TWO

What can I get for you, hon?”

Lou Delgado smiled up at the waitress, who stood with both her left breast and order pad poised above his right ear. “The usual, Marge. How’s it going?”

“They come, they eat, sometimes I get a decent tip out of the deal.” Marge cracked a wad of gum.

“You aren’t referring to me, are you?”

Chuckling, Marge gave him a wink, then retreated to the counter. Lou settled back in the booth, appreciating the rhythmic jiggle of her bottom against the snug blue polyester of her uniform. All in all, the Copper Pot Diner was not a bad place to meet clients. The corner booth stayed empty in the late-night hours, the fluorescent lights allowed him a full view of the front door, and the waitresses knew how to keep their mouths shut if any cops came nosing around. Not a bad place at all, considering.

He drummed his fingers on the table and checked his watch. His next client should come walking through the door any minute. A young man, Lou thought, remembering the call from Perry that afternoon. Perry was an attorney who always sent Delgado his dirtiest jobs. Usually he was up-front about what needed to be done, but today the old shyster had been tight-lipped, saying only the new client was “someone you might recognize.” Lou enjoyed coyness about as much as a root canal, but he had agreed to meet the guy. What the hell, he decided. He could use the money. Private dicking in Dixie was not the most lucrative of professions.

Headlights flashed across the front window as Marge placed a mug of coffee and a piece of pecan pie on the table. Delgado forked up his first bite as the door of a black Porsche opened. As a figure emerged from the car, Lou relished the warm, sticky sweetness that filled his mouth, then turned his dark eyes intently to the door.

A man wearing khaki trousers and a pale blue button-down shirt entered. The newcomer stood well over six feet, with broad shoulders and a thick neck. Ex-high school quarterback, Delgado guessed. Too tall for a wrestler. Not the right color to play hoops. His dark blond hair was combed back from his forehead, and he wore his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal the taut muscles of his forearms. Pumps iron, too, Lou decided. The young man scanned the diner like a lunchroom bully looking for his next victim, then nodded at Lou and strode toward the booth.

“Mr. Delgado?” The young man extended his hand.

“Right.” Lou tried not to wince as powerful fingers mashed his fleshy paw.

“Mr. Perry sent me.”

“Have a seat.” Lou nodded at the other side of the table.

The young man slid into the booth and pulled a pack of Camels from his pocket. He flicked one out of the pack, touched what looked like a solid gold lighter to one end, and dropped both lighter and cigarettes back in his pocket, every movement precise as a close-order drill. He inhaled as if pulling the nicotine all the way down to his toes. Marge bustled back over, order pad in hand.

“You need a menu, sugar?”

He barely glanced at her. “Bring me a glass of water. With lots of ice.”

Lou studied the young man as Marge went back to the counter. He looked familiar, like one of those actors in a late-night infomercial. The Porsche in the parking lot and the Rolex strapped to his wrist spelled money, but he was too young to have accumulated that kind of wealth on his own. Daddy’s got dough, Lou decided. Junior’s in some kind of trouble and Daddy’s going to grease the slide.

“Okay.” Lou started with his dependably disarming smile. “Tell me why a guy like you needs a guy like me.”

“I need to find out someone’s habits.” He blew a plume of smoke toward Lou.

Delgado grinned. “You got a girl who’s running around on you?”

“I wouldn’t need a private detective to take care of that, Mr. Delgado,” the young man replied curtly, pulling a newspaper clipping from his pocket. “I want to find out about this woman, here.” He shoved the article across the table.

Lou looked down at the paper. The girl leaving the Deckard County Courthouse looked attractive, in a crisp, I-mean-business way. Long legs, nice tits, but all subdued behind an expensive black suit and a leather briefcase. He recognized her before the kid’s fingers left the page. Mary Crow. Lou knew people who cursed this woman on a daily basis.

“So what did the famous Ms. Crow do to you? Not get all your speeding tickets dismissed?” Lou kept his voice light as Marge set a tall glass of water down on the table, ice tinkling.

“She just convicted my brother of murder.”

Lou’s face brightened. Suddenly it all fell into place. He had seen this guy on television. Not commercials, but the news. Every station in Atlanta had shown him sweating like a pig on the witness stand at his brother’s trial. He didn’t have the movie-star good looks of his killer brother, but the hair, the eyes—and the arrogance—were the same.

“You’re that Whitman kid’s brother,” said Lou.

The young man nodded. “I’m Mitchell Whitman. Son of old Cal the real-estate king and brother of handsome Cal the killer.”

“Sorry.” Lou shrugged. “It seemed like a pretty airtight case.”

“They set it up to look that way. My father has made a lot of money in his life, and a commensurate number of enemies. The only way they could get to him was through my brother.”

“And the prisons are filled with innocent men.” Delgado sighed. How many times had he heard that? “Just tell me how I figure into this.”

Whitman drained half the glass of ice water, then set it down. “Like I said, I want to know as much about Mary Crow as you can tell me. Where she goes, what she does, who she does it with.”

Lou choked out a little laugh. “Look, kid, I’ll tell you right now I don’t mess with officers of the court. And I sure as hell wouldn’t mess with Mary Crow. I saw her going after you on TV. She squeezed your balls pretty hard.”

“Nobody’s asking you to mess with anybody.” Whitman ignored Delgado’s testicle remark. “I’m only interested in information.”

Lou frowned down at the newspaper article. “So what terrible things do you figure she does on the side? Pose for porn? Fuck the mayor?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Delgado. That’s what I would be paying you to find out.” Whitman bypassed the ashtray on the table and flipped his cigarette on the floor, grinding it out on the linoleum with the heel of his hand-sewn boot.

Lou gave up on his pecan pie. For some reason this Mitchell Whitman made him feel like he was sitting next to someone flicking matches at a half-empty gas can. Better to just get this over with, he thought, and be gone. “Okay. So I tail Ms. Crow. Then what?”

“Then report back to me. I’m sure this isn’t anything you haven’t done before.”

Lou looked at Whitman for a long moment. Something told him there was a lot more to this, but something else told him it was better not to ask what. Suddenly an idea occurred to him.

“Okay,” he said confidently, trying to regain control of the conversation. “You put five grand down on the table right now and you’ll have me for twenty-four hours. Then I’m out of it, totally.” Lou grinned. Rich people were the cheapest skates of all. A price tag like this would kill the deal cold.

Instead, Mitchell Whitman reached for his wallet and pulled out a blank check. Without blinking, he uncapped a fountain pen from his pocket and scrawled in: five thousand dollars.

Lou looked at the check as Whitman slid it across the table. It was already signed by Bill Perry and drawn on the Perry & Hendrix account. Thanks to Daddy’s money, no trouble would ever come back to lie in this kid’s crib.

“To be so young, you know the ropes pretty good,” Delgado said.

“I’m a graduate student in applied computer science at Georgia Tech, Mr. Delgado. In six weeks I’m going to be installing a computer-operated hydroelectric dam on a small, very beautiful little island off the coast of Chile. I’ve spent the past three months helping my family wade through this pile-of-shit persecution. I would do most anything to leave the country without having to worry about my brother and the overzealous Mary Crow.”

For the first time Mitchell Whitman smiled. Involuntarily, Lou stiffened. Whitman had a cold kind of mirth Lou had seen only once before, on an old man in Chicago who’d claimed to be the Führer’s personal skinner-of-Jews. Jesus, he thought. Who is this kid?

“So have we got a deal?”

“Meet me here, eight o’clock Saturday morning. You’ll get a twenty-four-hour slice of Ms. Crow’s life. But I’m warning you, if she makes me, or any of my people, then I’m outta there and you and Perry are out five grand.”

“Not a problem,” Whitman said as he slid out from the booth and stood up. Delgado saw that his thighs were thick as small trees, and that he looked over the diner as if assessing how much firepower he would need to turn the whole place into a pile of greasy, smoking rubble.

“Saturday morning, kid. Then we’re history.”

Delgado watched as Whitman walked out into the night, the neon lights of the diner making the back of his neck glow a sick shade of green. He hopped into his car, the Porsche’s lights came on, and Mitchell Whitman roared off, tires squealing against tarmac.

“Jesus.” Delgado shook his head. “If that kid’s engineering the future, then we’re all fucked.”