Speak of the Devil Read Free Page B

paper bag was on the table. So were the handcuffs.
    Seated across from me was a large man in his late fifties. Huge chest. He was in a charcoal suit with a red tiepin. The tented handkerchief in his front pocket was a pale blue that somewhat matched his eyes, which were small, hard, clear and currently boring angrily into mine. His salty hair was cropped short and sat flat on his scalp, sort of a modified Roman-emperor look. On the local news, you don’t tend to notice the old acne scars. You see putty-colored skin, a twice-broken nose and an imposing ugliness that, in his job, seems to work in his favor. You also don’t notice the labored breathing. The man in front of me looked like he had just finished a couple of laps around a horse corral.
    “Hello, Commissioner,” I said coolly. I massaged my right wrist again as I glanced about the dreary room. “I don’t know. Perhaps maybe a nice landscape over there? Pick the place right up. What do you think?”
    Police Commissioner Tommy Carroll came forward, resting his arms heavily on the table. “What the
fuck
are you doing here?”
    I met his angry gaze with as placid a one as I could muster under the circumstances. “I don’t even know where ‘here’ is.”
    “We’re in the Municipal Building.”
    “Oh. Really? What floor?”
    “Jesus fucking Christ.”
    I could practically see the gears spinning in his head. The eyes were like blue-tinted windows behind which the thoughts were tumbling at high speed. Carroll probed the inside of his cheek with his tongue, as if fiddling with a jawbreaker. He stared hard at me a few seconds. Then he checked his watch. “I need to be across the street in fifteen minutes. You can imagine the hell that’s breaking loose.”
    “I’ve just been through a little hell breaking loose myself, Tommy. I gather you’ve heard.”
    “There were two guys with guns out there. That’s the report I got. You were one of them?”
    “Not my gun. I lifted it from a dead cop.”
    “McNally.”
    “We didn’t have the chance to properly introduce ourselves.” I indicated the bag on the table. “What gives, Tommy? Some bizarre new suspect-protection program? I know you’ve got budget crunches, but paper bags? What are we doing here? Why aren’t we in a police station?”
    “I can’t talk right now.” He looked at his watch once more. “Look. I need to hear your story. I need it short and sweet. We’ll talk again later. And I mean soon. An hour. But I’ve got to be three fucking places at once right now, and one of them can’t be here. For the record, you’re not here, either. Now, what the fuck happened out there? Give it to me clean. And quick. I mean it.”
    Carroll glanced at his watch three more times in the two minutes it took me to tell my side of the story. As I spoke, his eyes moved to the wall behind me, as if maybe he was using it as a place to project my story.
    “That’s it,” I said when I was finished. “How many casualties are we talking?”
    His eyes snapped back to me. “First reports from the scene have seven confirmed dead. That could change, of course. It’s nuts out there. We don’t know what they’re getting at the hospitals. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
    I sent an eyebrow up the pole. “You’ve got seven dead. One cop and at least a couple of kids. You might want to think about putting the word ‘lucky’ away for another day.”
    “Seven isn’t seventeen.”
    “It’s not zero, either.”
    He waved it off. “Were there any other people in the vicinity when you shot this guy? Did you notice?”
    I shrugged. “Nobody else was by the fountain. I know that much. If there had been, I wouldn’t have shot. Why? Are you looking for witnesses?”
    “I’m just trying to picture the scene.”
    “I didn’t see anybody.”
    “Look. I don’t want you talking to anyone about this. Okay? Nobody. It’s important. Not until you and I have had a chance to talk.”
    “This isn’t a talk?”
    “Not