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“The police have already checked his grandmother’s house; he’s not staying there.” An idea occurred to Shaw. “Did you have any kind of relationship with his grandmother? Would she talk to you?”
“His grandmother? I never met his grandmother.”
Shaw opened his mouth to ask, and then he stopped.
Maleah must have heard the question anyway; confusion was scrawled over the fear in her face. “We never went to his grandmother’s.”
He chose his words carefully. “That’s the address on his license. That’s the address on all the records—the police, the jail.”
Maleah shook her head. “Maybe he put her address on official paperwork, but when I knew him, Philip never lived with his grandma. He lived out at the park-and-store.”
16
It took time to coordinate across three different law enforcement agencies. Time for everyone to put in their opinion. Time for everyone to argue. Time for everyone to feel important. And time for everyone to actually get their asses out of their chairs and do what they were supposed to do.
“He probably died of old age by now,” North muttered inside the GTO.
It was dark, the afternoon and evening eaten up by bureaucracy. Even with the sun down, the air was hot and sticky, and a mosquito had gotten inside the GTO and whined in North’s ear intermittently. They were parked a quarter mile from Al’s RV Park and Self-Store, on a country road outside Auburn. They’d been sitting there for half an hour, waiting for the go-ahead from Chief Cassidy. In that time, the only traffic had been a horse-drawn buggy. The horses looked long in the tooth and tired, and the guy driving them hadn’t been much better, his face pinched and sunburned under a newsboy cap and beard. Amish, North guessed; they still had a few communities around here. He figured if the guy was secretly working with Welch and spying on them, they still had a hundred and some odd years before he reached the park-and-store.
Ahead of them, John-Henry and Emery sat in the Mustang; they were waiting. And ahead of them sat an Auburn PD cruiser. And ahead of the Auburn PD’s finest were a couple of Highway Patrol boners. Everybody waiting. Because all hell would break loose if someone actually, you know, did anything. North considered flashing his headlights. He could picture Emery’s face, and that would have been something at least. But he didn’t. He stayed in line, dick in his hand, and waited too.
“We did this the right way,” Shaw said. He had changed, thank God, into a black tee and black jeans purchased at the Auburn Walmart, and there was nary a cosmonaut in sight. “We called John-Henry like we were supposed to. We did it exactly right.”
“That’s going to be a tremendous fucking comfort when we find out Welch rabbited as soon as he saw this fucking parade of idiocy. Bad enough Brey lawyered up; now they’re going to blow our only other lead.”
“I thought Welch died of old age.”
North tried to slam Shaw’s head into the dash, but Shaw was slippery—and always stronger than North remembered.
Another half hour crawled past.
“Fuck this,” North said. “We could have gone in there and hauled his ass out before dinner and not waited while this jabroni called that jabroni so they could swing their dicks and piss all over each other about jurisdiction. I mean, this is a joke. John-Henry’s not even in charge anymore, and we had to include fucking Cassidy?”
“That’s not what John-Henry hired us to do.”
“Did he hire us to sit on our fucking thumbs?”
“If he did, I would definitely get paid more.”
He tried to slam Shaw into the dash again, but Shaw was such a fucking eel.
North’s phone buzzed, and he answered it on speaker.
“What the fuck is going on back there?”
“Don’t answer him,” Shaw said. “Someone might be listening. We’ll have to use code. I-ay hate-ay—wait, how do you do pig Latin again?”
“This is why I said you should fire them,” Emery said.
“Don’t listen to Shaw,” North said. “Those horse-spies left a long time ago.”
John-Henry laughed quietly.
“I asked you,” Emery said, breaking each word out of the sentence like he was talking to someone particularly stupid, “what was going on back there.”
“I got a flat and decided to change the tire,” North said.
“We’re playing bucking bronco,” Shaw said, “and I’m the bronco.”
