“Where are you driving?” I asked. I still had the pistol out, but it was resting in my lap now. I kept my hand on the grip and my finger on the trigger. Occasionally, I caught his eyes flashing down to look at it, then away again.
“There’s a place I know where we can talk,” McKesson said.
“Your station or a coffee shop?”
“A twenty-four-hour place with good pie.”
“All right.”
The detective relaxed a fraction. Maybe he thought we had some kind of bond going.
“You going to put that thing away?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. “Not yet. I’ve got plenty of questions. Such as what murder you suspect me of having committed.”
“Good idea,” he said brightly. His mood and demeanor shifted. “Let’s assume for the moment you are innocent. We can help each other out.”
I glanced at him. “How?”
“Let’s pool what we know. How did Tony’s murder go down?”
I shook my head. “I really only know what I heard from an eyewitness. I was in the passenger seat, we crashed, and he apparently choked to death in a freak accident.”
“Ha!” McKesson exclaimed. “Come on. You were there. You know what happened to him.”
I eyed him. “I can’t remember the accident. I was hauled off to the hospital too, remember?”
“Useless.” McKesson sighed, shaking his head and rubbing his chin. “Totally useless. I got more out of the whore who found you on the sidewalk.”
I looked at McKesson suddenly, deciding I didn’t like him much. Clearly he was talking about Holly. Was he the one she was afraid of now? I frowned, increasingly annoyed. “What about this exchange of info? What happened to my house? What happened to Tony? What do you know?”
McKesson shrugged disinterestedly. “Not enough. Tony Montoro was a small-time thief who ran a strip joint to launder his money. He died mysteriously on the night of the twenty-seventh with a gut full of sand.”
“Sand? You mean like actual sand?”
“Yeah, sand. We live in a desert, you know. His gut was full of sand. His lungs too. He suffocated, exploding with the stuff.”
I nodded. That matched with Holly’s story. It was freakish indeed. What a way to go. I wondered how long you would remain conscious. A minute? Longer? I wasn’t sure.
We pulled into a parking lot.
“This is the place,” McKesson said. “You want to give me back my gun?”
I eyed him. “We’re not best friends yet,” I said. “You never even told me what I was accused of.”
“We going in, or what?” he asked.
I eyed the place. It looked like a dump, but sometimes these cheap little hole-in-the-wall places had the best food. Cops always seemed to find places like that.
“Are you still planning to arrest me?” I asked.
“Eventually,” he said.
“How about tonight?”
“Are you buying?”
I thought about it. “Yeah,” I said.
McKesson sighed. “All right. You’ve got the gun, and you’re not my biggest problem tonight. We can call a truce. You forget about the slap and don’t talk about the loose cuffs. I’ll pretend you got by me. We’ll sort it out later. But I can’t promise I won’t be coming after you tomorrow.”
I thought about the offer. Even as far as it went, I wasn’t sure it was genuine. But I needed some kind of ally. I figured I could always slip his cuffs again, or get out of his car, as long as I had the sunglasses. He didn’t seem to understand their power yet. I decided to risk it.
“You’ve got a deal,” I said, and I put the gun away.
McKesson got out of the car and walked into the place as if we were old friends. Had he read me so well that he knew I wouldn’t take off running? Was he just swaggering and overconfident? Was all of this some kind of elaborate con job? I really wasn’t sure. He left me wondering what to do next.
The place looked like a dump inside. Ugly old wallpaper with small images of banana splits, hamburgers, and frying pans was everywhere. The seats had rips in them showing yellowed foam rubber.
We sat across from one another in a booth and ordered pie. His was lemon meringue. Mine was coconut cream. He was right—the pie was excellent. Unsurprisingly, it was also cheap.
The waitress recognized McKesson and knew he was a cop. The coffee was free and she refilled it whenever it was halfway down. I smiled at the arrangement. This was a cop hangout, a business with an inexpensive security plan in place.
“You still haven’t told me what I’m suspected of doing,” I said when my pie had been reduced to crumbs.