Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [99]
“Hey, Tammy,” Johnny says, “you saw her get killed, didn’t you? You were there. You got away. You could give us the guy who did it.”
She finds an interesting stain on the table, wets her finger, and rubs it out.
“That’s the good-parts version,” Johnny says. “You want to hear the bad version?”
She goes back to the shrug.
“The bad version,” Johnny says, “is that you set her up. You both saw Danny set the fire, but you made a deal and she wouldn’t, so you got her in that room to be killed. Try to follow along here, Tammy, because I’m presenting you with a very important choice. It’s a one-time offer. It goes off the table in five seconds, but right now you get to choose which you want to be—witness or suspect. We’re talking first-degree homicide, premeditated, and I’ll bet I can get ‘special circumstances’ tossed in. So you’d be looking at … I don’t know. Let me get my calculator.”
“I want a lawyer,” Tammy says.
Which is some sort of progress, Johnny thinks. At least we’ve gone verbal now. The problem is, she’s verbalized the magic words that will stop the interview.
“Are you sure about that?” Johnny says, playing the standard card because he’s not holding any better ones. “Because once you ask for a lawyer, you choose suspect.”
“Twice,” she says.
“Excuse me?”
“This is twice I’m asking for a lawyer,” she says.
Johnny pushes his luck. “Who was the kid, Tammy?”
“What kid? I want a lawyer.”
“The kid in the room with Angela, a little girl, pink toothbrush?”
“I don’t know. I want a lawyer.”
But she knows. Johnny sees it in her eyes. Dead as stone until he mentioned the kid, and then there was something in there.
Fear.
You’re a cop for more than a few weeks, you know fear when you see it. He leans over the table and says real quietly, “For the kid’s sake, Tammy, tell me the truth. I can help. Let me help you. Let me help her.”
She’s at the tipping point.
Again, he knows it when he sees it. She could go either way. She’s going toward Johnny’s when—
There’s a commotion in the hall.
“I’m her attorney! I demand access!”
“Get out of here,” Harrington says.
“Has she asked for a lawyer? She has, hasn’t she?”
Tammy sets her jaw and looks at the ceiling. Johnny gets up, opens the door, and sees Todd the Rod standing in the hallway. The lawyer looks over his shoulder at Tammy.
“It’s okay now,” he says. “I’m here. Not … one … more … word.”
He has her out of there in thirty minutes.
103
Boone’s in a lot longer.
After all, he hit a cop.
A detective, no less.
In a courthouse hallway.
And Boone didn’t just punch Harrington once. He went off on him—big heavy hands and muscles hard from years of surfing slamming punch after punch into Harrington’s face, ribs, and stomach until Johnny Banzai managed to get some kind of judo hold on him and choke him out.
Now Boone lies on a metal bench in the cell and nobody fucks with him. He shares the cell with mostly blacks, Mexicans, and some white-trash drunks, bikers, and tweekers and nobody fucks with him.
He hit a cop.
A detective, no less.
In a courthouse hallway.
Boone could run for president of the cell and win by acclamation. They love him in there. Guys are offering him their bologna sandwiches.
He’s not hungry.
Too fucking miserable to eat.
It’s over, he thinks. I took Harrington’s bait like the chump fish I am, and now I’m looking at a felonious assault rap on a law enforcement officer. That means certain jail time, and my PI card is gonzo.
Half The Dawn Patrol’s pissed at me and the other half must think I’m a total barney, and they’re totally correct in that. I let this Roddick babe play me like a fish, make me chase her like she didn’t want to be caught, and then, bang, she turns around and rams a hole in the boat.
And we’re all going down with it.
Roddick set us up. She was never going to testify against Danny. She sold the insurance company a story so