“The deal is shut up.”
“Where are we going?”
“To school.”
“What?”
“I told you
to shut up.”
He drove into an old part of Trinidad and parked behind the pool hall where Spud may have punctured the tires of the inmate who had sold him the stolen transistor radio. The alleyway was lined with garbage cans and paved with old brick that was sunken in the middle; a greasy stream of water ran all the way to the street.
“This is the school?” I said.
He got out and opened the back door. “Let’s go.”
I stepped out on the bricks, my wrists still manacled behind me. He took out his handcuff key and unhooked me.
“Why’d you put on that show for the deputies?” I said.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Some of them are too close to the Vickers family,” he said. “Plus, I run my own investigation. Got it?”
The alley was deep in shadow, cool and damp, the sun blazing out on the sidewalk. “There’s the back door of the poolroom,” he said. “Your friend could have come out here, seen the victim on the sidewalk, and followed her. Would you argue with that?”
“I don’t believe Spud would do that.”
“Cut the crap. Your friend is a whoremonger. The murdered woman was a five-dollar working girl. In her forties. According to our witness, the probable killer stopped her at the entrance to the alley, then they walked toward the hotel on the next block.”
“The witness identified Spud?”
“No, he didn’t see the guy’s face.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
He reached under the driver’s seat of his car and opened a manila folder. It contained four black-and-white crime-scene photos, all of the same victim. They were worse than the ones he had shown me previously.
“Those are ice-pick holes?”
“Either that or something like it.”
“Was she alive when he did that?”
“The coroner says probably.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Why her eyes?”
“Why do these guys do anything?”
He took the photos out of my hands. I felt dizzy. A rat ran from a garbage can and splashed across the water and disappeared under a pile of cardboard boxes.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Nothing.”