Witt didn’t park out front, instead he drove down two blocks and pulled in at a meter that still had some life left in it.
She hopped unaided from the truck. No way was she waiting for anyone to open her door. It was miles to the ground, though, and she landed hard and awkwardly, wishing she’d made him take her home to change the damn heels. These shoes weren’t made for walking. The thought reminded her of a song, but she sure as hell wouldn’t attempt to use them to walk all over Witt. He just might like it.
Witt rounded the front and took her arm to lead her down the street. She snatched it away. “Would you quit with the touching all the time? I can walk by myself.”
He looked pointedly at the slight limp in her gait, then flashed her an amused glance. “Just being polite.”
Busted. Despite his words, he knew exactly why she hated him touching her. It was because she didn’t hate it. She swallowed. “I’m not ungrateful that you’re helping me out on this.”
“Find Snake, argue later. Much later. In my truck, just the two of us. All alone under the stars. Gonna be a full moon tonight. Much better time for arguing then.”
She laughed then. He was joking. Good. That she could handle. “You just enjoy pushing my buttons.”
“That, too.” He scratched his jaw. His eyes shone with humor. Damn. She liked the man.
She stepped up onto the curb in front of St. Vincent’s Mission. The odor of urine permeated the air and clung to her nostrils. She wrinkled her nose.
“Life on the streets. Guarantee Snake isn’t going to smell any better when we find him,” Witt said.
Through the glass doors of the mission, Max could see rows of tables, the seats filled with a myriad of individuals from spike-haired nineties rejects to dirty hippies left over from the sixties. They all had one thing in common—they were here for the free food. And as fast as the flock moved out, more moved in to take their places.
Dinner time. “I know I should feel sorry for them—”
“Politically correct thing to do.”
“But I don’t want to go in there.”
“You wanna stay out here while I take a look around?”
She wasn’t sure if he was serious. But if he was, she sure as hell didn’t want to admit she would have been afraid without him. “He’s not in there.”
“You had some sort of vision?”
No, just a really bad feeling born of living too long in middle class neighborhoods with a middle class mentality that said The Homeless were bums with a name change. And they were a damn scary lot.
God, Witt would think she was a stereotypical conservative Republican right-winger. Not to mention heartless and prejudiced.
“Yeah, a vision. He’s over ...” She turned on her heel, pointing, pointing, “there.”
Jesus H. Christ, he was.
“How the hell’d you do that?” Witt’s tone was filled with amazement and awe.
How the hell indeed? She had no flipping idea. “Magic.” She reached for her keys inside her blazer pocket, scraping her thumbnail along the serrated edge of the teeth.
Jesus, Cameron, tell me how we did that. No answer from the Beyond.
Leaning against a chain link fence beneath a halogen street light, Snake sat across the street on what looked like a folded blanket. It was the arms revealed by the rolled up sleeves of his T-shirt that gave him away, his flesh covered completely in a mosaic of tattoos.
His tied hair was long, graying, and greasy, his chin stubbled, and his shirt and pants covered with what looked like paint stains or dried bird shit. A tin can sat in front of him. With his head tilted back on the fence and his eyes closed, he let his hands hang limply over his knees. He could have been meditating. He could have been begging. He could have been dead.
She stepped off the curb. Witt grabbed her arm as a car whizzed by. Her hair fluttered in the breeze the motion left behind.
“What’s your plan?” he asked.
He was way too tall with her standing in the gutter like this. “I’ll know when I get there.”
“Stay close. No sudden moves.” His features were impassive. Witt the Detective. She wasn’t sure she liked the stone face, but she felt safe with him.
This time, when he put his hand on her arm, she didn’t shake it off. He looked both ways, they crossed together, quickly, then slowed on the other side as they came abreast of her wino.
The snake on his arms lay dormant now. He stank of sweat, crotch rot, and bad teeth. Age? God, she couldn’t tell. In his condition, anywhere from thirty to seventy. His skin resembled dried-up apples, but that could have been prolonged exposure to the sun. His jowls hung as if he’d once weighed far more than this now-emaciated body he occupied.
His eyes popped open at the sound of their steps on the concrete, and his skeletal fingers reached toward his tin can. “Spare some change, lady?”
She wondered why he needed it when there was a soup kitchen right across the street.
Ah, the booze.