The Drifter (Peter Ash #1)(15)
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Peter knew the rest. He had called the Milwaukee Police Department for the details when he came down from the mountains. The cheap street pistol that Jimmy had pressed into the soft flesh beneath his chin. The back of his head blown clean off. There was no autopsy. The city was too broke for autopsies on open-and-shut suicides.
Peter checked the mirror again. The SUV was still there, peeking out from behind a utility truck.
“Dinah,” he said, “I have to ask. How could he have come up with that kind of money?”
Dinah shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t.” She turned the paper bag in her hands. “But I can tell you it surely wasn’t from tending bar three afternoons a week.”
Following Dinah’s directions, Peter turned left, then right. She kept them off the main roads, and Peter watched while the tough neighborhood turned to true ghetto. Abandoned cars, shops boarded up, holes in the streetscape where houses had burned down or been torn down by the city. Out the side window he saw two little kids without coats, the soles falling off their laceless shoes, running around in the cold when they should have been in school. Dinah watched them, the smile fallen from her face.
“Dinah?” said Peter. “Where are we going?”
“To see a man I knew once,” she said. “A long time ago.”
7
Expensive condos lined the river two miles away, but development had stalled out at MLK Drive and hadn’t even been imagined on Center Street, where the blocks of peeling-frame storefronts leaned on one another like worn-out drunks sharing a skin disease.
Dinah pointed at a three-story corner building, maybe ninety years old but in better shape than the rest of the block with freshly painted trim and new tuckpointing on the brick. “There,” she said. “That’s Lewis’s place.”
Apartments filled the top floors. The ground floor was divided in half. The front had a tavern called Shorty’s, the name spelled out in dim neon letters over a faded Pabst Blue Ribbon logo. The big tavern windows were covered with heavy steel security grates. The rear was a storefront with a sign, black with flaking white letters, reading CENTER CITY REAL ESTATE. It looked vacant now, the storefront windows replaced with neatly painted plywood. Except for the small modern security camera mounted high with a view of the whole street.
A gleaming black Escalade was parked on the side street, ahead of a crisp silver Jeep with polished chrome trim and an older but immaculate tan GMC Yukon with a tubular steel bumper.
Nice cars for the neighborhood, he thought. Nobody was out there watching them. Just the security camera.
“This Lewis guy—do you know what he drives?” asked Peter.
“I haven’t spoken with him in years,” she said. “But I have seen him in that tan truck with the big bumper.”
Peter cruised past without slowing. The black Ford was two cars back.
“You missed it,” said Dinah.
“Just checking out the area,” said Peter, his head on a swivel as he took in the building layout, the alleys and exits. “Old habit.” One that he wasn’t going to break. Especially not when a man with a gun was watching Dinah’s house.
He drove in an outward spiral, checking the surrounding area. The neighborhood was seriously beaten down. More businesses were closed than open. Graffiti was everywhere, from basic tags on the crumbling houses and bullet-pocked road signs to elaborate multicolor displays on boarded-up corner stores. But Lewis’s building, whose neat brick and clean paint should have been prime canvas, was oddly pristine.
He looked in the rearview. The Ford had disappeared.
Peter swung around the block and parked at the curb.
Before Dinah could open the door, Peter put a hand on her arm.
“Wait,” he said. “Tell me about this Lewis.”
“We were friends once,” she said. “Lewis and James and I. But things ended badly.” She didn’t elaborate.
“Okay,” said Peter. “But why do you think the money is his?”
“Lewis has his fingers in a lot of things,” said Dinah. “They’re all about money.” She angled her head toward Shorty’s. “And James worked at his bar.”
She pulled her arm away, set the paper bag on the floor, and slipped out of the truck. She walked not toward the bar entrance but toward the side door, the boarded-up section with the security camera.
Peter took the Army .45 from under the seat, tucked it into the back of his pants where his coat would hide it, and jogged after her. The heavy steel door was already closing behind her when he got there.
He felt the flare of the white static as he reached for the knob.
The space inside was bigger than Peter had expected, a big rectangular room. The outer walls were brick, probably a foot thick, and still showed pale patches where stubborn plaster remained. It looked like someone had taken out most of the interior walls. The oak floor was patched in places, the old finish turned orange with age. Once it had been an office. Now it was something else that wasn’t quite clear.
The jittery pressure of the static reminded him to look for the exits. The windows were covered with plywood, so that was no help. There was a door in the back that likely led to another way out, along with a bathroom and maybe stairs to the basement.
In the center of the room stood a walnut trestle table, at least ten feet long and probably custom-made, but only three rickety mismatched chairs. At the head of the table, atop an oil-stained towel, a shotgun lay in its component pieces, broken down for cleaning. It looked like a 10-gauge autoloader, with a fat bore and a shortened barrel. It would clear a room like a hand grenade.