‘Don’t bullshit me, Halo. I don’t care if you got beat up by a fucking Girl Scout. What did he look like?’
Halo reconsidered. ‘He was strong,’ he insisted. ‘But he wasn’t that big. Maybe my height.’
‘Or a bit less?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe older than you?’
‘Maybe,’ Halo said grudgingly. ‘A bit.’
‘Was he wearing a suit?’
‘Yes!’ said Halo, surprised by his sudden recollection. ‘Yeah, he was! And a tie. Why?’
There was a brief silence.
‘Tom?’ said Halo, louder. This time he heard an answering grunt. ‘Tom? You think it was about the Pride of Maine?’ He held his breath, aware that Vee was awake and watching him.
‘Isn’t everything?’ said Tom.
*
Tom’s stomach churned, part shock at the previous night’s events, part excitement. Bits of the jigsaw were slowly emerging from the darkness and starting to drop into place. Finally he had enough to start putting the puzzle together, even though he couldn’t yet see the picture he was trying to build. At least he was convinced now that pretty much all the pieces were from the same puzzle.
He knocked on Jan Ryland’s door and she opened it in pink pyjamas, still with bed hair.
‘We working today?’ he asked, without preamble.
She shook her head. ‘Why? You got somewhere to be?’
‘LA. Not for long, though.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘Did the cops tell you about the trailer?’
She sighed. ‘Yes. We’ll have to start again.’
He handed her the key and turned away.
‘Tom?’
He looked back at her.
‘Last night. Thanks for going after them.’
He shrugged and walked away. He wasn’t about to take credit for trying to catch Munro’s killers when he might as well have painted a bull’s-eye on the man’s chest.
He went back to his room and packed.
As Tom was throwing his gear into the trunk of his rental in the hotel lot, Pete pulled up and helped a woman he knew must be Lenny Munro’s widow out of his car. He glanced around for someplace he could duck out of sight but his heart sank as Pete saw him and raised a ‘hold-on’ hand.
He clicked the trunk closed and slowly walked across the lot, noticing that police tape now cordoned off the corner where the Jeep had been parked last night. Next to the space was a police cruiser, a bored-looking cop securing the scene.
‘Tom Patrick, this is Gloria Munro.’
Lenny Munro’s wife was a small, homely woman with laugh lines round every one of her features. Even now, she smiled at him with real warmth and held out her hand for shaking. The words ‘sorry for your loss’ stuck in his throat and he could barely look at her as he mumbled, ‘Hello.’ He wondered how often Lenny Munro had told his wife what a prick he was.
‘Mr Patrick, Pete tells me you went after them. Thank you so much.’
He nodded dumbly and she squeezed his hand, as if he was the one who’d just lost his life partner.
Tom noticed that she held a clear plastic Ziploc bag in her other hand. Lenny Munro’s personal effects, as collated by the Tulsa Police Department morgue, stuff he must have had in his pockets. He could see Munro’s cheap leather wallet, a watch, a couple of slips of paper.
And Lemon’s bolt.
Right there. In the bag.
Munro must have kept it on him. Stuffed it casually into a pocket, little knowing that this was what they wanted; this was what he was going to die for.
Tom almost whooped in relief and had to resist the urge to yank the Ziploc out of the grieving widow’s grasp and tear it open right there in the parking lot. It took all his restraint.
‘Will you join us for a drink, Tom?’ Her eyes shone with gratitude through the pain, and he thought that if he’d known Gloria Munro before all this, maybe he’d have liked Lenny more.
‘I have to go,’ he said.
‘It was so nice to meet you.’
