Judge Tifaro nodded. I stood and walked to her and leaned over, letting her whisper in my ear as all watched.

“Judge,” I said, “could you excuse us? Something has turned up to which we need to immediately attend. Mr. Jefferson and the detectives will want to come along, too. It might be better if we just recess everything until tomorrow morning.”

“What is it, Counselor? What have you found?”

“Bobo.”

52

THE SEABRIGHT Motel squatted on a desolate commercial section of Route 1 leading to the Delaware shore, surrounded by outlet centers and strip malls. The exhaust and sound from six lanes of traffic covered the two-story cement block like a fulsome blanket. The only sign of the bright sea still twenty miles away was the aqua painting above the lit neon VACANCY. It was a weekday and summer was over and most of the spaces in front of the building were empty. Those cars still parked were battered and old, their shocks sagging from the weight of sad, rambling stories. Except for the white Camaro in the corner, the white Camaro with the silver Nevada plates and the right side dented in all to hell.

Bobo had fallen back into motel land, and he had fallen back hard.

We came down in a caravan: a black unmarked van, carrying Beth and me, Jefferson, one of his assistants, Breger and Stone, followed by two Delaware State Police cars we had teamed up with in Dover, their lights off and their sirens silent.

Slowly we passed the motel and then parked in the lot of a huge discount store next door to the SeaBright. The six of us, along with four uniformed state troopers, congregated at the edge of the high chain-link fence separating the two properties. Two of the troopers held shotguns at the ready.

“So what do we do now?” said Troy Jefferson. “Has the Delaware judge signed that warrant?”

“Not yet,” said one of the troopers. “They’ll radio us when he does.”

“You want us to go in anyway?” said another of the troopers. “We can knock and ask if he wants to talk.”

“He’s probably jumpy as it is,” said Breger. “I don’t think the sight of four uniforms is going to calm him any.”

“Let me wander over and see if he’s still there,” I said. “He spots me, I’m just a guy in a suit. My man’s waiting for me on the other side of the fence. Once we know the situation, we’ll be better able to figure something out.”

“Just find out where he is,” said Jefferson, “and where we can all stand unobserved, and then come right back.”

“Fine.”

“Don’t be a cowboy,” said Stone.

“No threat of that,” I said. “I’m too smarmy to try anything brave.” I winked at her before I skulked around the fence to the corner of the motel’s lot.

In the shadow of a large sign advertising a mini-golf just a bit farther down the strip, I found Skink waiting for me. He was wearing his brown suit and fedora, leaning against the sign pole, tossing something up and down in his hand, looking every inch the insouciant private dick out of a different era.

“I finally figured out where you find your wardrobe tips,” I said as I eyed his getup. “From the colorized versions of old detective movies on TNT.”

“You took your time showing up.”

“Just a little distraction called a murder trial. He still here?”

“Yes he is.”

“We’re lucky he didn’t leave.”

“Yes we are,” he said. And then I noticed that the thing he was tossing up and down in his hand was a spark plug.

“How’d you find him?”

“Outgoing call from the DoubleTree this morning.”

“Did he make you?”

“Nah. He wasn’t here when I first showed up, gave me a fright, it did. But then he came roaring back into the lot with a bag of McDonald’s and a bag of booze. He’s up on the second floor, two-oh-nine, emptying them both. I don’t know which bag will kill him first.”

“Why is he here of all places?”

“Had to go somewheres, didn’t he? But he grew up only a few miles down the road. Might still have pals around to help him out while he waits for it all to blow over.”

“Two-oh-nine?”

“The room above the car.”

The door was closed, the window was curtained, the room looked dead. And inside was the man who had murdered Hailey Prouix.

“Cutlip almost confessed to everything on the stand today,” I told Skink while I stared up at the room. “Killing Jesse Sterrett, his abuse of Hailey, even her murder. Almost.”

“Who’d he blame?” said Skink.

“He said the Sterrett boy asked for it and Hailey seduced him.”

“Bugger all. We ought to tell Mr. Sterrett when we gets a chance.”

“I’ll drive you back down if you want, let you meet up with your old pals Fire and Brimstone.”

“Maybe we’ll call.”

“You know what his last words were before he finally took the Fifth and refused to answer anything more? He said, ‘Whatever Bobo done, I had nothing to do with.’”

“Loyal bastard, isn’t he?”

“How’d you ever get hooked up with him in the first place?”

“He found me,” said Skink. “Hailey left him my name in case of trouble.”

“There are four cops with shotguns behind that fence. I want you to hold on here while I head up to Bobo’s room. As soon as I get to the door, go over and tell everyone waiting on the other side where I am.”

“Are you sure you want to go alone? You don’t want me along, or one of the cops?”

“I don’t know how he’ll react to a crowd, and I don’t need anybody reading him his rights either. I see trouble, I see a gun, I’ll disappear and let our cops shoot the bastard to bits. But right now it’s better all around if it’s just me that goes up. Tell those clowns in the uniforms that they can bring their cars into this lot and put on the lights and cock their shotguns if they want. It won’t hurt if Bobo sees them out there once I’m inside. But under no circumstances are they to rush the stairs and start firing. If they spook him, there’s no figuring what he’ll do. Can you manage all that?”

“I’ll try.”

I patted Skink on the shoulder. “You did great.”

“I always does great.”

I returned his gap-toothed smile. We had a moment, one of those touching no-touch male moments, a glance, a nod, an urge to hug stifled. Who would ever have expected that I’d have to stifle an urge to hug Skink? To strangle his ropy neck maybe, but not to hug him. We had our moment, and then I headed off for Bobo.

The stairs were outside the building, at the end opposite Bobo’s room. I strode quickly through the lot and around the tiny fenced-in swimming pool to reach them. I must have looked a sight, a man in a blue suit hurrying across the asphalt, his gaze steady on a second-floor window as he moved, but I reached the steps without so much as a twitch of that curtain. Slowly I climbed, stepping softly so that my footfalls barely registered on the metal stairway, and then, carefully, my back to the brick, I made my way along the portico to the corner room.

I stooped down below the level of the peephole as I passed the door to Room 209. His door. Something tickled my neck as I passed it. I reached out a hand and brushed the door with my fingertips. It was hot, sizzling, as if there was a strange, evil fire raging inside.

Past the door, I squatted at the window. Between the curtain and the sill closest to the door was a slight opening. Carefully I placed an eye at the opening and gazed inside.

It was a small, filthy room. My view was tightly constricted, but still I could see the bed unmade, the floor littered with fast-food wrappers, emptied beer cans, the crumpled cellophane of cookie packs and potato chip bags. A flickering blue light filled the room with an uneven glow, a television light, but I heard no sound over the incessant roar of the highway. And strangely, even as I could see the action of the screen play on the scuffed block walls, there was something else, some other change in the light, as if something was moving, circling, spinning between the light source and the wall.