“Well, Barnwell isn’t dead,” Zelker said.

“He yet lives?”

I figured the kid would look disappointed or something but he kept his poker face.

“Yep. So, you know who Barnwell is? And Ligett?” I said.

“Yea. I saw them upon the news. They aren knaves and men of murderous intent. ’Tis no great harm that they should be slain.”

Zelker laughed, and I shook my head at him.

“And that’s what you went there to do?” I said. “To kill them? That was your plan?”

“Nay. ’Twas my intent to negotiate for the lady LaReigne’s freedom. ’Twas not I who struck the first blow.”

That was all we could get out of Gentry Frank, and after he’d given us the same version three times, he asked for some water. Zelker got up to get it, but he stopped at the door and looked back at Gentry with a frown on his face.

“Where did all that blood come from?” he said.

I got up and went around the table, where I could see there was a puddle of blood under Gentry’s chair. I’d thought all the blood on him was from his friend, but that would have long since dried up. The blood on the floor was fresh.

So I recuffed him, loaded him in a patrol car, and drove him over to the county hospital. They put him in one of the back cubicles, where I cuffed him to the bed. Not that I thought he was going to cause trouble, because he seemed pretty calm. Not much like the kid who’d been banging his head on the table. Once the doctor cut his pant leg open and started messing around with his leg, Gentry went back to scratching his neck and talking to himself.

“I know well thou art wroth for I defied thee, but speak.” Then he turned right around and said, “Wilt thou not cease plaguing me? I have prayed. I will pray, but I would hear the Witch.”

“What is that?” I said, when the doctor tossed a big bloody wad into the basin.

“Tampon.”

“He stuck a tampon in his leg?”

“Good wound packing in a pinch,” the doctor said.

“My brother, Sir Edrard, be he here?” Gentry said, ignoring the doctor rooting around in his leg with a forceps.

“Yeah, he’s here.”

“How fareth he? Well or ill?”

“I can go check on him. Doc, you know I need that slug for evidence.”

“I know.”

I figured a little show of goodwill might get Gentry to open up some more, so I left him there with the doctor, and went to check on his friend.

Turned out I wasn’t going to have any goodwill to offer, because his friend had coded about fifteen minutes before, and they couldn’t resuscitate him.

Final count for the night: four to the morgue, two to the hospital, and that pretty blond woman crying in a jail cell. I was glad when the U.S. marshals showed up to take it all off our hands.

CHAPTER 48

Zee

   In the morning, while I walked Leon up one stretch of Broadway and down the other, I made plans.

First, I had to get on the straight and narrow as much as I could. I hid the THC drops inside the lamp base in my motel room. That envelope of cash was pretty incriminating, too, so I put some in a new checking account and the rest in a safety-deposit box. They tell you not to store cash in safety-deposit boxes, but you can’t deposit eighty thousand dollars in a bank account without answering a lot of questions, either.

At Mom’s house, things were worse than they had been. It had rained at some point while I was gone, and the whole front yard was a swamp of ruined furniture, rotting cardboard boxes, garbage, and bloated romance novels.

Hanging on the front door was a yellow piece of paper from the City of Wichita: a notice of abatement telling Mom she had thirty days to clean up her front yard. Otherwise the city would clean it up and fine her. One of her neighbors must have called out the city inspector. I didn’t blame them for wanting the mess gone, but the date on it was the day after the cops had searched the house. That only gave me three weeks to solve it.

I took out my phone, looked up dumpster rental companies, and called the first one. I rented the biggest roll-off dumpster they had, knowing Mom would never forgive me. We might make peace someday, but she was never going to get over me parking a twenty-foot dumpster in her driveway.

“Where have you been?” she said, when I went inside. “I have been absolutely frantic wondering where you were.”

“You could have called me.” I could have kept my mouth shut.

“I thought I had the wrong number.”

“I wrote my number right there on your list. Right there.” I walked across to her phone list and tapped my number. I’d even written Zhorzha instead of Zee. Mom ignored me.

“I talked to LaReigne yesterday, and she needs help hiring a lawyer. She’s in Arkansas right now, but she’s going to waive extradition so she’ll be closer to home. It’s unbelievable. They’re charging her as an accomplice! She’s been through hell and back, and they have her sitting in a jail cell, instead of letting her come home to her family. It’s criminal. She needs to be with Marcus. With us. And don’t you nag me about my phone bill. You know they only let them call collect.”

“I know, it’s a scam,” I said. “What did she tell you?”

“What kind of question is that? You know she can’t talk about anything on those phones.”

I’d long since memorized Mom’s rant about the Department of Corrections listening in on phone calls, because I’d had to hear it every time she talked to my father. I went to look at the situation in the kitchen: the leaking sink, the garbage disposal, the dead fridge that was blocking the back door. I needed to hire an electrician, a plumber, and a couple guys to throw stuff into the dumpster.

“Are you listening to me?” Mom yelled. I hadn’t been, but I went into the front room, because if I ignored her for too long she would come into the kitchen, and catch me making plans.

“I didn’t hear you.”

My phone rang, but it wasn’t a number I knew, so I didn’t answer.

“I said she needs a better lawyer than a public defender,” Mom said. “Your father’s lawyer was fresh out of law school. He’d never even been to trial. There has to be something we can do to scrape up a retainer. I’m going to call your aunt Shelly. She’s always complaining about money, but she certainly has more than we do. And I can always take out a second mortgage on the house.”

I stood behind Mom’s chair, waiting to see if the person calling would leave a message. I wasn’t surprised when the voice-to-text popped up.