Urge to Kill

“Depends if you’re a cop,” said the shorter of the two. He grinned and bounced around as he talked, in a way that suggested he had to do it. Lots of energy. Might have been on batteries.

Both boys wore baggy and low-slung gangbanger pants, but this one had what looked like a dirty athletic bandage around his right ankle, holding the voluminous pants leg in tight so it wouldn’t snag in the bike’s chain. The other boy said nothing. He was as tall as Quinn, wearing filthy jeans, a wifebeater shirt, and a sensitive, somber expression. He had coiled snakes tattooed on both skinny arms. Quinn didn’t think he’d want either of these characters delivering his pizza.

“I’m a cop,” Quinn said “but nobody’s in trouble here unless you guys shot someone.”

“You mean ever shot someone?” the grinner asked. Then he bobbed around some more. “Jus’ jokin’, officer.” He had a Spanish accent he laid on heavily to project a certain pride that came across as arrogance. Quinn understood it and didn’t care.

“You see what happened here last night?”

“Guy gettin’ shot? Never seen it happen. Or even heard it. I came back from makin’ a delivery an’ there was this buncha people.” He put his hands on his hips and struck a mock indignant pose. “I tol’ another officer all this.”

“That’s okay.” Quinn looked at the taller boy, thinking he resembled the old movie actor Sal Mineo. “How about you?”

“I left right before the guy was found. What I know’s what I seen in the papers next mornin’.” His accent was lighter, or maybe he just wasn’t hiding behind it so much.

“See the victim’s photo?”

“Sure. Front page.”

“Ever see him before?”

“No. I don’t think he was from around here.” Quinn saw something change in the liquid dark eyes. Only for an instant, but it had been there. He’s lying. He knows something.

“Dead guy used to be a cop, right?” the short boy with the attitude said, possibly trying to change the subject, protect his friend.

“Used to be,” Quinn said.

Both boys nodded, maybe sadly, probably too young to be pondering their own mortality. Again, something came over the tall one’s handsome features.

Quinn took both boys’ names. The short one was Jose Meayna. Sal Mineo’s name was Jorge Valento.

“Anyone ever mention you look like Sal Mineo?” Quinn asked Jorge. See if he lies again.

“My mother. She’s dead now.”

No change of expression. Sal Mineo on Novocain.

Quinn peered more closely at Jorge’s arms. “Nice tats. Look like real snakes.”

“Thanks.”

Quinn didn’t mention the needle tracks that had nothing to do with tattoos. Possibly the snakes were there to disguise them.

He said good-bye to the boys, figuring he’d talk with Jorge again when they could be alone. Maybe the boy had simply been lying because he was talking to the police. In this kind of neighborhood, lots of people lied to the police.

But Quinn didn’t think that was it. Jorge knew something, and sooner or later Quinn would know it.

This was a homicide investigation. Eventually and in myriad ways, everything would become known.

Everything.

15

Hettie liked bars at night.

She particularly liked the bar at Chico’s, a tiny restaurant on West Forty-sixth Street that was handy for the theater crowd. It was dim yet bright enough to show off her good skin and strong bone structure. And every now and then somebody from one of the Broadway or near-Broadway shows wandered in.

Not that Hettie hadn’t already been discovered, just not by the theater world. Since moving to New York, she’d had small speaking parts in half a dozen TV series, and was the voice of Dubba the Mermaid on a Saturday morning cartoon show that had lasted five weeks three years ago but was still in reruns. She wished adults would watch things over and over the way kids did. It was simplistic things that sold to kids again and again, and it didn’t necessarily have to be quality stuff.

She wasn’t knocking Dubba. Maybe it was her part in that show that had landed her the detergent products commercial spot she was scheduled to shoot next week, wearing the skimpiest of bikinis.

Good clean work, she thought, like she’d promised her mother back in Idaho.

From the potato state or not, Hettie had a kind of wicked sexiness about her. She was five-ten and slender but curvaceous, and had those much sought and envied finely chiseled features with high cheekbones, bright dark eyes, and a full-lipped wide mouth that easily slipped into an arc of disdain even when she was thinking nice thoughts. She knew that men read all sorts of things into her, most of them carnal. That was fine. It meant she could play almost any role that came her way, from Gidget to black widow killer. Trouble was, not enough roles were coming her way.

So here she sat sipping a Cosmopolitan, having just come from an acting lesson, when she should be standing on a Broadway stage.