“You got my pictures, the tapes, the reports—” Decker said.
“Your smiling face is what the lawyers want,” Lou Zicutto said. “You be there, Mr. Cameraman.” Then he hung up.
The second person Decker tried to call was Catherine. The first time, the line was busy. He tried again two minutes later and a man answered. It sounded like James, the chiropractor; he answered the phone the way doctors do, not with a civil hello but with a “Yes?” Like it was a pain in the ass to have to speak to another human being.
Decker hung up the phone, opened a beer, and put a Bob Seger album on the stereo. He wondered what Catherine’s new house looked like, whether she had one of these sunken marble tubs she’d always wanted. A vision of Catherine in a bubble bath suddenly swept over Decker, and his chest started to throb.
He was half-asleep on the sofa when the phone rang. The machine answered on the third ring. Decker sat up when he heard Al Garcia’s voice.
“Call me as soon as you get in.”
Garcia was a Metro police detective and an old friend. Except he didn’t sound so friendly on the machine; he sounded awfully damn professional. Decker was a little worried. He drank two cups of black instant coffee before calling back.
“Hey, Sarge, what’s up?”
Garcia said, “You at the trailer?”
“No, I’m in the penthouse of the Coconut Grove Hotel. They’re having a Morgan Fairchild lookalike contest and I’m the judge for the swimsuit competition.”
Normally Garcia would have donated some appropriately lewd counterpunchline, but today all he offered was a polite chuckle.
“We need to talk,” the detective said mildly. “See you in about thirty.”
Garcia was sitting on something, that much was certain. Decker shaved and put on a fresh shirt. He could easily guess what must have happened. A Louisiana cop probably had found those three dirtbags that Decker had clobbered along the interstate. They would have sworn that this scoundrel from Miami had flagged them down and robbed them, of course. A tracer on the Hertz car would have yielded Decker’s name and address, and from then on it was only a matter of professional courtesy. Al Garcia was probably bringing a bench warrant from St. Charles Parish.
Decker was not especially eager to return, or be returned, to Louisiana. He figured he could beat the phony assault rap from the highway robbers, but what if the Lockhart case broke open in the meantime? Decker didn’t want to be around if Skink got arrested.
Skink was the big problem. If Decker hadn’t enlisted the mad hermit into the case, Dickie Lockhart would still be alive. On the other hand, it was probably Lockhart who had arranged the murders of Robert Clinch and then Ott Pickney. Decker didn’t know exactly what to do next; it was a goddamn mess. He had come to like Skink and he hated the thought of him going to the gas chamber over a greedy sleazoid such as Lockhart, but murder was murder. As he straightened up the trailer—a week’s worth of moldy laundry, mainly—Decker toyed with the idea of telling Garcia the whole story; it was so profoundly weird that even a Miami cop might be sympathetic. But Decker decided to hold off, for the moment. There appeared to be a good chance that Skink might never be found, or even identified as a suspect. Decker also understood that Skink might see absolutely nothing wrong in what he did, and would merely appear one day to take full credit for the deed. This was always a possibility when dealing with the chronically unraveled.
The news from Louisiana was relatively sparse. In the two days Decker had been back in Florida, the local newspapers had run only a couple of four-paragraph wire stories about Dickie Lockhart’s murder at the bass tournament—robbery believed to be the motive; no prints, no suspects; services to be held in Harney County. The stories probably would have gotten better play had it not been for the biannual mass murder in Oklahoma; this time it was twelve motorists shot by a disgruntled toll-booth operator who was fed up with people not having exact change.