Death Notes

out of here.’
    I didn’t even see his hand move, but his open palm smacked my right cheek. I hadn’t expected the blow or the force behind it. My ear seemed to explode. Tears sprang to my eyes and my hand flew up to my burning cheek.
    I backed up snug against the door, scrambling to get away from his reach, but I was trapped. It was just me and him and the solid wall of brick behind me.
    ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ he said, and grabbed my wrist. The memory of the dead rat in my shower flashed before my eyes and fed my rising panic.
    ‘Stop, Les. Stop! Don’t do anything you’ll be sorry for.’ He pried my fingers from the door. I felt myself sliding across the bench seat as he yanked me toward him. Then I saw a shadow loom over the car. Then another. And another.
    They were faces. Missing and broken teeth, matted hair, dirty faces, ragged clothes. Wild-eyed homeless people. They’d surrounded us.
    I stopped struggling and stared through the windshield back at them. Then Les realized they were out there, too.
    He dropped his grip and stared at them like they were from outer space.
    The first face shouted, ‘Are you okay, lady?’
    Nobody had ever looked more beautiful.
    ‘No!’ I shouted back.
    Suddenly fists started pounding on the glass.
    ‘Who are they?’ Les demanded.
    I didn’t know and I didn’t care. Whoever they were, they looked better to me than he did. I scrambled over his paralyzed body and threw open the car door before he realized what I’d done.
    They were the homeless and they smelled bad, like they hadn’t seen a bar of soap in years, but that was fine with me. They helped me out with kind hands, then one of them, a stooped, toothless woman, asked, ‘You okay?’
    I nodded. ‘I am now, yes. Thank you. Thank you.’
    I kept moving, moving away from Les and his car and the group.
    ‘I’m okay,’ I kept saying. ‘Thank you.’
    ‘We saw what he was doing,’ one of the guys said. ‘We’ll take care of him.’
    Right then, Les’s engine started up. The group - I counted about fifteen men and three women - all surged toward the car.
    With their attention diverted, I took a couple of deep breaths, then started down the street. As I fell into an easy jog, behind me I could hear Les’s shouts and protestations. Somehow, whatever they did with him, I was certain it’d be just.
     

50
     
    T here are some situations you like to handle on your own and some you have to. Then there are those you shouldn’t. Confronting a possible murderer, in my book, ranked in the last category.
    So I tracked Blackie down at his favorite after-hours place, hoping he’d be sober enough to be my muscle so I could roust Hank Nesbitt. But when I found him, it was too late - he’d been working on his Saturday night too long. The bartender had already cut off serving him. So instead of rousting Nesbitt, I ended up driving a wobbly, singing Blackie to his house and putting him to bed.
    Then I picked up the phone and called Glen Faddis.
    ‘Do you know what time it is?’ he demanded when he answered the call.
    He sounded groggy but he obviously wasn’t groggy enough not to be annoyed at being awakened.
    ‘Can you act tough?’
    ‘What? It’s three thirty in the morning. What are you talking about?’
    ‘You said you wanted an exclusive. Can you play a heavy?’
    ‘What’s this about?’
    ‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’
    ‘This is crazy.’
    He grumbled some more, then agreed to meet me on a corner in the Excelsior.
    ‘Wear leather,’ I said.
    I didn’t tell him I’d picked the meeting spot because it was just down the block from Hank Nesbitt’s house.
    My first thought once I’d reached the safety of my Toyota an hour earlier had been to track down Hank Nesbitt. As brutish and violent as Les Barton had behaved, I knew he hadn’t killed Match. He’d shown me he didn’t have the intelligence or the skill to pull it off and get away with it. He was a simple, lumbering thug, clumsy, no aptitude.
    But Hank Nesbitt could have. And Hank could have put Les up to tonight. The only problem was, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t come up with a motive.
    Hank had everything to benefit from Match’s success. In fact, the whole band’s fortunes were riding with Match. And Sharon had said Match was as loyal to them as they were to him, that he wouldn’t fire any of them, even after she’d asked him to. The bottom line was: none of them had a motive.
    My intention was to find