Egan thought he was being pretty damned forthright and informative. He expected a show of interest. Take a notebook out. Lean closer. Something. Stubbs just stood there. Then he said, "Now tell me something I don't already know."
The editor got flustered, his cigar made circles in the air. "How d'you—"
"Like for starters," the cop interrupted, "she's been missing, what, almost a week now, and you don't think to report her missing?"
"I didn't think..." Egan began. "I didn't want—"
"Didn't want to get involved," said Stubbs. "Didn't want the inconvenience. I know the type ... But now you're being inconvenienced and maybe now you're scared, and now that it's not just a question of the ad person being dead or not, but your papers being dumped out on the floor, now you're starting to believe there really is a Russian Mob."
Egan didn't take offense. He smoked instead. Then he said, "Well, yeah, I sort of am. Aren't you?"
Stubbs started pacing through the rubble. "Doesn't seem to matter much, what I believe."
Quite suddenly he was thoroughly pissed off. He couldn't put his finger on just why. He catalogued the day's annoyances. The trisected cat, its neck vertebrae protruding like something meant for soup. The drowned woman with her nose-less nostrils. The second donut he should not have eaten, and now this typical solid citizen who didn't want to get involved.
Irritations all—but with each step Stubbs took in his futile little march around the ancient classroom, he realized that none of them was to the point. He was pissed off because he too was at fault. Egan's guilt was his guilt. He hadn't wanted to believe, either. He pictured the battered Suki holed up in the vending truck. Why was she there? Because she cared about the town, tried to fight back against something that was ruining it; and when the whole thing blew up in her face, no one wanted to get involved. Bad for business at the Island Frigate. Bad PR for the police department, a headache for the tourism flacks ...
Now there was a dead woman with a Russian label in her panties. That seemed to make it two dead Russians and someone nearly strangled by a Russian. Money laundering probably. Plutonium dealing, just maybe. How much weirdness made a Mafia? And if there was a Mafia in town, what then? Stubbs didn't have the manpower or the knowledge to fight it, and the thought of killers that he could not fight frustrated him to the point of tantrums. So he paced, and he glared at the hangdog editor sitting in his wreath of smoke, and then without a word he kicked aside some Playbills and some broken glass and headed for the door.
"Wait! You never showed me yours!" protested Donald Egan.
Gary Stubbs kept going, and his footsteps were heavy on the metal stairs on the outside of the building.
Chapter 32
Suki had no patience for sitting still, lacked the prudent meekness to stay hidden in her turret. At the Mangrove Arms that afternoon, she and Aaron were planting shrubs out in the courtyard.
They were working side by side and on their knees. Suki's hair was tied up in a red bandanna, her shoulders were covered by a big work-shirt knotted at the midriff. She wore gardening gloves, and where they ended the sinews of her wrists were flickering. Dirt flew from her trowel as if kicked back by a terrier, and her forehead was pebbled with sweat at the hairline.
Aaron's shovel bit in next to hers, and when the hole was ready, he lifted the shrub by the base of its stem, the hairs of its roots protruding from the shredding burlap, and Suki helped to center it and nestle it in. Leaning across to tamp down the soil, their faces were very close, they smelled each other's skin, and they pretended that the closeness was an accident, nothing but a circumstance of labor, a gesture from some archaic time when life was tenuous and basic and people didn't speak of love, but rather sowed it, pruned it, proclaimed connection with muscles not with words. Suki dragged an arm across her forehead. Aaron stared an instant at her mouth. They scuttled side by side to the next place in the line of shrubs.
They were tamping dirt, serene, cares put aside, when a squat distorted shadow slashed suddenly between them.
The shadow stained the upturned soil the brickish brown of drying liver, and in a heartbeat it brought an unnatural and unwholesome coolness to the air. The wheeze of labored breathing scratched through the whisper of the palms; some sinister note in the rasp of it sent adrenaline squirting into Aaron's blood.
On some dormant heroic impulse that lived not in the brain but the spine, he clutched his shovel harder, ready for defense. His haunches tightened, set to spring. From under resolute brows he raised his eyes.
He saw Fred standing there, breathing hard and sweating through his ragged shirt.