Riding the Rap

Bobby turned to see Chip in the sunroom, watching them through a pane of glass. He said, “Leave him in there.”

“Scared to come out,” Louis said. “Look at him,” and said, “Come on, man, the coast is clear.”

“I told you leave him in there,” Bobby said, his tone getting Louis’s attention. “We have to think about this guy-what’s his name?”

“Raylan something,” Louis said, “believes he’s a cowboy. Got the hat, the boots. I wouldn’t mind a pair like that, black with the tan wing tips?”

“Had his coat open, thumbs in his belt,” Bobby said. “You see that? Ready to draw his gun. I always wonder what that would be like, two guys facing each other with guns.”

“Like in the movies,” Louis said.

“Yeah, but it could happen,” Bobby said. “This guy isn’t going away.”

eighteen

Whenever Raylan thought of Reverend Dawn he’d see her facing him from across the table with her eyes closed, her long hair parted in the middle. He’d see her eyes open then to look at him with her calm expression. He’d see her hand come up to move her hair away from her face, using the tips of her fingers in a delicate kind of gesture, and he’d notice the way she bit her nails down.

Raylan was anxious to have his fortune told again, see how he was doing, and was on his way from Warren Ganz’s home to Reverend Dawn’s when the beeper message stopped him. He followed up to hear a female voice in the Sheriffs Office detective bureau asking if he’d meet Sergeant Lou Falco in the parking lot of a funeral home on Federal Highway in West Palm. As soon as possible.

Shit. He knew Falco, Falco was okay, but how long would this take? It sounded like a stakeout.

Raylan found the funeral home, 1940s moderne painted white with round corners and glass-brick inserts. He got out of the Jaguar and into an unmarked Crown Vic, a gray one, saying, “How do you work surveillance when everybody knows this’s a police car?”

“I’m waiting for a guy,” Falco said, “who’s coming to see what his brother looks like with embalming fluid in him. The brother is sitting on his front steps, a guy gets out of a car, pops him three times, gets back in the car and drives off. Maurice has to know who did it, but won’t talk to us. So maybe, you know, when he sees his brother laid out…”

“Maurice,” Raylan said. “That’s the name of one of the guys tried to jack my car that time.” He saw Falco nodding.

“Maurice Woody. You see them once you know you’ll see them again. Maurice is why I asked you to come. The other one’s Faron, the dead one.”

“Wears his hair in cornrows?”

“Yeah, that’s Faron.”

“They must’ve made bond.”

“Ten thousand each. They promised their grandma they’d never get in trouble again and she put her house up as collateral. The brothers were out five days when Faron got popped.”

“Maurice was there?”

“In the house.”

Through the tinted windshield they watched a car coming along Federal toward the funeral home. As it passed Falco said, “You know Maurice. I was thinking when he gets here if you went in with me… You heard about Faron so you stopped by…”

“Offer Maurice my sympathy?”

“Talk to him in his bereavement, shoot the shit.”

“Offer a plea deal on the car-jacking?”

“You could mention it. See if he’d like to trade, give us who did his brother.”

“There isn’t a state attorney in Florida,” Raylan said, “would go for a deal on car-jacking. You know that.”

“Yeah, but Maurice doesn’t.”

“He’d have to be awful dumb. The guy’s in and out of the system.”

“So? We don’t know his I.Q. He might go for it. We were hoping,” Falco said, “to put them at a robbery in Delray, a mom-and-pop grocery store, right after they got out. Use it to leverage Maurice into cooperating. We showed their pictures, the woman said no, it wasn’t them, so…” Falco was silent, watching the street, before saying, “It was like these two guys spur of the moment decide to rob the place. They go through the store picking out what they want and put it on the checkout counter-snacks like pretzels, potato chips, a couple of six-packs, and Jell-O.”

Raylan said, “Jell-O?”

“Yeah, all the party stuff and a half-dozen boxes of Jell-O. The store owner pulls a gun and gets creamed with it, thirty stitches in his head. The one guy wants a ring the woman’s wearing but can’t get it off her finger. So-listen to this-the guy takes out a pair of snippers and is go

“The guy had snippers on him? Like tin snips?”

“I think more like the ones you use for gardening.”

“Pruners.”

“Yeah, for trimming bushes.”

“Both guys were black?”

“The woman thought so but wasn’t sure. They’re Lebanese, the couple, only been here three years.”

They sat there not saying anything for a while, watching cars go by on Federal, Raylan seeing Bobby Deo with the pruners on his belt that first time, in the front yard with the machete, Bobby the gardener. You wouldn’t call him black, though he could be and the woman wasn’t sure. But if it was Bobby and the other guy, Louis, what would they be doing holding up a grocery store for snacks and six boxes of Jell-O? Raylan tried to remember the last time he’d had Jell-O. At lunch in Miami Beach. With Harry?… He thought of Harry and right away began thinking of Dawn again, Dawn with her eyes closed, her eyes opening, looking at him, and he said, “I’ve been meaning to ask around, I wondered if anybody in Crimes Persons knows a Dawn Navarro. She’s a medium, like a fortune-teller.”

“Reverend Dawn the psychic,” Falco said. “Sure. What’s she doing now?”

“I’m trying to find out what she knows about a missing person.”

“Ask her. That’s right up her alley.”

“How do you know her?”

“From a homicide investigation, couple years ago. I was with Tactical then and there was a question she might need protection.”

“If she testified in the case?”

“Even before, if she got too close to our suspect, a guy we believed had killed a woman in Boca. Beat her to death and then dropped her off a balcony ten stories up. We find out the woman was one of Dawn’s regulars, Mary A

Raylan watched a car coming. “How’d she know?”

“What do you mean how? She’s psychic. She sees things without actually seeing anything.”

“She identify your suspect?”

“She was tuned in to the woman, the way Dawn explained it, and saw what happened to her but not the guy doing it. She felt his presence, said he smoked pot.”

“Maybe she picked up on something you said.”

“Listen, she told us things there was no way she could’ve known about.”