“So how long to get us there, Cam? I see your arm still hurts, you want me to drive?”
Cam had already turned the corner. She stuck her flasher on the roof of her Mazda, gave him a huge grin. “Nah, this is nothing. I wanted to be a race car driver until I was nearly twelve.” She gunned the Miata, swerving around cars that didn’t melt away in front of her. Even traffic on the Francis Scott Key Bridge hugged the sides as she roared past them, screeching into a hard right turn onto Franklin Boulevard.
Jack was grinning like a maniac and he wasn’t even in the driver’s seat. He loved speed, loved the adrenaline rush, could feel the roaring of the blood through his veins and wondered if Cam felt the same way. Her wavy blond hair was whipping about her head, and he saw she was whistling. He felt very good at that moment; he felt energized. He sat back and enjoyed it. Seven minutes later, Cam pulled the Mazda up on a curb half a block from the abandoned warehouse district where they’d first found Manta Ray lying with a dirty torn sheet pressed to his bleeding side.
“That was well done, Wittier; I’m impressed. You want to race with me sometime?”
Cam’s adrenaline level was still soaring upward. “I’ll have you know that was official business. If Savich was right about Manta Ray coming back here, we had to get here fast.”
“Sure, believe what you need to believe.” He gave her a big grin as he climbed out of the Miata and looked around. He saw a desolate hardscrabble landscape with abandoned parking lots fronting a dozen dilapidated warehouses and loading docks, their windows broken out, probably for decades. Nests made of cardboard boxes were huddled around the warehouses, to give shelter from the wind. He saw half a dozen homeless people sitting on warehouse stoops, their backs against building walls, paying them no attention.
“It’s this one,” Cam said, pointing to a warehouse that looked on the edge of collapsing in on itself. Cam pulled off her sunglasses as they made their way into the dim interior of a large empty single-story space. The air smelled like dead rodents and rotted food. They both snapped on nitrile gloves and started going through every corner of the ramshackle space where Manta Ray had picked to hide. They banged on floorboards that hadn’t already been ripped up, checked every crevice behind the busted-up wallboard. They didn’t find Manta Ray’s stash, or any trace he’d ever been there. They stood in the middle of the vast space and tried to look at it with fresh eyes. But their fresh eyes didn’t see anything, either.
As they walked out of the warehouse, none of the homeless people paid them any mind, most kept their heads down, not wanting to draw attention to themselves. But one man was singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” He looked at them and smiled. Jack and Cam trotted over to him, both ignoring the other eyes suddenly watching their every move. The man was leaning back against some broken-down cardboard boxes propped against the side of a warehouse. He had an old filthy towel draped over his head, wore a ragged hula shirt open to a dirty T-shirt. They couldn’t tell if he was fifty or eighty. Jack went down on his haunches beside him, got a whiff of something very ripe. He took a hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet. “This is yours if you can tell me anything about this man.” He called up Manta Ray’s photo on his cell.
“It’s not enough,” came a phlegmy old voice. “Double or nothing.”
“What? You from Las Vegas? All right.” Jack pulled out a second hundred, his last. “You’ve emptied the bank. Tell me.”
His bloodshot eyes focused on Cam. “You sure are pretty. I had a girl once who was pretty as you. I wonder sometimes what happened to her. I guess she isn’t so young anymore. I sure ain’t.”
“Thank you. Sir, this is really important. Have you seen him? He’s a seriously bad man, a criminal. We believe he might be coming back here.”
“I know who he is, missy. It’s that Manta Ray character. Sally over there”—he flapped a veiny hand toward a head of matted red hair hunkered down in a ragged bundle of blankets inside a cardboard box some twelve feet away—“I call her Dancin’ Sally. She used to be a stripper. She saw him first, told me while we were sharing a nice half bottle of bourbon that this here Manta Ray was about the cutest boy she’d ever seen. She said he was so bad hurt, he’d probably bite the big one.”
He waved a gnarled hand. “Then I saw him. He was dragging himself around, moaning and carrying on.” He looked at the photo again, turned his head and spit. “Don’t see it myself. He looked like another vicious mongrel to me. I haven’t seen him back here since all the cops took him away. I don’t remember when that was, a long time ago, maybe. Last year?”
“A long time ago,” Cam said. “So, you haven’t seen him? Maybe this morning?”
“Nary a glimpse. So he survived. I wondered, so did Sally. He get away from you guys? You’re cops, right?”
“Yes, we’re cops,” Jack said. “You haven’t seen anyone you don’t know drive up here this morning? Or maybe late last night?”
“Nope, just my usual neighbors, and the dealers meetin’ up with their fancy buyers, the putzes. All of ’em belong in jail, you ask me.” He turned his head away and coughed.
Cam felt a hand on her shoulder, looked up to see Agent Ruth Noble. She hadn’t heard Ruth; she’d come up so quietly. “Let me, Cam.” Ruth fell to her knees beside the old man. “Hello, Dougie,” she said, and gave him a Kleenex, waited until he’d wiped his mouth.
40
“Wow, that you, Ruth? You’re looking happy. What? Haven’t seen you in a couple of weeks. Or maybe longer. I can’t remember. How’s Dix and the boys?”
“They’re well, thank you.” She placed her fingers against the pulse in his dirty neck, counted, then nodded. “You told me you were going to stop the booze, Dougie.”
“Yeah, well, a man’s weak, ain’t he? That’s what Sally always says.”
“All of us are weak, Dougie. I heard you tell my friend you haven’t seen Manta Ray come around either last night or this morning?”
“That’s right.”
Ruth thought a moment. “Okay, then, have you seen anything odd, anything unexpected, since the police took Manta Ray away? Something that made you pay attention? Something that surprised you?”
“Well, yes, Ruth, all of us had a really big surprise, ended up with dirt in my hair until I pulled my towel over my head.”
“What did you see?” Jack was bending down close. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Dougie cocked his head, said to Ruth, “Don’t know why he’s so pissed off, neither of these two kid cops asked me about nothin’ else but Manta Ray.”
Ruth pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. “Spill it, Dougie. No, no more, you’ve already fleeced us enough.”
He gave her a cunning look, but Ruth shook her head, stared at him and waited. He said in his scratchy smoker’s voice, “Well, all right, if you’re going to be a hard-ass. A fancy white helicopter came right down here early this morning, at first light. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The sucker landed right over there.” When he shifted to point, the towel fell away from his dirty grizzled gray hair. “It ain’t all that big a place for a helicopter, but it set itself down nice and smooth, right there in front of that warehouse. Didn’t bother to turn off those noisy blades, either; they kept whirling and kicking up dirt.
“I couldn’t believe it, Ruth, I mean I hadn’t seen no helicopter ever land around here. The noise woke everybody up, scattered dust something fierce, like I said. Is that strange enough for you?” Dougie rearranged the threadbare dingy gray towel with a faded Marriott printed on it over his head. “If it was bigger, I could tie it under my chin, you know, if that chopper comes back and stirs up the dirt.”