The fat kid, who had the wonderful ability to move swiftly without appearing to, sauntered away. Just as Tess was debating whether she should chase after him, she saw Lloyd coming down the block, tire tool in hand, positioning himself. Another kid did it. I didn’t do shit to your tire. Wasn’t that what Crow said Lloyd had insisted, over and over, with winning sincerity? It had been a technical truth, then. One boy slashed it, another offered to fix it.
Whitney left the soup kitchen, once again making herself as ostentatious as possible-tossing her blond hair, shooting her cuffs, revealing her watch and gold bangle bracelet, also borrowed from her mother. Playing her part brilliantly, she headed back to the car as if it never occurred to her that anything could be amiss, opening the driver’s door. It was then that Lloyd materialized at her elbow.
Tess couldn’t hear their initial exchange, although it did strike her that Whitney was overplaying the damsel in distress a bit, flailing her arms and even chewing on a gloved knuckle at one point. Finally Whitney popped the trunk and then, as she and Tess had rehearsed, began filling Lloyd’s arms with the remaining boxes of cookies, ostensibly to get to the spare.
“The tire’s just here, under this compartment,” she was braying when Tess crept up behind Lloyd.
“Hey, Lloyd,” Tess said.
They had anticipated that his instinct would be to hurl his armful of cookies and make a run for it. But Tess had also counted on a split-second delay, a moment in which Lloyd would hesitate-and be lost. Even as he tried to throw the cookies at Tess, Whitney stepped forward and pushed him into the open luggage compartment, then slammed the door shut and locked it with the button on her key ring. The Mercedes may have been more than a decade old, but the era of child-safety locks had already been in full swing then. The old station wagon also had a mesh screen separating the luggage compartment from the rest of the car, an option added for Mrs. Talbot’s beloved but lively corgis. Lloyd was trapped. He banged on the windows with his fists, cursing them, but there was nowhere he could go.
Tess kept watch over him, even as Whitney ran around the corner to the Lexus, fetched her spare from Tess’s trunk, and proceeded to change her own tire, a task made slightly more difficult by Lloyd’s heaving body, which rocked the Mercedes a little.
“What now?” Whitney asked, eyes gleaming.
“I don’t know.” Tess raised her voice so Lloyd might hear her over his pummeling fists. “What now, Lloyd? Cops? Division of Juvenile Services? Your call.”
“Fuck you, bitches!” he yelled back. “You can’t make me do shit! You got nothing on me! I didn’t do anything!”
“I saw it, Lloyd. I know you’re working with that other kid. All I have to do is call 911 on my cell, and the cops will be here in a few minutes. Or maybe I’ll go chase your friend, who’s almost certainly hiding around the corner, let the two of you decide who wants to take responsibility.”
The mention of his accomplice seemed to increase Lloyd’s rage and panic. “FUCK YOU, YOU MOTHERFUCKIN’ WHITEASS BITCH! I will cut you if I get out of here, I will fuck you up, I will-”
“Nice talk. Look, we’ve got you on auto theft, hit-and-run-enough charges to put you back in Hickey for several months, if not central booking at city jail, where people are staying up to forty-eight hours these days before they even see a judge. But we’re reasonable people. You can make a deal.”
“I DON’T TALK TO COPS!”
“You don’t have to talk to anyone but me. For now.”
“Where?” Whitney asked, ever practical. “Your house?”
“Yours. I’ll drive your mother’s car back to her while you take mine.” She thought she should be behind the wheel of the Mercedes if Lloyd did anything unpredictable. “Plus, your house is so remote that he can’t run away that easily. Even if he gets away from us, he won’t get far.”
Once at Whitney’s house, Lloyd came out of the luggage compartment feetfirst, aiming straight for Tess’s midsection. Again, she had expected nothing less and needed nothing more than a simple sidestep to avoid the blow. Still, without Whitney to help her, she would never have been able to subdue the young man. Thin as he was, he had a feral strength, twisting and turning in their grasp, cursing them all the while. The two women ended up straddling him, so his face was scraping the gravel in the driveway.
“Fuck you, bitches,” he said. “The minute you get up, I’m going to kill you both.”
Tess pulled out her gun, just to remind him that she had one-and he didn’t have any weapon at all. Not even a knife, based on her inexpert pat-down, for all his talk of cutting people.
“You ain’t gonna use that on me. That’s not your way.”
“What do you know of my ways?”
“All I did was try to steal your car. White folks like you don’t shoot you for shit like that.”
“You’re right.” Tess put the gun away and pulled out her cell phone. “Calling the police is more my style. County police. I’ll tell them that Whitney and I caught you trying to break into her carriage house out here and that you attacked her. You want to get picked up by county police on attempted rape and burglary?”
“That won’t hold.”
“It will hold long enough for someone to beat the crap out of you in an interrogation room in Towson.”
Tess didn’t actually believe that county cops would automatically brutalize any black teenager in their custody, not even one accused of an attack on a Valley resident. But she thought the threat would be credible to Lloyd-and it was. He allowed the two women to escort him inside, where Whitney produced a length of rope.
“What’s that for?” Tess asked.
“To tie him up. He doesn’t have the best record for staying put.”
“Fuck you.” Lloyd spit on the floor and started to writhe in Tess’s grasp. Whitney dropped the rope and grabbed his other arm.
“Look,” Tess said, forcing Lloyd to make eye contact. “We’ll give you a chance to sit and talk to us. If you run, we call the police. It’s that simple. The driveway is a mile long, Lloyd. By the time you get to the end, a squad car will be waiting for you. And if you try to cut across the property, you’ll find that picturesque fence is electrified.”
He considered her offer.
“I’m hungry,” he said at last. “You got any food or soda?” Then, as a hasty afterthought, as if remembering the chipotle muffins that had so distressed him: “I mean normal food.”
“Well, there are several bags of those cookies, although they’re now broken into pieces,” Whitney said. “Other than that, I think I have some olives. And maybe some gin.”
Lloyd settled for a glass of tap water and a bag of the shattered lemon cookies.
“When you were at my house, you saw a photograph of Gregory Youssef,” Tess began.
“Who?” He wasn’t very good at faking ignorance-or masking the nervousness that the name always seemed to inspire in him.
“Don’t be coy, Lloyd. Youssef is the federal prosecutor who was killed the night before Thanksgiving. You knew that a federal prosecutor had been killed, because the dealers in your neighborhood were pulled in for questioning. You knew Gregory Youssef’s name. But the two weren’t linked in your mind. Who was Gregory Youssef to you?”
“Never met the man.”
He seemed sincere, but Tess had already observed that Lloyd had a knack for technical truths that sidestepped larger ones.
“How do you know his name, then? And why do you try to avoid the subject when it comes up? Are you scared?”
“I ain’t likely to be scared of you.”
“Not of me. But definitely of someone, something. Someone who can link you to Gregory Youssef. And perhaps indirectly to his murder.”
Lloyd finished a bag of lemon cookies and started in on the chocolate chip ones. Tess couldn’t help envying his metabolism. She had once been able to eat that way, but that had been on the other side of thirty.