Chapter Thirty-Six

 

There's a very specific meaning to the phrase 'this conversation never happened.' It seems like permission, and in a certain very real sense, that's exactly what it is. And yet, in another sense, it isn't that at all.

Permission means defense. Permission means that when he gets himself into trouble, the Captain will be there to dig him out. She knows what he's up to, and she knows what he's doing, and she's given him the okay to keep doing it.

When she tells him she's not going to stop him, what she means is that if he gets fucked by this plan, and he almost certainly will, then he's on his own.

But, other than that, she does agree with his judgment, more or less. He's right that there's something funky going on, she's just not going to stick her neck out for him.

In this case, it's hard to blame her. She'd be sticking her neck out awful damn far, for awful little evidence. With the way things were looking, they probably weren't going to get much evidence, either.

Not without bringing someone in and talking to them. Josh pulls the phone out of his pocket and dials up a number.

"Yeah, hey. It's me."

"Aren't you on suspension?"

"Sure, but that doesn't mean I'm not working."

Jeffries always was a spoil-sport, but that didn't mean that he wasn't willing to listen for a minute. Which is the only in that Detective Meadows is going to need, really.

"I've been looking into this bank job, the one you asked me to look into?"

"The safety deposit boxes, yeah. Give me a second, let me grab my files."

"Don't worry about that. I've got an idea for you. It's not much, but you might get something out of it."

"I'm listening."

The real suggestion is to muscle the hell out of this guy… Josh looks down at the page. Roy Weissman. Muscle the ever-loving shit out of him, tell him he's going back to jail, this time for good.

Tell him there's no light at the end of the tunnel, this time. That he's completely fucked and that there's as much evidence against him as there was against Tim McVeigh, and that son of a bitch confessed.

Then hope to hell he cracks. He cracked the first time. He'll crack again, because he doesn't hold up under interrogation.

There are only two guys on the staff that could have done the bank job, even if they wanted to. The problem was, the list of boxes. Why those boxes? Not one of them makes sense or has much connection to Mitch or Al Queen.

Nor do they have any connection to any of the other cases that Josh can think of off the top of his head. Answers like that will come with time. They're not really set in stone yet. But when the time comes, things will come together, because they have to.

"Yeah, I had a talk with this guy the other day, when I was working the Witt kidnapping."

"The one that ended in you knocking the hell out of the Queen kid?"

"You know me so well," Josh says. He smiles, and hopes it translates into his voice. "Yeah, that one. He's an older guy. Did some work back in the early 2000s. Just got out of prison a few years ago, but he seemed sharp as a tack. Maybe you talk to him and he has a few ideas about how it could've been done, and who could have done it."

"You're not trying to get me to bully some guy for you, are you, Meadows?"

"I've got a hunch, but no. Not for me. Just trying to find an angle on this that you might not have thought of. A couple of red flags at the Queen house, thought you might want to bring the guy in to talk."

"Just to talk, not to man-handle and break the guy's front teeth."

"No, nothing crazy like that. Look, maybe you scare him a little. Get him talkative. Then back it off, and see what he has to say about the other guys in the business. Is that so bad? No, that's fine. All above board. No problems."

"This better not be a load of shit, Meadows. I will come down on you so fucking hard your grand-kids will still be feeling it, if you are sending me on a wild damn goose chase."

"Like I said. Guy knows his trade. He did three or four jobs that we know of, between '02 and '05, and those are just the ones we know he did. There are a few solid question marks that nobody can prove, and with a guy like this, there will be jobs that we can't even tie to the guy. Shit we don't even know about. So at the very least, he could give you a solid lead."

The conversation dies slow, but it does die, in the end. Meadows is glad when it does. Now he'll have to wait. If he can tie one crime down, it will at least prove his little theory has something to it.

There hasn't been much press the past day or two about Al Queen. That's a little weird. A little spooky. If they had him, they'd be blasting it all over everything.

If they were in negotiations, then he'd have heard something solid through something.

Almost a week with no word, though… tomorrow, he'd be giving his little apology speech. It still sounded like shit. He'd managed to polish it until it almost sounded like he might mean some of it, but that wasn't near good enough, and nobody was going to be fooled by such a feeble damn attempt.

That doesn't matter much, though. Not if Jeffries gets through to this Roy Weissman. He'd have to hurry, of course. But with a little luck, they can get Weissman turned around real quick, they can dig a little more into the deposit boxes, and they can turn around solid evidence on Mitch Queen.

Which in the end is about all that matters, really.

Josh takes a breath. He has to wait a few hours. The waiting is always the worst. But he'll do it, because he has to. When the dam finally breaks, it will break hard. Until then, it's just thinking up new theories and trying to throw them at the wall as fast as you can to see what will stick and what won't.

This angle with Weissman is the closest thing that Josh has gotten so far to finding anything connecting Al Queen or his son to any active and open cases. By the end of the afternoon tomorrow, with a little luck, he'll have his badge and his gun back.

Until then, he's got a lot of waiting to do, a little hoping, and not a whole hell of a lot else.

There's nothing else that he can do, though. Not for another day.

Then he'll be back on the job, and he'll be able to get at the old files and see why in the hell Al Queen decided he needed to have an old-time knee-breaker so prominently positioned as his head of security.

There were certain advantages to going with the old-school guys. Loyal, and they don't ask too many questions.

On the other hand, they have their problems. They're no spring chickens, for one thing, and for another, they're rarely as up-to-date as you'd like them to be. There's a reason most don't choose to go that way.

But Al Queen did, and now Maybe-Detective Meadows needs to figure out why. The wedding makes a hard deadline, because crook or not, married is married.