No way out

Chapter Sixty-seven

Quinn drove a stripped-down black SUV wrapped in dark tinted windows, stick shift and rubber mats, no sound system for talk radio, top forty, or hard rock, the cup holders stuffed with gum wrappers, loose change, and wadded scraps of scribbled paper. There was a canvas bag on the front passenger seat that smelled like old sweat but rattled like it was packed with steel when I moved it to the back.

“More oranges?” I asked him.

“Odds and ends,” he said, settling behind the wheel and tossing me the orange. “Whose orange is that?”

“Yours, I guess.”

“Don’t guess.”

“Okay. It’s yours.”

“Based on what?”

“You gave it to me.”

“Whose name is on it?”

I rotated the orange, finding the familiar stamp. “Sunkist.”

“My name Sunkist?”

He was making a point that began to dawn on me. “No, and neither is mine.”

“Exactly. So you’ve got the orange. That gives you a possessor’s rights. Maybe that’s enough for you to keep it, maybe not. But I want the orange. I tell you it’s mine, that I bought and paid for it and I want it back. Naturally you say bullshit because you’ve got the orange and I don’t have a receipt for it and my name isn’t Sunkist. Now make peace.”

I laughed. “When my kids were little, I’d tell them to work it out or I’d take the orange and neither one of them would get it. They’d both be mad at me, and I’d end up with an orange I didn’t want.”

“And,” Quinn said, “if you were Solomon, you’d tell them to cut it in half.”

“But you wouldn’t.”

“Nope. They’d still be mad. The real is question is, why do you want the orange?”

I shrugged. “I’m hungry. I want to eat it.”

“And I want to use the peel to bake a cake.”

“You don’t look the type.”

“I’m not. I prefer moon pies. But if I was, we can both get what we want. You can have the fruit, and I can have the peel. We can make peace because knowing why we want what we want lets us expand the pie and meet both of our needs.”

“That’s swell, Dr. Feel Good, but suppose I don’t give a shit about you or your cake and I want the whole thing because I don’t share well with others.”

He smiled. “That’s when we find out how hungry you are and how badly I want to bake that pie.”

“What are you, an ex-cop, a lawyer, a shrink, or just a guy who sells fruit?”

“My father is a psychiatrist and my mother is a psychologist, which means every time I farted when I was growing up, I got analyzed. I broke their hearts when I applied to the police academy instead of Harvard. I spent six years on patrol, another ten as a detective, went to law school at night, passed the bar but never practiced. Couldn’t see selling slices of my life measured in tenths of an hour. Stayed a cop and ended up a hostage negotiator until I quit the force and opened up my own fruit stand.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“They gave me a choice. Quit or get fired.”

“Why?”

“When the fruit is rotten, someone has to take the fall. It was my turn, which was only fair because it was my fault. Two people died. One of them was a hostage, and one of them was a cop.”

“But they still use you as a freelancer?”

“The department ran out of negotiators, which made it easy for them to forgive even if they didn’t forget. Kate told me what she knows and thinks she knows about your case. I need you to tell me the rest.”

I started to talk, but my vocal cords froze, my chin bobbing, my torso following suit, the words finally coming in a stutter.

“It’s not a short story. Be better if we stopped somewhere for a few minutes.”

“No problem. Mendez won’t start without us.”

“Are we on a schedule?”

“Anytime after dark. I’ll send him a text message when we’re ready.”

“You must be good if you’ve got him sitting by the phone waiting for you to call.”

“I let him pick the place as long as I got to pick the time. Turf is a big issue for him. It’s one of the ways he defines himself. I’m not into real estate, but going in unprepared can get you killed. This way he’ll feel like he’s in control and we’ll be ready.”

A powerful spasm jerked me forward, bending me at the waist, twisting me clockwise. I grunted and braced myself, one hand flattened on the dash, the other on the passenger door, taking a deep breath when it passed, looking at Quinn, wondering if he was having second thoughts. He didn’t blink, smile, or frown, his eyes doing all the work, boring in, deciding how, not whether. I was another problem to be solved, more water off a duck’s back.

“You have some place in mind we can go?”

“Yeah. You look like you could use some religion.”

He parked behind a small, two-story church in Northeast, the first floor ringed in limestone, the second in dark red brick. There were no lights on and no other cars in the one-row parking lot. I followed him out of the car to the back door where there was a keypad lock. He punched in a code and opened the door, turning on lights as we walked down a narrow hall.

“Let me guess,” I said, “you’re a preacher in your spare time.”

“No chance. The only thing worse than the pay is the hours. This church has a small congregation. The building is only open on Sunday and Tuesday. I did some work for them a while back.”

“And they let you use the church for client meetings?”

“No, but I was with the pastor one time when he punched in the code for the back door.”

We came to the end of the hall, and he opened another door, turning on a single ceiling fixture, casting faint light and long shadows on the bare-bones sanctuary with its hard-backed wooden pews, scuffed and scarred. Stained-glass windows lined the walls, one of them broken out and covered over with plywood. There was a shallow stage with a portable lectern and two leather chairs immediately to our right.

“Take a seat,” he said, pointing to the chairs, “and preach to me.”

My chair was soft, the room quiet and peaceful. It wasn’t a cure for tics, but it was soothing, my body and brain easing as I gave Quinn the gospel, breaking it down into the books of Chase, Martin, Crenshaw, and Staley.

“I think you’re right about Jimmy Martin,” Quinn said. “He’s caught in the crossfire between two sides. Someone is using his kids to keep him quiet, and the other is trying to kill him. If he talks, his kids die. If he dies, his kids die. If that’s the world you’re living in, solitary confinement looks pretty damn good. Nobody goes to that much trouble for a truckload of copper.”

“But they would for three quarters of a million dollars in guns.”

He nodded, opened his phone, sent Cesar Mendez a text, and looked at me. “One hour.”