Dark of the Moon

Jesse Laymon to talk to me. I think he’ll have to do something. If Jesse takes off, and Williamson goes home, or back to his office, or wherever, we’ll tag him. Overnight, anyway. And just in case he figures out a way to sneak off, I want Padgett and Brooks to hang at Jesse’s overnight.” He nodded at the two men: “If nothing happens, I’ll join you out there early tomorrow, and I’ll ship Jesse back to her hideout while I try to figure something else.”
    “All seems a little shaky,” Brooks said.
    “It’s a lot shaky,” Virgil said. “But to tell you the truth, with what I’ve got now, and what I’m likely to get, I don’t think we’ve got a conviction. He’ll get away with it, unless he kills somebody else, and trips up. We gotta take the shot.”
    “Not against that,” Brooks said. “I’m just sayin’.”
    “I hear you,” Virgil said. “I’m more worried than you are.”
     
    “W HAT IF he really didn’t do it?” Jensen asked.
    Virgil smiled. He’d been waiting for that question. “That’s almost as good. If we clear him, I think I can work out who we’re really looking at. We’ve really got quite a bit of detail, once you sift it out,” Virgil said.
    “What detail?” Stryker asked.
    Virgil shrugged. “I got notes. Small stuff. Show it to you later.”
     
    T HEY WENT OVER the details one more time, but it wasn’t rocket science, and they were done by 8:45. They were all a little hot, eager to get going, and by nine, Virgil was alone in his truck, and called Jesse. “You ready to roll?”
    “Yup. I’m a little nervous.”
    “Good. You should be. We’ve already got the place staked out,” Virgil said. “Margo Carr will be outside. She’ll be close enough to be there instantly if you scream; and she’s armed. I’ll be five seconds away, on the corner by Sherwin-Williams. Now: remember about the radio check. You call me on your cell when you’re coming up to the exit so we can get Margo moving, and then when you’re coming into the Dairy Queen, turn on the radio. I’ll make sure you’re coming in clear. Don’t get out of the truck until I give you the okay.”
    “Okay. I’ll leave here right at eight-thirty.”
    “Stay in touch,” Virgil said. “You’ve got my cell. Call me for anything.”
     
    A T TEN AFTER NINE, Virgil was squatting between two plastic recycling bins and the back wall of Jane’s Nails and Extensions, a cell-phone bud in one ear, a cop-radio bud in the other. Stryker called: “All right, I got Williamson. He’s at the office. Saw his head in the window, clear as day.”
    “His house is dark,” Jensen said. “I’m moving up behind the Judd building, looking down the alley toward the back.”
    A minute later: “I’m looking down the alley. His van is there.”
    Another minute, Stryker: “Got him again. He’s working.”
     
    S TRYKER SAW HIM twice more, the clock creeping around to nine-thirty.
    Virgil: “All right, everybody, Jesse is on her way. Margo, are you there?”
    “At my house, all set, in my car. I am two minutes away,” she said.
    “Big Curly?”
    “Here.”
    “Little Curly?”
    “Looking at the Diary Queen.”
    “Stay cool, everybody.”
    Virgil himself was not that cool. He lay behind the two garbage cans, with the shotgun, watching his truck across the street. Nine thirty-two. Nine thirty-five.
     
    L IKE THIS: he thought the odds that the killer was Williamson were about thirty percent, one in three. If he was, then Williamson would meet Jesse in the Dairy Queen, and Jesse would unload a whole bunch of things that Virgil had told her, about his record, about being Lane, about how he must’ve known he was Judd’s son, just to get there…about talking again with Betsy, to see if she could identify him. If that happened, then Williamson would follow her home and try to kill her, and they’d get him.
    But the Curlys had shown themselves capable of some serious shit. Big Curly had been there the night that Maggie Lane died; might have known that she’d been beaten before she died. They’d tampered with a murder scene, for sure. They said that Todd Williamson had fed them Jesse Laymon as a suspect, and Big Curly said that Williamson had gone through the Gleason house, and may have left the Revelation. But all of that was what the Curlys said…
    An alternative: one of the Gleasons, knowing about the cover-up surrounding Maggie Lane’s death, had gotten religion. Maybe even from Feur. And fearing for