Dead Even - Mariah Stewart [15]
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He stopped when he found himself backed into the counter that separated the kitchen from the living area.
“Why, sure you do. Now, I was just talking to Detective Crosby this morning—I know you remember Detective Crosby—and he was telling me how you were out and about. Well, here I was, so close by, I figured I should stop and say hi.” She never took her eyes from his face. As if fascinated by her, Archer could not look away.
“What do you want?” He forced himself to look elsewhere.
“Well, first I wanted you to meet my good buddy Agent Fletcher. Say hello to Agent Fletcher, Archer.”
“Hello. Why are you here?”
“We just stopped by to check out something that Detective Crosby mentioned. About Vincent Giordano.”
“Who?”
“Oh, Archer, don’t play that game with me. Please. We all know about the favors you and Vince and Curtis Channing agreed to do for one another.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know no one named Vince or Curtis.”
“That’s funny. ’Cause Vince knows you.”
Archer shrugged. “Can’t place him.”
“You’re better than I expected, Archer.” Will leaned back against the door frame. “I’m impressed. I don’t believe you, but I am impressed.”
“I don’t give a shit what you are. You don’t have no business with me, so you can both leave. I didn’t do nothing, I barely left this trailer since I got out of prison. I don’t have no car, no job, nothing. I don’t go nowhere.” The look on his face was smug. “So you just go on out of here. I don’t know no one named Vince, no one named Curtis whatever you said his name was. I don’t know what they done, and I don’t want to know, but it has nothing to do with me.”
He pushed past Will to shove the door open.
“See you around, Archer.” Miranda winked.
“Later.” Will smiled and followed her out the door.
They did not speak until they were back in the car.
“He’s better than I expected,” Will said.
“We’re better. Right now he thinks he’s got the edge. Did you see that smug look?” She turned the key in the ignition, let the car idle. “So I think we’ll just sit here for a few minutes and give him a little something to think about.”
She fished her cell phone from her bag and rolled down the window, the phone in her left hand. “Let him think we’re really on to something—which we will be, once we start to get to him.”
She pretended to speak into the phone instead of to her companion.
“Okay.” She made a show of dropping the phone into her bag. “Now he thinks we just reported to someone, so he’s going to be a little more nervous about leaving home.”
“You didn’t buy that I-haven’t-been-outside-these-four-walls-in-weeks routine, either, eh?”
“Are you kidding? He’s twenty years old; he’s been locked up for months. I noticed a bar about a quarter mile from the trailer park. I’ll bet that’s where he hangs out.”
Miranda put the car in reverse and backed out of the small parking pad, then took off slowly down the wide black-topped road.
“Maybe we should stop back this evening and see.”
“Maybe we should.”
Will turned to look at the bar in question as they sped past.
“Looks like a biker bar I used to hang out in, once upon a time.”
“A biker bar? Were you undercover?”
“No, this was before I came to the Bureau.”
She frowned. Biker bar? Mr. Conservative from the Heartland of America Will Fletcher?
He smiled with satisfaction. “Thought you knew all there was to know, did you?”
Vowing not to ask, she bit her lip, and hit the gas.
Archer stood in the tiny bathroom and peered through the curtains, watching until the Spyder backed up and drove off.
What the hell was that all about?
Had Vince Giordano given him up? Had he?
No, no, that wouldn’t happen. He and Vince and Curt, they had this pact. Vince would never . . .
But even if he had, so what? It was his word against mine. And he’s a convicted killer. An admitted murderer. Sure, sure, Vince could have said something. Maybe he did. But who the hell can prove it?