His hand quickly clutched around the bills, eyes glancing down to Ray’s shiny Rolex. “Nice watch ya got there.”
He let out a small growl that had the man stumbling back. Not enough to completely scare him off but more so that he understood his place within this exchange.
“Don’t push it.”
“All right, all right. Can’t blame me for tryin’.”
That made him roll his eyes.
Normally, he didn’t care about dealing with vagrants and homeless people from time to time. Living in this kind of area, it came with the territory. However, dealing with hustlers was something else and always tended to piss him off more than anything.
“So?” he prompted.
“Oh, yeah.” The man shoved the bills into one of his only remaining pockets and grabbed his stick again. “I saw the whole thing.”
“And what whole thing might that be, exactly?”
“The fight between the guys. And that girl that was here too. Long blonde hair with the big ol’ doe-eyes. And they killed that guy. Did you know that?”
“Yes, but what about the girl? What did you see?”
The man waved his stick around wildly, painting an invisible picture with it in the sky.
“I was there watchin’ her watch them. Nothin’ creepy, though; don’t get it all twisted. She saw them both kill that guy, and then she ran when they caught her peepin’. Good thing I was out of view, or else they woulda come after me too.”
“What happened when they caught her watching them?”
“Well, they chased her. Course, I couldn’t tell ya what they looked like. I’ve got bad eyes, and they had masks, but I know a beauty when I see one, that’s for sure. Could even pick her out of a crowd for ya.”
There was a low whistle that followed the statement.
Ray held back a snort. While he didn’t disagree with the compliments about Augusta’s appearance, he wasn’t in the mood to talk poetically with a homeless man about her either. Especially with her currently tied up at the hotel and his animal’s possessiveness growing by the minute.
He needed more information about what exactly happened that she wasn’t telling him. He could smell the dishonesty on her without even digging into anything critical. She was absolutely hiding something, and he was going to get down to the bottom of it.
Ray turned on his heel and looked around the slaughterhouse again.
It seemed almost impossible that Augusta had gotten away from the ones who killed Jimmy just by how strangely this building had been cut out. Plus, not to mention the fact that she had two shifters chasing her along with a homeless man supposedly watching her from the shadows. A small part of him actually felt bad for her in a way.
“After they chased her, what happened?”
The homeless man shrugged. “Beats me. I only stayed long enough to see them take care of that guy. I was gonna check through his pockets, too, but I didn’t get a chance before this place was swarmin’ with cops.”
Ray shook his head. Pickpocketing a dead man wasn’t something that he’d ever felt great about but considering this man probably had no other options, who was he to judge in the end?
Holding out his hand to the man, he waved his fingers.
“I already knew all of that. You aren’t telling me things that aren’t already in the news.”
The man put a hand over his pocket with the money inside and turned his body away from Ray.
“You can’t take it back.”
“I can because you haven’t provided me with anything useful.”
The man’s eyes glazed over, bouncing around the space as he tried to come up with something else to say that would give Ray enough info to let him keep the money. Unfortunately, Ray wasn’t in the business of being charitable most days.
He needed answers, and if finding those meant going somewhere else and looking for them, then he wasn’t going to let some man in rags swindle him out of a few hundred bucks in the meantime.