid enough to put up with you tonigh
t?” he asked,
and
then followed up by
chugging
a
lmost a
third of his
beer
.

I shook my head.

“Any idea who put that thing in your garage?”

“Someone who doesn’t know me very well. Just about everyone knew that little fridge was dead. And if they didn’t, once they opened it up they should have gotten the hint.”

“Hint?” he asked,
then
chugged another third.

“
You kidding?
I had boxes of nails and screws in
there, what kind of idiot sees
that sort of stuff in a refrigerator
and tosses a finger in
?”

“I don’t know, some guy in a hurry,
worried about getting caught sneaking in or
rushing out.
Someone who doesn’t
really
care,
someone who
wants to set you up,
see you get
jacked around and
nail
ed
.
”

“The guy sees the fridge
,
first of all he has to move a bunch of shit just to get to the thing. He opens it up,
the light doesn’t go on, it’s not cold,
there’s boxes of hardware in there,
a couple of paint cans,
seems
like a
pretty weak
set up
to me.”

“Maybe,” Louie drained his bottle and
didn’t ask if I wanted another
. He
just walked back into the kitchen and
reappeared thirty
seconds later with two more
beers
, he
handed one to me.
I set it
down
on the floor
.

“Plus,
are
you telling me the guy who was stalking Harlotte Davidson all this time
around the country
was some moron from
Saint Paul
?”
I asked.

“That second part
, being a
moron,
that
seems pretty plausible.”

“Yeah, that’s for sure
. But hell, I didn’t
even know
these English Roller Derby gals
existed
until Justine put me in touch with them.”

“Well there you go, obviously if the great Dev Haskell didn’t know anything about their
fund raising
tour
across the
United States
, no one else did, either.
I
t just couldn’t be news, right?”

I took his point, shrugged my shoulders.

Louie shook his head.

“It’
s someone connected to the
Hasting
Hustler’s
in some way. Some creep has the hots for that Harlotte
chick or she gave some idiot
the finger and
now
he’
s following her around
. What do they call it when all those creeps follow Jodie Foster around? I
t’s probably
something like that.
”

“What do they call it? Nuts, they’re all whack jobs. I’m
still not sure that explains the
finger?”

“The one in your garage?”

I nodded and took a
sip.

“I honestly think it’s some sort of a diversion.”

“
Gee really?
You
mean some douche bag didn’t
just walk around and pick up a middle finge
r lying on the sidewalk?
Then decided to hide the thing in my garage?
”

“Yeah
,
I know it didn’t just occur, happen
. The thing is
obviously
from the guy who’s really been doing this shit otherwise it makes absolutely no sense at all
..
.
”

“Makes no sense, you mean unlike everything
else
so far?
” I said.

“
I’m only half joking
here
when I say
at no surprise
you must have pissed someone off.
You might want to think about who
it could be
.
”

“That list is long
,” I said,
then
drained
my
bottle of
beer a
nd grabbed
the
fresh
one off
the floor
.

I
was finally
allowed
back into my house late the next day. Manning
had been right, they did take the non-working
refrigerator from the garage. They also took the
working refrigerator
from
my kitchen, along with all my knives, my tool box, a table saw,
a
skill saw and strangely
,
a set of utensils for eating lobster that I’d
gotten as a Christmas gift one year and
never used
, the things were still in the original box
.

All the stuff that had been kept in m
y refrigerator
;
butter, oranges, left over pizza, cranberry juice
, doggy bags from restaurants, ice cube trays, was all scattered across my
kitchen counter.
The beer was missing.
Nothing
was left out
that twenty-four hours
in humid weather
wouldn’t help make worse. It was the second time that week I’d cleaned up a gallon of melted i
ce cream. I bagged everything
and threw it
all
in the trash
, opened the windows to air things out
.

Louie phoned
later
that evening, I could hear glasses clinking and the
low
hum of
background conversation
.

“How you holding up?” he asked.

“I’ve
been worse, but it’s been a while.”

“They grab that refrigerator?”

“The one in the garage? Yeah. They also took the one
in my kitchen, virtually all m
y tools,
my table saw, all my
knives, God knows what else.”

“Well I know it’s a pain
,
but it’s not like there’s anything to find, right?”

“That’s what you said before and
then they found that finger in my
garage. I don’t know, I just want all this over and done with, it sucks
big time
.”

“Mmm-mmm,
” Louie said after
swallowing, “Yeah not fun. For what it’s worth I got a call from a source over at BCA.”

“The crime analysis
folks, w
hat’
d they
have to
say?”

“About all they could confirm was they got a finger.”

“I could have told them that.”

“Nothing from any data base, no match. He said i
t had been
frozen, before, the finger that is.”

“Just like King’s,” I said absently.

“What?”

“The guy I spoke with in
Denver
, King Quinn,
Kingston
,
actually. He said the
y determined the same thing,
the finger out there
had been frozen
. That was the
one taped to the door
of the bus
.
They couldn’t
link
it
to
anything in their data base, the C
ODIS data base
. Might be worth a heads up to your source,
see if
they
want to contact King, maybe together
they can come up with anything.”

“Give me his name again,” Louie said, “I’m writing it down on a bar napkin.
Got a phone number?”

Once we were finished and I’d hung up
Louie’s call got me thinking, I called Andy Lindbergh.

“Hi Andy, Dev Haskell, sorry to bother you at home.”

“
No problem, Dev, but i
f you’re calling for bail money the answers no
,
”
he
half
joked.

“No, they just held me for questioning,
but I’m out now,
not fun, let me tell you.”

Dead silence on the other end.

“Andy?”

“You serious?”

“Yeah, not to worry, s
ay let me ask you something. You
were telling me the other day about the crematorium, maybe a place to
,
as you said, harvest.”

“You’re back on the fingers, right?”

“Yeah. Let me ask you a question,
we’ve
gotten results back on two fingers. I’m guessing here, but what are the chances
of two random fingers not matching
DNA
anywhere in our data bases?
”