Double Take - Catherine Coulter [109]
“Hmmm, now that’s a bit more difficult, it all happened real fast. It was a man, young like the first—” Tuck broke off, laughed. “You gotta understand, anyone who isn’t on the shady side of sixty-five looks young to me. Alice said they were both old, but she’s seven years old.”
“Middle-aged, maybe?”
“He just wasn’t getting on like me.”
“The driver, was he bald? Glasses? What was he wearing?”
“No, he wasn’t bald, I’m sure about that. I couldn’t tell you exactly how much hair he had on his head, only that I could see some. The color? I couldn’t tell, really couldn’t, sorry. I remember thinking it was weird how his fingers kept tapping on the steering wheel while the motorcycle guy climbed into the car. Then he started yelling.”
“Could you hear what he was yelling about?” Savich asked.
“ ‘Hurry,’ that’s what he yelled, yelled it twice, and then he cussed and stomped on the gas. Now that I think about it, that car really took off fast. So it probably wasn’t an everyday sort of car, probably a fancy one, German, maybe, sounded real sweet and smooth.”
“Friar, you didn’t tell them the guy driving the car was mad, real mad.”
Savich and Sherlock looked down at a little girl who’d slipped out the front door and was peering around at them from behind her great-grandfather’s waist. “You’re Alice, right?”
Alice stared up at Sherlock. “I bet your hair’s real beautiful, ma’am, but not right now. It looks like you need to wash it. Oh, I’m Alice Douggan and this is one of my ancestors, Friar. That’s what he calls himself.”
Sherlock smiled between the two of them. “Is it all right, Tuck, if we speak to Alice?”
“Sure, no problem. Alice, stop hiding behind me. Come out here. You stand straight and tall, get those shoulders back and you tell them what you saw. Don’t add in all sorts of little details from that imagination of yours or else they might arrest you. They’re federal agents.”
Alice walked around Tuck, stood front and center. She cocked her head to one side, studied them straight on. Not at all shy, this cute little fairy. “You sure are dirty. My mama would skin me alive if I ever got as dirty as you are. You were in that big fire, right?”
“That’s right,” Savich said, and went down on his knees so he was eye level with the little girl. “I sure like your freckles. I wish my wife had some to go with her red hair, but I guess when she came down the line, the good Lord shook his head at her. When our little boy asked for some, he shook his head at him too.”
“I don’t like them. The kids make fun of me, call me speckle face.”
“Wait until you’re twenty-one and smiling real big. All the guys will line up to talk to you. And I want you to remember what I told you.”
The little girl smiled back at him. Can’t help it, Sherlock thought, content to let Dillon take over. “Alice, you said the man driving the car was mad?”
“Oh boy, was he ever. He was yelling and cussing something fierce at the motorcycle guy, worse than Friar ever does. My mama would have cleaned his mouth out with her organic barley soap. It tastes worse than oatmeal.”
“You didn’t hear any of his words other than the curses?”
Alice shook her head. “He had real long legs, and he looked like he could twist the head off a snake.”
“Who?”
“The black dude, the one wearing glasses. When he opened the car door, he cussed a blue streak right back at the man who was driving, called him a dickhead.”
“Alice—”
“I’m sorry, Friar, but that’s what he called the man—dickhead. He said, ‘Shut up, dickhead, and drive.’ ”
“Okay, let’s move on. The man driving, Alice. What did he look like?”
“He was old, but not as old as Friar. There aren’t many people that old. He was wearing this really neat ring and he was banging it against the steering wheel. I’d like to have a ring like that. I could wear it on a leather band around my neck, like my friends do at school.”
Savich said, “Tell us about the ring, Alice.”
“He wore it on his marriage finger, but it wasn’t a wedding ring, it was this