And a flutter of muscles in Brent's face told Dellray that some pieces were falling together. He was thrilled to see this. But of course revealed nothing.
Brent confirmed in a whisper, "I have heard something, yes. About somebody doing some mischief."
"Tell me." Trying not to sound too eager.
"There's not enough to tell. It's smoke." He added, "And the people who can tell me? I can't let you contact them directly."
"Could it be terror related?"
"I don't know."
"Which means you can't say it isn't."
"True."
Dellray felt an uneasy clicking in his chest. He'd run snitches for years and he knew he was close to something important. "If this group or whoever it is keeps going . . . a lot of people could be hurt. Hurt really bad."
William Brent made a faint, candle-extinguishing noise. Which meant that he didn't care one bit, and that appeals to patriotism and what was right were a waste of breath.
Wall Street should take a lesson. . . .
Dellray nodded. Meaning the negotiation was under way.
Brent continued, "I'll give you names and locations. Whatever I find, you get it. But I do the work."
Unlike Jeep, Brent had himself displayed several qualities of dharmic enlightenment when Dellray had been running him. Self-control. Cleanliness of spirit--well, body at least.
And the all-important honesty.
Dellray believed he could trust him. He snared him in a tight gaze. "Here it is. I can live with you doing the work. I can live with being cut out. What I can't live with is slow."
Brent said, "That's one of the things you'd be paying for. Fast answers."
"Which brings us to . . ." Dellray had no problem paying his snitches. He preferred to bargain favors--reducing sentences, cutting deals with parole board case officers, dropping charges. But money worked too.
Paying value, getting value.
William Brent said, "The world's changing, Fred."
Oh, we're back to that? Dellray mused to himself.
"And I've got some new prospects I need to pursue. But what's the problem? What's always the problem?"
Money, of course.
Dellray asked, "How much?"
"One hundred thousand. Up front. And you have a guarantee. I will get you something."
Dellray coughed a laugh. He'd never paid more than five large to a snitch in all his years running them. And that princely sum had bought them indictments in a major dockside corruption case.
One hundred thousand dollars?
"It's just not there, William," he said, not thinking about the name, which Brent probably hadn't used in years. "That's more than our entire snitch bag put together. That's more than everybody's snitch bag put together."
"Hm." Brent said nothing. Which is exactly what Fred Dellray himself would have done, had he been on the other side of the negotiation.
The agent sat forward, his bony hands clasped. "Give me a minute." Like Jeep in the stinky diner earlier, Dellray rose and walked past a skateboarder, two giggling Asian girls, and a man handing out fliers, looking surprisingly rational and cheerful, considering his cause was the 2012 end of days. Near the dharma tree he pulled out his phone and made a call.