“What happened to your tires?” McFadden asked.
“My tires? What about my tires?”
“They’re flat,” McFadden said. And then he felt rage rise up in him.
That fucking Hay-zus did this! That’s what that bullshit was about him working on something at Broad and Olney! He drove up here, and let the air out of Payne’s tires!
“They’re?” Matt asked. “Plural? As in more than one?”
He knelt beside Charley as Charley, pulling on a valve stem, discovered that someone had slit it with a knife.
Someone, shit! Hay-zus!
“All four of them, asshole!” Charley said. “Somebody caught you sleeping and slit your valve stems open. And I’ve got a good fucking idea who.”
“It doesn’t matter, Charley.”
“The fuck it don’t!” McFadden said. “You call for a police wrecker, how you going to explain this? Vandals? You were supposed to be sitting in the car, or close enough so that you could hear the radio. The guys on the wrecker are going to know what happened, stupid. It’ll be all over Highway and Special Operations, the District, ‘you hear about the asshole was sleeping on a stakeout? Somebody cut his tire valves.’”
Matt was touched by Charley’s concern. This did not seem to be the appropriate time to tell him that he was going to resign in the morning. It occurred to him that he liked Charley McFadden very much, and wondered if some sort of friendship would be possible after he had resigned.
“Well, now that I’ve made a jackass of myself, what can be done about it?”
“I’m thinking,” Charley said. “There’s a Sunoco station at Summit Avenue and Germantown Pike I think is open all night. I think they fix tires.”
“Why don’t we just call the police wrecker and let me take my lumps?” Matt asked.
“Don’t be more of an asshole than you already are,” Charley said. “We’ll jack your car up, take off two tires at a time, put them in my car, and you get them fixed. Then the other two.”
I have an AAA card, Matt thought, but this doesn’t seem to be an appropriate time to use it.
“Come on,” Charley said. “Get off the dime! I don’t want to have to explain this to a supervisor.”
A supervisor did in fact appear thirty minutes later, by which time Matt had returned from the service station with two repaired tires, and departed with the last two.
“What’s going on here?” Captain David Pekach asked. “You need some help?”
“No, sir, another officer’s helping me,” Charley said. “Payne.”
“What the hell happened?”
“There was some roofing nails here, Captain. Got two tires.”
“You should have called the police wrecker,” David Pekach said. “That’s what they’re for.”
“This looked like the easiest way to handle it, sir,” Charley said.
“Well, if you say so,” David Pekach said. “Good night—or is it good morning?—Charley.”
“Good night, sir.”
“Charley, I’ll have a word with Inspector Wohl tomorrow, and see if he won’t reconsider this bullshit stakeout.”
“I wish you would, sir.”
“Good night, again, Charley,” Captain Pekach said. He was in a very good mood. He was going to check in at Bustleton and Bowler, then go home and change his clothes, and then come back. Martha had said she completely understood that a man like himself had to devote a good deal of time to his duty, and that she would make them breakfast when he came back. Maybe something they could eat in bed, like strawberries in real whipped cream. Unless he wanted something more substantial.
Jesus!