Then goes downstairs in the morning to check out of the hotel, finds himself enveloped by cheery blond-haired and blue-eyed Michiganers for Jesus, which is bad, then finds out there’s no coffee, which is worse, so he loads up his car, walks over to the Linderhof, grabs a cup of coffee, and comes out to find his Mustang gone and a half-naked man standing in the parking lot.
Cleveland had played it cool with Jeffrey. The man’s casual tip of his hat said it all. This wasn’t his first rodeo. You didn’t get to be a black man traveling up the northeastern corridor with a carload of coke and guns without having a pair of brass ones. No wonder the DEA was on this guy’s trail. The murder charge would bring even more resources into what was probably shaping up to be an interstate trafficking investigation, possibly a RICO charge. Cleveland could be either the tip of the iceberg or, better yet, the tip of the spear.
Jeffrey picked up the pace as he walked toward the alleyway. His sneakers became soaked with snow. His jeans wicked up the cold as he approached the Mustang that was not his Mustang. The police tape was floating in the wind, torn in two and flapping off the side mirrors like flags outside a used car dealership.
He stopped by the driver’s-side door, took his keys out of his pocket, trying to think how Nora would’ve worked it. He imagined her running out of the Schussel, probably right when Cleveland was going into the Linderhof to score his coffee. She spots the Mustang parked out front, runs toward it, jams the car key into the door lock—
That wasn’t right.
The door would’ve been unlocked, because Cleveland had used a slim jim to open the door. He could see where the gasket had been sliced by the flat, hooked piece of metal that had been used to pull up the locking mechanism.
So she opened the car door.
He did the same.
Then she’d climbed in.
So did he, giving himself a second to enjoy the sensation of not being battered by hurricane-like winds. The car was bright white inside from the snow on all the windows. He found the ignition switch. Dash mounted, the same as his. Some engineer at Ford had had the bright idea to add a little sidebar hole in the face of the ignition switch. You slide the key in the ignition and turned it to Accessory, then bent open a paper clip and shoved it into the hole. Voilà. The cylinder inside the ignition switch popped out.
You needed a key to do this, of course, but the thing about the ignition switch on a ’68 Mustang is that it’s twenty-five years old. He was twenty-six and wasn’t holding up so well himself. The pins inside the cylinder weakened over time, so all you had to do was jimmy in a flathead screwdriver, or a pocketknife, turn it gently to the left, push in the paper clip, and pop out the cylinder.
A pro could do this in under ten seconds. A really smart pro, someone who wanted to be able to easily crank the engine again and again, possibly on a trip up from Florida, through Georgia, and onto farther points north with some coke and guns in the trunk, would shave down the tumblers inside the cylinder so that any key would turn on the engine.
Which he was able to do with the key to his own Mustang.
The engine coughed and sputtered against the freezing temperature. He pumped the gas to keep it going. While he was at it, he turned up the heater. Cold air blew in his face.
Now what?
He sat back in the seat, trying to consider his options. The kid at the hotel needed a second round, but not enough time had passed. Whatever he was lying about needed to fester like a rusted piece of metal inside his intestines.
Corinna was at the funeral home, but he doubted he’d get much out of the grieving mother, and besides, he wasn’t exactly working with the blessing of the locals. There was a fine line between what Chief DuPree would see as helping and what might come across as hindering.
Double up on the mountain was an obvious suspect to follow—drug dealer, connected to the victim—but he knew better than to go into some desolate holler without someone watching his back.
Not to mention that the snow was accumulating, which to a person living in the South was the most bloodcurdling thing that snow could ever do. Cars would be abandoned. Children would be locked behind doors. Grocery stores would be purged of milk, bread, kerosene, toilet paper, and Cheetos—all the vital necessities.
Anna Ruby Falls was half an hour drive and a quick hike into the Chattahoochee National Forest. The kid at the Shussel had said Double and his family lived on Millar Road. Second trailer on the right. American flag. Double’s neighbors would be watching out the windows. They might be involved in the family business, or making money off not being involved. Around these parts, crack was the new moonshine. The same people you saw in church on Sunday were the same people dealing on Monday.
He tried to turn on the wipers. The motor sent back a pained groan over the weight of the snow. He cut the engine and looked at his key, making sure the jimmied lock hadn’t damaged it. He could see white breaths in the air in front of his face.
The radio clock read 4:01.
The roads would be locked up by sundown, not because of the snow, but because even when it was cold, it always got warm enough in the afternoon to melt the snow, then it got cold enough to freeze it and come rush hour, people who thought they were driving home in the snow realized that they were sliding across sheets of ice.
All this talk about snow made him think of something.
He reached down and pulled the trunk release. He got out of the car, shivering like a beat-down dog as the wind cut open his skin. He had to squint his eyes almost closed as he walked to the back of the Mustang and pushed up the trunk.
The guns were still there.
The brick of coke was still there, but there had to be more than one brick of coke, otherwise, why bother?
“Shit,” he mumbled.
He didn’t have to think hard about how this had gone down. The chief, freaking out about the murder, the death notification, the hit to his budget, the risk to his department’s reputation, had run off to make phone calls, but not before telling Officer Paulson to secure the car. Paulson had put up the tape thinking that no one would violate the sacred words that beseeched all good citizens to DO NOT CROSS. Then he’d clapped his Jolly Green Giant hands together and ho-ho-ho’d off thinking job well done.
“Shit,” he repeated.
He would have to call A. Fuller and tell her to come get the coke and the guns. And then he would have to listen to her tell him that Alabama was going to be ranked number one or two this year, depending on where Florida State fell.
“What have we got here?”
He turned around.
The question had been posed by a guy with a northern accent who stood like a cop, legs apart, shoulders relaxed. He had a sidekick, another cop, a little younger, with a Glock in hand.
Police issued, it seemed.
The sidekick said, “Looks like we’ve got a guy with a bunch of guns and some coke in his trunk.”
The older guy said, “At least he’s put on some pants.”
4:04 P.M.