The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [81]
Sam glared at him. Her words could barely be heard, she spoke so quietly. “You are such an asshole.”
Joe cleared his throat. “I’ll fatten my own assignment with the garbage bag and the missing dope dealer, just for what-the-hell.”
“Lester and I can give you a little background on that,” Sam admitted. “We spent some time checking him out when the BOL first came out.”
Joe nodded, giving his team one last appraising look. “Okay—looks like we’re heading for parts west.”
Chapter 17
“Where is it?” Nancy asked quietly, as if being discreet in a roomful of eavesdroppers.
They were both in Ellis’s apartment again, alone. In bed.
“In my trunk,” he said.
She propped herself up quickly on one elbow, her eyes wide, all discretion gone. “What? It’s been days. I thought . . .”
He covered her mouth gently with his fingertips. “I did, too. But I started thinkin’ about somethin’ else.”
She slowly removed his hand. “What?” she asked, her confusion clear. “You were going to hide it in his toolbox.”
He nodded. “And then call the cops.”
“The feds,” she corrected.
“I know, Nance. I know. Let me finish.”
She pressed her lips together, fighting the urge to protest.
Ellis took a small breath before continuing. “The plan was to have Homeland Security take him away like they did with that guy we heard about on TV—lock him up forever and not even give him a trial, like a terrorist.”
“But you gotta plant the stuff, Ellis, like we discussed—put the cheese in the trap.”
His face darkened slightly at her persistence. “Yeah, Nance, I gotta bait the trap. And whose prints are on that bag? And whose DNA? I sweated on that thing.”
“We wiped it off.”
He shook his head. “You seen what they can do on TV. Plus, where did that bag come from?”
She stared at him, wondering what the trick part of the question was.
“From the hospital where my mom is,” he finished. “How hard do you think it’ll be for them to figure that out? I drop a dime to the feds, telling them Mel is a wack job aiming to blow up the Bennington Monument or something, and first thing they’ll do is take that bag apart. They’ll figure out where it’s from, and nail us instead of him. Far as I know, Mel’s never even been in that hospital.”
Nancy untangled her legs from his and sat up in the bed, leaning against the wall, her expression hard.
He tried winning her back. “Sweetie, we can still do it, or something like it. We just need to be more careful.”
“Give me a cigarette.”
He rolled over toward the night table and retrieved a half-empty pack. He extracted a cigarette, lit it up, and handed it to her.
“It’s still a good plan,” he reiterated.
She took a deep pull, held the smoke for a few seconds, and then let out a long contrail between her lips. She was staring straight ahead.
“I guess,” she finally said.
“We need to figure out how to make them look only at him and not us.”
She was silent a while longer, her eyes still on the far wall, working on that cigarette.
“I just want it done, Ellis,” she said.
“I know. Me, too.”
Joe glanced down at the buzzing cell phone in its dashboard charger. He didn’t recognize the number on the small display, but it was a Montpelier exchange, which gave him a pretty good idea who was calling him.
Conflicted, he glanced ahead, saw a pull-off at a souvenir stand parking lot, and stopped his car. He was on his way toward Bennington, on Route 9, and had just passed the road’s apex over Vermont’s tree-covered, hilly backbone—complete with a view stretching out for hundreds of square miles. His ambivalence about the upcoming conversation was compounded by a small regret that he’d just missed the best place to have it.
“Hello.”
“Hi, Joe. It’s me.”
Gail Zigman had a low voice, and from the first time he’d heard it, it had always hit him the same way, with a stirring he imagined animals responded to in the wild.
Almost despite himself, he smiled. “Hey, Gail. This is a treat.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
He laughed. “I was just thinking about that. I’m a few hundred yards past the top of that long downslope