The call came when Pepper was warming up for her race. It was Wolfe, and he wanted to meet. He was trying to sound controlled and confident but there was a note of fear underneath it, one I wouldn’t have detected if I wasn’t so intimate with the emotion myself. When I asked what he wanted, he only said that he had information for me and he was planning on turning himself in if we could come to an agreement.
I took the address and as soon as my girl crossed the finish line, I was on the road. I called Frankie to tell him where I was going, and he insisted on joining me. I picked him up from Lizzie’s place and we made it to the Denver address in record time. It was a duplex in a decent neighborhood, and Wolfe opened the door as we approached.
He eyed Frankie for a long time, asked if he was a cop, and then let us inside. I’d thought about calling my cop friend, but had decided against it. Some things are better handled without law enforcement, and I had a feeling this might be one of those things. The place was clean and sparsely decorated. As far as I could tell, no one else was around.
The conversation began with a strange negotiation. I didn’t really know what we were negotiating at first and we were dancing around each other. “I’ve got important information,” he kept saying, “and in return, I want your girl to drop the charges.”
“First of all,” I told him, “Pepper isn’t a prosecutor. She doesn’t decide whether to press charges.”
“She can drop her testimony or statement or whatever,” Wolfe urged.
It was a pointless back and forth, and what was he going to do, take my word for it? Besides, I would never agree to anything without Pepper’s consent. In the end, I told him it depended on what he had to tell me. “If I bring everything I have against you, you’re going to be put away for a long time. If I don’t, you might be able to work a decent deal on what you most recently pulled. It really depends on what you’ve got to tell me.”
See, somehow Wolfe had managed to keep a clean record. He liked to intimidate and scare people, but my gut had always told me he was not as dangerous as he seemed. I had spent some time with the guy in the past, and he was irresponsible and unpredictable, but he didn’t seem capable of the kind of shit he had pulled with Pepper. I had always thought he was just trying to scare her and get to me with the first incident at the pool house. If I had suspected he was going to do worse, I would’ve dealt with him differently. Now, with the recent attack, I’d wondered if he’d changed. If he’d done too many drugs, or if I’d misunderstood him from the beginning. But here in this house, seeing what months of hiding had done to the guy, I could tell he was resigned to doing time, but he wanted to minimize it. And now I was curious as hell as to why he did what he did.
And when he finally told me, I realized that it had been right in front of me. It was like he was telling me what I already knew, I just hadn’t put it together.
“It was a lot of money, and I really needed it. I owed some bad guys and she wasn’t supposed to get knocked out, man,” he was saying. “My buddy got freaked out or something, I don’t know why he did that.” He was making excuses but I was tuning him out now.
Immediately, I called Pepper, and when she didn’t answer, a deep sense of foreboding sent me out the door and into my Jeep, with Wolfe calling out behind me and Frankie jogging to get in the passenger seat. I’m not sure why it felt like now that I knew, Pepper was suddenly in more danger than before Wolfe told me. It wasn’t logical, but as we drove back to Brockton at top speed, I felt like I was racing a clock, and that time was not on my side.