The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [89]
CNIO8CO.
What could Amoyo have known that would be worth torturing and killing him for?
CHIO8CO.
Something about Nada.
CHIOACO.
About where she might have gone?
CHIGACO.
Oh hell.
Wayne took a step backward toward the door. He needed to get the cops to listen. He needed to tell them everything. It would be uncomfortable. They would be suspicious of his story. But Wayne had to keep a clear head. The police would need to move quickly. David Amoyo was a coward and now whoever did this is on his way to—
The smooth sole of his clunky right shoe slipped out from under him and his big ass hit the floor with a sound like a gong, reverberating in Amoyo’s lamps and his flat-panel television and in glass all around. Wayne put his hand down and felt something wet, and then with a horrible sensation he held up his palm. Blood.
He stood up, carefully this time, and looked with horror at the red stain on the carpet that had now been transferred to the seat of his pants.
Sirens closer now.
He took a breath. This would be bad, but he could explain it. The cops would be unhappy, but he had information that could help them. David Amoyo’s killer, and Bea Beaujon’s, too, was really after Canada Gold.
As he waited, he looked at the body again. There was an object he hadn’t seen before. A knife. A long, folding knife.
It looked like Wayne’s knife.
He patted the front of his pants, spreading Amoyo’s blood to the fabric. His knife wasn’t there. Had it fallen out when he knelt over the body? Had he even been carrying it today? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d used it.
When he slipped, hadn’t he felt something hard under his foot? Maybe he had slipped on the knife. Maybe it had been there all along. Maybe it was just a knife that looked like his. Or maybe somebody had taken it from his desk. If it was his knife—whether it had slipped out of his pocket or been stolen from his office and planted in this apartment—it had his fingerprints and Amoyo’s blood all over it.
“Once the cops have reason to suspect you, they never unsuspect you,” Peter had once told him. And when Wayne considered what would turn up in even a cursory search of his desk and computer, waves of panic radiated out to his fingers and toes.
Wayne scooped up the bloody knife and was at the elevator in steps, pressing the button a dozen futile times, in the process transferring more blood and fingerprints, which he tried to wipe off. Two cars arrived simultaneously, and as he leapt onto one, Hoover’s replacement, the kid from maintenance, stepped off the other. Wayne supposed Hoover had sent the kid to check on him.
Downstairs, Hoover had a handkerchief in one hand and was wiping his chin. Wayne pushed against the revolving door and mumbled, “Getting something from my car. Be right back,” and Hoover opened his mouth to protest but couldn’t say anything before Wayne was gone.
As he rushed to his car, Wayne tried to make himself small, holding the Mustang’s remote close to his hip. He just had to get out of this parking lot. He had to get out of the lot and then decide what to do next.
Wayne dived behind the wheel, wincing as he turned the ignition. He rolled calmly onto Fifth Street just as three police cruisers pulled into the lot in a line.
Amoyo had been killed and tortured in his living room. The Beaujons had met the same fate in their bedroom. A bloody knife in Wayne’s pocket, his bloody ass print on Amoyo’s carpet. His bloody fingerprints everywhere, and now all over his car, as well.
He couldn’t go home. Couldn’t go to work. His arms were numb, his face hot with fear.
Wayne glanced at his quarter-full gas tank. He knew where he had to go next, and this car couldn’t take him there.
30
“THE THING that made him a freak is what made him a genius. The same thing. Genetics. Or maybe it’s chemical. Or maybe his oversize skull put pressure on parts of the brain. Anyway, when it happens to most people, it just makes them retarded.”
The guy who said this was standing across the room from Nada, who had