The Second Girl(58)

“I’ll show you out now.”

He turns and does an about-face and I expect a march, but he only walks with short steps to the door and opens it to let me out. I muster my best smile and walk out the door and toward the elevators.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if I were still wearing the suit I wore when I picked up Edgar, this might have played out differently.

The first thing I’ll have to do when I get home is toss that suit and dress casually for a while, especially when I’m in Virginia. I’ll miss that suit. It means a lot to me.

I push the down button on the elevator.





Fifty-two



I gotta be more careful.

Davidson let me down. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t think I had anything to do with the murder; he misled me.

Hell, who am I kidding? I’m guilty as sin, but not for the murder of Edgar Soto. But Davidson doesn’t know that, and the least he could’ve done is give me a heads-up instead of leading me into the lion’s den and treating me like a common suspect.

I don’t know why they were playing me like that if all they were after was whether I talked to the kid on the day of his murder. I’m fairly certain a lot of it had to do with Wightman putting a bug in Agent Hawkins’s ear. Whatever the motivation, it’s f*cked me up. I feel like I’m being watched, like Wightman had my house bugged. I know it’s ridiculous, but I can’t stop scanning the living room, checking the light fixtures, the walls, and then my landline. After all, I have experience with this sort of thing.

Fuck, do I hate Wightman. He mistakes order for effectiveness, certainty for smarts. Despite that, I don’t hold anything against him having to do with what happened in the past. If I were in his shoes, I would’ve tried to screw my ass, too. Hell, I deserved much worse than I got back then. Like Wightman said, the private deal I got was about the cases we made, specifically the subjects I placed under arrest over the course of my career. I could not even count. It would be a field day at district court and superior court, though. All those defendants, with all their advocates. I shudder to think about it. Costello’s so pissed off at me now that if it ever got out she’d probably jump on the bandwagon.

I also know that I shouldn’t have been able to walk out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office an hour ago. I’m going to have to be more careful.

Starting now.

I walk up the stairs to my bedroom and find the suit I was wearing. I crumple it up and toss it on the bed. I search my closet and find one more suit of similar color and toss that on the bed, too. I head back downstairs to the living room, where I wad them up; I place the suit jacket I was wearing yesterday in the fireplace first. It’s a little chilly outside, so this is nothing unusual, unless I’m being watched. I’ve burned clothing before. It can take a while, and it stinks. I’m also sure it’s not that good for you to inhale, but then again, I put a lot of shit up my nose, so how much worse can this be?

I squirt the jacket with lighter fluid and set it on fire. It gives off a lot of smoke. Too much. I realize I didn’t open the fireplace flue, so I quickly pull it open and secure the chain. The smoke still isn’t getting pulled up the chimney. I run to the front door and open it to allow ventilation. I can feel a cool breeze being drawn in. After a minute I go back to the living room. The thick smoke is being carried up through the chimney now. I drop a log in there to help it along. It’s a bright flame.

After a couple of minutes I drop the pants in and push the log around with a poker.

I sit on the sofa and light a smoke to watch the first old work suit burn. I’m sorry to see it go like that, but I’m happier I didn’t wear the one I just bought. I like it better. It fits me well.

When the material burns down enough, I stir what’s left of it and drop in the other suit. I sit back on the sofa to watch it burn for a bit, then close and lock the front door, then go to the laundry room.

After I slide the wall open, I grab the bag of money out of the washer. I rearrange a few items on a bottom shelf and carefully stack the wads of money along the shelf. It takes me a while to finish. When I’m done it looks like a small wall of tiny paper tubes stacked one on top of the other.

I notice the pill container of Oxys I took from the house on Kenyon. I open it and take out two, then close up the wall again and head back up to the living room.

I down the Oxys with some bottled water and sit back on the sofa to enjoy the fire.





Fifty-three



I haven’t had a rough morning like this in a while.

I soak my head under a hot shower until the headache eases off enough that my frontal lobe doesn’t feel like it’s trying to force its way out of my forehead.

After my half pot of coffee and a couple of grapefruits, I replenish my supply from the secret wall and grab a couple more of the Oxys from the pill container and a few rolls of currency. I have a feeling it’s gonna be a long day.

I call Luna on my cell because I’m still paranoid about the landline. We talk briefly. He doesn’t have a clue about what I just went through. I’m sure both he and McGuire have been kept out of the loop because they’re close to me.

I set up a meet with him for lunch and ask him if he can give me a couple of PDID photos, one of Angelo and the other one of Viktor. He agrees after I tell him I’ll buy.