“Dane, you know what I’m asking from you, right?”
“Yeah, August. I know. You need a tour guide. I got it.”
O’Barr didn’t even try to deny it. “I appreciate your help with this. The Bureau will be in your debt. You might even find yourself looking at a future on a federal level.”
Dane thought about the paperwork in his pocket from his doctor. The paperwork he’d kept on his person for over a week so his girlfriend back at the house wouldn’t see it. The same paperwork that promised him a future far different from one of a celebrated FBI agent. He felt like pulling it out to give August a more detailed look at what his future really looked like, but he left the papers where they were and nodded his head. He felt tired again—exhausted, really.
O’Barr tossed the greasy paper bag into the Oldsmobile and Roselita rejoined them just as August was sliding behind the wheel.
Dane squeezed at his sore neck. “Listen, I know you guys are raring to go on this, but I need to go home for a few hours. My girlfriend just moved in with me and thinks I’m knee-deep in a creek an hour away from home right now.”
“Fine. I’ll have a chopper ready to bring you back to McFalls.”
“I’ll get myself there,” Roselita said. “I’ve got some things to follow up on myself.”
“Fine, the two of you do whatever you have to do, but track these bastards down before they find anyone else to shred into pieces.” August slammed the long door on the Oldsmobile and cranked the engine. He rolled the window down. “Oh, and find the money, too.” He gave an animated wink as the glass slid back up.
* * *
August pulled the car out of the lot and Dane waited until he was completely gone before saying another word. When the Oldsmobile had left his line of sight, he headed back toward the motel room. “Roselita, come with me.” He crossed the lot, leaned down under the yellow tape, and stepped back up on the curb. He stood in front of room 1108 but didn’t go in. Roselita had taken out her phone and began to tap in a text message. Dane wasn’t a fan of that method of communication. Texting lacked inflection and it was easy to be misconstrued. He preferred talking. He guessed that made him old. He eased the door open and pointed down to the threshold. “Put your phone away, Velasquez, and look at that.”
Roselita tapped her phone off and looked down at a dark smudge on the carpet just inside the door. She pulled at the legs of her pants and crouched down to get a better look. Dane didn’t need one. He knew what it was.
“So what about it, Kirby? An ember drifted over here from the body.”
Dane shook his head. “No. That’s not from the same fire.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You don’t have to follow me, Velasquez. But you might want to follow the weed.”
“Follow the what?”
Dane leaned against the wall, balanced himself, and squatted down to the threshold. He lightly rubbed his finger into the small scorch mark that Arnold Blackwell’s joint had left on the carpet just before he was ambushed. Dane held his finger to Roselita’s nose. “Follow the weed,” he repeated. “No one could smell that over the stink in there, not even me, but you can smell it now, can’t you? Blackwell must’ve been getting high in here when he was interrupted, and I know it may sound like a weak lead, maybe he has it on him all the time, but maybe, just maybe, he picked it up in Atlanta before he boarded the flight. Maybe you can trace it back to whoever he was working with or whoever the second ticket is for before our killers do.”
Roselita agreed that it was indeed a weak lead. “He could’ve gotten it from anywhere.”
“Look, Blackwell didn’t have a pot to piss in, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, I know for a fact that you need ten grand in cash to buy in to the Slasher. That’s what builds the pot. Where did he get the money? And once he had more, maybe he bought some weed with it. It’s just a hunch.”
“You’re telling me Blackwell made a pit stop somewhere between this Slasher tournament and the Atlanta airport to pick up some pot and smuggled it via airplane across the state line with a suitcase stuffed full of cash?”
“Well, we’ve already established that this guy wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box, and besides, where else can we start looking?”
Roselita rubbed at the mark on the carpet herself. She smelled her own fingers. “Maybe this burn was already here before he checked in.”
“No. Trust me. This is fresh.”
“And you think the men who did this are hunting the dealer right now?”
“They are hunting someone. And the interesting thing is that they took the joint. Why? It’s not here, is it? Is there any evidence of drug use in the room?”
“No.”
“Because they didn’t want us to know it was there. Because they are following the weed. It’s as good a place to start as any.”
Roselita stood up and brushed the wrinkles from her pants. “Or you’re completely full of shit.”
“Maybe, but regardless, this is a piece of the puzzle, and maybe it’s where you need to be on this case. Just see where it takes you.”
Roselita sniffed her fingers again, and looked down at Dane. “How did you even see that, Kirby? And why didn’t you tell August any of this?”
“Listen, Velasquez, you’re good at what you do, I can tell. But I’m good at what I do. I’ve been investigating fires my whole adult life. That mark was one of the first things I noticed when I got here. I figured someone would’ve gotten around to telling me about it, or showed me the joint that made the mark, but no one ever did. That means someone took it—someone who didn’t want us to know about it. I didn’t tell August, because I don’t want anything to do with this. I’m not the guy for this. You are, the girl, I mean, the woman—”
“I get the drift, Kirby, just keep going.”
“Right. Well, this”—Dane rubbed the ash between his fingertips—“will prove it, so I’m telling you, follow the weed, beat those monsters to wherever it came from. Find the money. Find the killers. And maybe you crack this case wide open. You take the bust and I’ll fade quietly back into the basement I crawled out of. Everyone goes home happy.”
Dane could tell Roselita was still skeptical by the way she chewed at the corner of her bottom lip, but he could also see she was ready to make that deal a reality. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll keep you in the loop.” She hopped off the curb, crossed back over the parking lot without a word of goodbye, and had her phone to her ear before Dane could even manage to pull himself upright.
“Hold up, sir,” Tweedledee said. The stout young agent from the helicopter appeared as if he’d never left. He bent over and helped Dane to his feet.
“Thanks.”
“No problem. The helicopter is ready, sir.”
Dane sighed. “Great. Can’t wait.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
William put the brand-new cell phone his brother had bought him back in his rucksack. He sat inside the bus station although he wanted to go back outside where it was cool. The air inside the station smelled like body odor, the way Arnie smelled after he disappeared for a few days and came home all twitchy and upset. It made William want to throw up. Arnold was in trouble. Whoever answered the phone didn’t sound very nice, and with Arnie yelling like that in the background, he knew it meant his brother had made someone else angry. Arnie was always making people angry. Their father used to sit up at night and talk to himself in the dark about the things Arnie used to do when they were younger. The thought of his dad put William in a bad place, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. He pushed it away. He pushed Arnie’s angry voice away. He stared straight ahead at the huge map of Atlanta mounted on the wall behind a scratched-up sheet of Plexiglas. The different colored lines on the map represented the different train routes the MARTA took through the city. The darker black lines broken by the white circles were the buses and the bus stops. He couldn’t read the legend of places, or the listing of numbers that ran down the left side of the huge map, but he didn’t have to. It took him twenty minutes to memorize the map. He wanted to take the train back to the zoo where Bobby had dropped him off. It was hard walking in by himself, but he did it. He loved trains and he loved the zoo. He knew the exact route to take to get back there, but Arnie had told him on the phone to go to their safe place. They discussed that before they went up north to the pretty lady’s farm. He called it a safe place because he couldn’t say what it was in front of whoever had his phone. William understood that. He understood a lot more than Arnie thought he did. He was also okay with leaving the zoo to go there. He liked their safe place, too. It could be a lot of fun if Arnie wasn’t in a bad mood. William had never been there by himself before. He hoped it would still be fun even with no one to talk to. He knew it would be. The birds talked to each other and William loved to just listen. Most people never just listened. They were always talking.