Short Ride to Nowhere Read Free

waiting for a significant question from Jenks, just so they could ignore it and prove who was in charge.  
    “Your friend is suspected of murdering a nine-year-old girl,” Nolan said with a growl.   It was a well-practiced growl.   It proved just how serious he was, a purveyor of truth, a fighter for justice, who did not like nine-year-old girls being murdered.   Like if you didn’t growl, you must just love it when children get knifed.   “She was stabbed.”
    “How often?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “How many times was she stabbed?”
    Again he was ignored, except that Wynn perked up and the doc’s plaid socks said, Oh ho, oh, so you vish to know about zee details.   Zees details, zey arouse you, yes?
    “And your thoughts?” Nolan asked.
    “My thoughts?”
    “Yes.”
    “My thoughts are he didn’t do it.   My thoughts are that he got knifed trying to protect the little girl.   And you have nothing to dispute that.   Because if you did, you wouldn’t be asking me my thoughts.”   
    “You went looking for him.”
    “I did.”
    “Why?   Why do you even care?”
    “I already answered that.”
    “Not to my satisfaction.”
    “Fuck your satisfaction.”
    Nolan’s jaw muscles tightened, adding a lean feral appearance to his face.   His upper lip skinned back as he began to argue the point, his huge hands tightening into fists, applying enough pressure to the table so that his Styrofoam coffee cup began to dance in place.   Jenks wondered how many wormy criminal suspects had cracked thanks to Nolan’s theatrics.   Enough of them for him to keep up the act.   But how Nolan he think it was going to play out with Jenks, a guy who was here voluntarily, to help out, a guy with nothing left in the world to lose?
    Wynn shifted his body slightly and came around to face Jenks.   “We don’t know who the girl was.   Do you have any idea?”
      “No.”
    “He had a daughter about the same age.”
    “Yeah.   Sandy.”
    Wynn let it sit out there, calmly waiting.   The only sound their heavy breathing, the doc scratching, distant shouts from patients and some slamming doors.   No wonder Hale had decided to off himself.   After this, what else was there?   Where else could you go?
    Jenks looked at the photo of the crazy beautiful girl again.   He took the reins again, as he was expected to do.   “You think Hale was so nuts that he kidnapped a girl about his daughter’s age because he couldn’t distinguish reality from fantasy, that it?   But you know that’s not the case.”
    “And how do we know that?” Nolan asked.
    “If it was, you’d have a missing child report and you’d know who the hell she was.”
    There went Wynn, grinning.   He liked dealing with smart people, even if they were on the other side of the table.  
    Hale had probably been offed for whatever he had in his pockets.   How much could it have been?   Ten bucks, maybe.   This was the age of a new Depression.   You had contemporary versions of Bonnie and Clyde roaming the highways.   Middle age mutts like Jenks with no future and damn little past.   With no homes and no money, no health insurance, no benefits, no stability.   No chance, no choice but to watch their kids get jacked on meth with no hope for ever grabbing hold of the American dream.   Jenks wondered what the next play was supposed to be.   “What about the blade?”
    “What about it?”
    “Learn anything?   Fingerprints?   Where it was sold?”
    “No prints.   It was clean but old.   They used to be popular back in the fifties, sixties.”
    “Sure.”   Jenks nodded, thinking about his old man.   His father had once come home with a butterfly blade, flipping it around but unable to do it with any precision.   He’d taken it off some mook who’d pulled it after being cornered in an alley.   Jenks remembered blood on his father’s knuckles as he’d spun the knife trying to get the handles to line up, Jenks’ terrified reflection