Bad Blood by S. J. Rozan Page B

about Grice that he has about you—asshole from the city messing in
his
county, all that shit.” I raised an eyebrow at “asshole” but that didn’t stop him. “But in the four years Grice’s been around, Brinkman hasn’t managed to take him up even once. Why is that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    He shook his head. “You don’t know. Well, maybe you know this. After your slimy lawyer sprang Jimmy Antonelli, Brinkman still had nine cars that his boys spent a week— and a hell of a lot of county money—pulling out of the quarry. If Grice was running dope up from Florida in them there must have been some other way to prove it. Why didn’t he or the DA even try?”
    I stood up. “What the hell do I look like, the Answer Man? Ask Brinkman. I’m going to get some lunch.”
    “Not even a theory?”
    “Yeah, I have a theory. But you won’t like it.”
    “Try me.”
    “Grice has protection, someone watching his back.”
    “Oh, screw that. In New York maybe. It doesn’t work that way up here.”
    “Come off it, Mac. A jerk who’d be nobody anywhere else drifts into the county, puts all the local talent out of business, and for four years even a jack-booted sheriff with a grudge can’t get near him. Did you know Grice left for Florida the night before Brinkman busted Jimmy? Left in a hurry, came back three days after Jimmy got out. It glows in the dark, Mac. Only a cop could miss it.”
    MacGregor turned his face to the window, stared out over the brown grass to the trees that started abruptly beyond it. After a minute he reached over, punched a button on his phone.
    “Craig? You got Smith’s statement yet? Well, bring it in. And bring in Tony Antonelli, too; I’m ready.” He dropped the receiver in the cradle. “Sign your statement and beat it. Don’t leave the county. You got a phone yet?”
    “Not a chance.” I didn’t tell him about the cell phone. Up here in the hills, it’s close to useless anyway, which I can’t say I really minded. “You need me, you can leave a message at Antonelli’s.” I looked at his gray, tired face. “Cheer up, Mac. Fishing season starts in four weeks.”
    Life came into his blue eyes. “Three weeks, three days. I’ve been tying flies all winter.”
    “I don’t doubt it.” The door opened and Tony came in, with the uniformed trooper who’d taken my tape. The trooper handed me three typed pages; I glanced through them, signed the bottom of each.
    “All right,” said MacGregor. “Go on. Just don’t disappear.”
    “When do I get my gun back?”
    “When we’re finished with it. Call tomorrow.”
    I turned to Tony. I could read tension in the set of his shoulders. His face was opaque. “See you later,” I said to him. He stared at me for a moment, then nodded. I left MacGregor’s office, navigated past a pair of troopers in gray uniforms sitting at gray desks. I took long, deep breaths as I headed toward my car across the gray asphalt parking lot.
    The damn car was gray, too. I couldn’t remember why that had seemed like a good idea at the time.
    Off the highway just west of the trooper station there was a shabby Amoco station with a working pay phone. I called Obermeyer’s garage, letting the phone ring long enough for a mechanic to curse, crawl out from under a car, and pick up the receiver in a grease-blackened hand; but it didn’t happen. There was no answer.
    I leaned against the chipped enameled steel panels of the station and watched a chunky kid in a green football jersey fill my car. I thought. Not that I had a hell of a lot to work on, but I thought.
    I paid for the gas and a pack of Kents and turned back east, toward the village of Schoharie. I cut off the highway onto 1A, a county road. For a few miles 1A ran through pines and maples and birches, past some old frame houses that had needed a coat of paint for as long as I could remember, past a couple of trailers parked broadside to the road, until suddenly it opened out just before it started