Mystic River

Jimmy tapped his fist into Val's. "Thanks, man."

Val tapped back. "It ain't just 'cause you did two years for me, Jim. Ain't just 'cause I miss your brain running things, either. Katie was my niece, man."

"I know."

"Maybe not by birth or nothing, but I loved her."

Jimmy nodded. "You guys were the best uncles any kid could have had."

"No shit?"

"No shit."

Val sipped some coffee and went silent for a bit. "Well, all right, here's the deal: looks like the cops were right about O'Donnell and Farrow. O'Donnell was in county lockup. Farrow was at a party and we personally talked to, like, nine guys who vouched for him."

"All solid?"

"Half, at least," Val said. "We also sniffed around and there's been no contracts floating along the street for a while. And, Jim, it's been a year and a half since the last time I can even remember a hired hit, so we'd a heard. You know?"

Jimmy nodded and drank some coffee.

"Now the cops have been all over this," Val said. "They're smothering the bars, the street trade around the Last Drop, everything. Every hooker I've talked to has already been questioned. Every bartender. Every single soul who was in McGills or the Last Drop that night. I mean, the law descended, Jim. So it's out there. Everyone's trying to remember something."

"You talk to anybody who did?"

Val held up two fingers as he took another drink. "One guy? you know Tommy Moldanado?"

Jimmy shook his head.

"Grew up in the Basin, paints houses. Anyway, he claims he saw someone staking out the parking lot of the Last Drop just before Katie left. He said the guy definitely wasn't no cop. Drove a foreign car with a dented front quarter, passenger side."

"Okay."

"Other weird thing was, I talk to Sandy Greene. 'Member her from the Looey?"

Jimmy could see her sitting in the classroom, brown pigtails, crooked teeth, always chewed her pencils until they snapped in her mouth and she had to spit out the lead.

"Yeah. What's she doing these days?"

"Hooking," Val said. "And she looks rough, man. Our age, right? And my mother looked better in her coffin. Anyway, she's like the oldest pro out there on that circuit near the Last Drop. She says she sort of adopted this kid. Runaway kid, works the trade."

"Kid?"

"Like eleven-, twelve-year-old boy."

"Ah, Jesus."

"Hey, that's life. Anyway, this kid, she thinks his real name is Vincent. Everyone called him 'Little Vince' except Sandy. She said he preferred 'Vincent.' And Vincent's a lot older than twelve, you know? Vincent's a pro. She says he'll fuck you up you try anything with him, keeps a razor blade tucked under his Swatch band, that sorta thing. There six nights a week. Until this Saturday, that is."

"What happened to him on Saturday?"

"No one knows. But he vanished. Sandy said he sometimes crashed at her place. She gets back there Sunday morning and his shit is gone. He blew town."

"So, he blew town. Good for him. Maybe he got out of the life."

"That's what I said. Sandy said, No, this kid was into it. She said he was going to make one very scary adult, you know? But for now, he's a kid, and he dug the work. She said if he blew town, only one thing could have caused it and that was fear. Sandy thinks he saw something, something that terrified him, and she said that something would have to be pretty bad, because little Vince don't scare easy."

"You got feelers out?"

"Yeah. It's hard, though. The kiddie trade ain't, like, organized. You know? They're just living on the street, picking up a couple of bucks however they can, blowing town whenever they feel like it. But I got people looking. We find this Vincent kid, I figure maybe he knows something about the guy sitting in the parking lot of the Last Drop, maybe he saw the, you know, Katie's death."

"If it had anything to do with this guy in the car."

"Moldanado said the guy gave off a bad vibe. Something about him, he said, even though it was dark, he couldn't see the guy good, he just said a vibe came from that car."

A vibe, Jimmy thought. Oh, yeah, that's helpful.

"And this was just before Katie left?"

"Just before, yeah. The police, right, they sealed off the parking lot Monday morning, had a whole team down there, scraping the asphalt."

Jimmy nodded. "So something went down in that parking lot."

"Yeah. That's what I don't get. Katie was taken off on Sydney, man. That's like ten blocks away."

Jimmy drained his coffee cup. "What if she went back?"

"Huh?"

"To the Last Drop. I know what the prevailing theory is? she dropped Eve and Diane, drove up Sydney, and that's when it happened. But what if she drove back to the Last Drop first? She drove back, she runs into the guy. He abducts her, forces her to drive back to Pen Park, and then it goes down like the cops think?"

Val tossed his empty coffee cup back and forth between his hands. "That's possible. But what brought her back to the Last Drop?"

"I don't know." They walked to the trash barrel and dumped their cups, and Jimmy said, "What about Just Ray's kid, you find anything out there?"

"Asked around in general about him. The kid's a mouse by all accounts. No trouble to anyone. If he wasn't so good-looking, I'm not sure anyone would even remember meeting him. Eve and Diane both said he loved her, Jim. Loved her like once-in-a-lifetime kinda love. I'll take a run at him, you want."

"Let's hold off for the time being," Jimmy said. "Watch and wait when it comes to him. Try to track down that Vincent kid."

"Yeah, okay."

Jimmy opened the passenger door, saw Val looking at him over the roof, Val holding something back, chewing it.

"What?"

Val blinked in the sunlight, smiled. "Huh?"

"You want to spit something. What is it?"

Val lowered his chin out of the sun, spread his arms on the roof. "I heard something this morning. Just before we left."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Val said, and looked off into the doughnut shop for a moment. "I heard those two cops were by Dave Boyle's again. You know, Sean from the Point and his partner, the fat one?"

Jimmy said, "Dave was in McGills that night, yeah. They probably just forgot to ask him something, had to come back."

Val's gaze left the doughnut shop and his eyes met Jimmy's. "They took him with them when they left, Jim. You know what I mean? Put him in the backseat."