The man who’d given me the slip at Baptist Manor sat trembling in a folding chair. We were a couple of miles from the Lake House, in a storage unit I rented month-to-month. The rest of the facility was pretty empty—nobody wanted to dig around in their old forgotten boxes of memories on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Lucky break for us. Not so much for T-Swizzle. That meant there was no one besides me and Barack to hear his desperate pleas: “I don’t know any Finn Donnelly. You have me confused with some other guy. You have to let me go, because if I go to jail then I’ll never become a patch-wearing member—”
I told him to shut up. He was only digging himself deeper.
“Freedom of speech,” he spat back. “I got freedom of speech.”
I said, “If you don’t shut up, that hole you’re digging is going to be your grave,” and I’m not sure who looked more surprised, T-Swizzle or Barack. I’d been thinking about that line for a while and was secretly thrilled I’d finally gotten to use it. I tried not to show my excitement. The time for fun and games had long passed.
T-Swizzle’s full name was Taylor Brownsford, according to the driver’s license in his wallet. We’d also found something else in his jeans: a pocket watch. Finn’s pocket watch. There was no debating it. Even in a world where facts seemed to matter less and less, any idiot could tell whose watch it was from the inscription on the back: TO FINN — FORTY YEARS — LOVE, YOUR DARLENE.
The watch was the first piece of physical evidence that directly tied the Marauders to Finn Donnelly. If there’d been any question about what we were going to do with Taylor—hand him over to Dan or Esposito for interrogation, or grill him ourselves—the pocket watch had sealed his fate. I wasn’t going to let him plead the fifth. I wasn’t going to let him slip through my fingers.
Barack and I stepped outside. I kept one eye on our captive, but so far he hadn’t made any attempts to escape.
“What’s that?” I asked Barack. He was grinning at a framed 8-by-10 he’d found inside the storage unit. He showed me the photo, an image of me and him jogging around the White House in dress shirts and ties. It was part of a promotion for one of Michelle’s get-off-your-fat-ass campaigns. “This was from your office in Washington,” Barack said.
I snatched it from him. “Quit playing around. We need to lay some ground rules.”
“Good cop, bad cop?”
“I’m not playing, Barack. This is serious. Rule one: no torture.”
He rolled his eyes, just as I’d known he would. “I can’t believe you’d think I would resort to enhanced interrogation techniques, Joe. The U.S. crossed the line after 9/11—that’s not a road I want to go down again.”
“Just remember, you don’t judge a man’s character by what he does when things are easy. You judge him by what he does when they’re hard.”
“Another of your mother’s famous sayings?”
I shook my head. “That’s one of yours.”
He thought I was being patronizing. What he didn’t realize was that I was trying to lay the ground rules for myself. I didn’t see how we were going to get out of this situation. We were beyond pretending that Barack wasn’t Barack, or playing silly games with ball caps hiding our faces.
I didn’t care. I just needed Taylor to spill the baked beans.
“That’s all you have? One rule?” Barack asked.
“Unless you have any.”
He shook his head, and we returned to our captive. Barack pulled the garage door shut behind us. We had cleared out a little space in the center of the unit by stacking boxes around us to the ceiling, and that’s where the biker was sitting. A single bulb lit the space, which was littered with mouse droppings and spiderwebs.
“You’re looking at hard time,” I told him. He was slumped over in the chair. “You were in Darlene Donnelly’s room. There’s video evidence,” I fibbed. “You can’t deny it. Stop pretending like I’m some confused old man.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Why are we doing this?” I said, spitting his words back in his face. “Because you’re the scum of the earth! The lowest of the low!” I paused to catch my breath. “Finn was my friend. First I find you in his wife’s nursing home. And now we find this in your pocket.”
I held up Finn’s pocket watch. It was enclosed in a pewter case decorated with a reproduction of the Saint Benedict medal. Taylor was silent.
“The guy with the beard and the robes,” I said, pointing out the embossed figure in the center of the medal. The robed man was holding a cross in one hand and a book in the other—The Rule of Saint Benedict. “He’s a Catholic saint. See the words running around the circle?”
I knew the inscription by heart, even if I couldn’t pronounce the words: Eius in obitu nostro praesentia muniamur.
“It translates to, ‘May his presence protect us in the hour of our death.’ Do you know what time it is, Taylor?”
He was on the verge of tears.
“You’d better start beating your gums,” I said.
And talk he did.