Instead, Kingsley said hello and perused the menu longer than usual. Ultimately, he ordered the same thing as yesterday and the day before—western omelet with a side of bacon, tomato juice, and coffee. They made light chatter until the waitress arrived with an oversized tray balanced on her shoulder and expertly slung a half-dozen plates to the table.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Kingsley said as he salted his eggs, “but the good news has to come first. The motel clerk woke up. He was lucid for a few hours.”
“And the bad news?” Cal asked, though the past tense spoke for itself. He didn’t suspect the clerk was lucid for a few hours and then watched Jeopardy or ate a bowl of Jell-O or asked to call his mother.
“He’s dead. The hospital claims the night nurse accidentally fudged the dose of his pain meds. Stopped his heart like that.”
Kingsley snapped his fingers, shook his head, and dug into his omelet. Cal stared at the short stack of pancakes in front of him.It sickened with the pad of butter melting on top and the syrup already soaked in.
“Don’t tell me you believe that,” he grumbled and sawed off a bit of the stack just to occupy his hands.
“I don’t, but something isn’t adding up. Emory Holt is decisive, and the window to act was weeks ago, so why would he deal with this now?” Kingsley plucked a slice of bacon from his plate and pointed it at Cal. “Someone else called this shot.”
“A decision like that would only come from Emory.”
“And what if his decision was to leave it alone? That means someone went behind his back.”
Kingsley chomped on a bite of bacon and stared out the window. As even keeled as he was, his eyes, deep brown and expressive, gave him away. Like staring through the looking glass, they always reflected what weighed on his heart. At that moment, they registered unease. Cal had seen that in Kingsley before and recognized the pattern.
“You’ve met Emory, haven’t you? You talk like you know him or something.”
Kingsley nodded, and his eyes traced a reluctant path back to Cal. “He helped with a case once.”
Cal waited to hear what else. It seemed odd that the chief of the Moriartys would play ball with a fed. Then again, those men routinely padded the pockets of law enforcement, a small price to pay for cops to look the other way. Kingsley wasn’t like that, though, and Cal sensed there was more to the story.
“What was the case?”
“We had an arrest warrant for one of his former captains,” Kingsley said as he tried to corral a chunk of bell pepper onto his fork. “Child molestation and solicitation of a minor. The guy caught wind of it and disappeared. All our leads dried up, so I reached out to Emory on a long shot. He pulled the piece of shit out of the woodwork and turned him over.”
“Am I supposed to believe that makes him a good man?”
“You can believe what you want and you’ll hate to hear it, but heisa good man. Smart, determined, humble. Embattled,though. Men like that…” Kingsley paused and let the bell pepper go as he chased down words instead. He shook his head and glanced at Cal. “I pray for his peace.”
“Not his salvation?”
“No man is beyond redemption, Cal. Not even him.”
“Whose side are you on?”
Cal meant it as a joke, but Kingsley answered dead serious, “The right side. Wherever that may be.”
“Fair enough.” Cal popped a chunk of pineapple into his mouth. “Is there any actual good news in all of this?”
“The pliers collected near the motel came back from the lab. We got a hit for Damon Presnick. You know that name?”
Cal nodded. Damon was a hired hand for several organizations and slippery as hell. His eccentricities and vagabond habits made him good at his job but hard to pin down.
“His last phone call was with Jack Armstrong,” Kingsley said. “Whatever happened at that motel, the Moriartys were involved.”
The pineapple turned sour in Cal’s mouth. He chewed slowly but couldn’t look at Kingsley. He might find the agony of irony there, never mind the truth. He could bury his head in the sand, but it made no difference. Reality prevailed.
“They have her,” Cal said, so plainly and evidently unaffected that he felt a stranger to himself. An odd rush of relief momentarily subsumed his heartache. It was progress, at least; a compass pointing due north after spinning out of control for weeks.
“Occam’s razor would say so.” Kingsley sipped from his mug and peered at Cal over the rim. “Unfortunately, there’s more. The Nye County sheriff’s office responded to a call about some unusual activity at an abandoned warehouse. They went to check it out this morning and found several Velasco members a few days dead. Clearly, something happened out there.”
There it was again. The black hole of blinding truth, as inescapable as it was crushing. An unknown variable had inserted itself between the Velascos and the Moriartys, and the two organizations clamored for the same thing.
Outside, the wind caterwauled against the cinderblock bones of the building, and the sunlight faded, throwing long shadows across the parking lot. With the dim light, the diner looked especially dingy; the floors dull, the patrons sickly.
