Spare Change (Wyattsville #1)(61)

“He’s my Pop!”

“He’s also got a reputation for chasing after women. Remember the problem with that woman from Portsmouth—”

“Forget it!” Sam growled, “Just forget I ever mentioned it.”

“Okay, it’s forgotten,” Jack answered. But, the truth was that such an idea had started him thinking.

On Tuesday, Sam Cobb, who for over a week had claimed to be having problems with his digestive tract, woke up feeling under the weather; so, even though he’d promised that Sam could take over most of the questioning, Mahoney went in search of Butch Wheeler alone. He arrived at the Route Thirteen truck stop shortly before ten; parked himself on a stool across from the plate glass window then sat and drank cup after cup of coffee. After the fourth cup, the waitress suggested he ought to have a jelly donut or crumb bun to soak up some of the caffeine he’d been downing. “That stuff will scald your insides,” she said jokingly. Without taking his eyes off of the parking lot, Mahoney smiled and told her that he was willing to take his chances. He said nothing about what he was really thinking—jelly donuts meant sticky hands; sticky hands meant a trip to the washroom—no thanks. It was close to one o’clock when the truck carrying a load of chickens pulled in. According to the description he’d been given, Mahoney figured the man would be about the size of Scooter Cobb, but Butch Wheeler was bigger—about the same height, but much wider.

Jack swiveled around, stepped down from the stool and walked outside. “Excuse me,” he called across the parking lot, “You Butch Wheeler?”

“Sure am.” Butch saw the badge clipped to Mahoney’s jacket and gave the kind of wide open grin only a man with a clear conscience is capable of. “Am I in trouble with the law?” he asked laughingly.

“Nah,” Mahoney replied, “I’m looking for a runaway boy and Tom Behrens over at the ESSO station thought you’d be able to help.”

“I had a feeling,” Wheeler said.

“Had a feeling?”

“Yep. Jack Mahoney, that wasn’t the boy’s name, was it?”

Mahoney shook his head, “No sir,” he said, “that’s my name.”

“You’re Jack Mahoney?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Whoo-ee. That kid has brass ones, stealing a policeman’s name.”

“I wouldn’t say he stole it,” Jack replied, “more like fell back on it, so he’d have somebody to be. His real name’s Ethan Allen Doyle. That ring any bells?”

Wheeler shook his head. “Can’t say it does.”

“Anyway, he was supposedly headed over to the mainland to find his grandpa—do you recall where you dropped him off?”

“Right in front of the building; even waited to make sure he got in safe.”

“You remember the address?”

“Wyattsville; I can’t recall the address...” Butch scrunched his forehead into a washboard of wrinkles; “But, I could tell you how to get there.”

“Good enough,” Jack answered with a smile.

Once he had a fix on where Ethan Allen had gone, Jack couldn’t wait to get to Wyattsville. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became—the boy had a story to tell; a story that quite possibly could get told, if Sam Cobb wasn’t doing the asking. Still, a promise was a promise and he’d promised Cobb that he could handle the interrogations. Of course, if Cobb happened to be unavailable…

Had Jack Mahoney not agreed to be sitting in the front row when his daughter performed in the school play that evening, he would have started for the mainland immediately; but he’d promised, and he’d already broken too many such promises so the trip would have to wait until the following day. Wednesday, he reasoned, was more often than not a slow day, and the likelihood was that Sam wouldn’t get back to work before the end of the week.

Wednesday, a good hour before dawn, on the road running smack through the center of town, a gasoline truck headed north jackknifed—turning itself into a fireball and setting five of the stores on the western side of the street ablaze. By the time Jack got to the station house, the duty officer was handing out assignments to officers not even scheduled for work that day.

Despite the hullabaloo, Jack didn’t slow down as he whizzed past the front desk. “I’ve got a solid lead on the Doyle boy,” he told the Captain who was standing at the water cooler swallowing down some aspirin, “so, if you’ve no objections, I’m gonna shoot over to Wyattsville and check it out.”

“Not today,” the Captain answered. “I need every man I’ve got.”

For the next two days, Jack was assigned to investigating a number of vandalisms that occurred around the business area where several stores were left wide open because their front windows had been knocked out by fire hoses. When he was finished with that, there was a mountain of paperwork to attend to and he didn’t get clearance for the trip to Wyattsville until four days later, by then Sam Cobb was back at work.

“I don’t think this kid’s gonna talk to you,” Mahoney told Cobb as they sat waiting for the ferry to the mainland. “Maybe you ought to wait in the car and let me handle the questioning.”

Cobb, who by now had a severe case of hemorrhoids and was in a worse than usual mood, grumbled, “Bullshit!”