Tony asked, “She say anything else about me?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Will was getting tired of this. “She offered to cook me supper.”
Tony took the news harder than Will anticipated. He tucked his chin down to his chest. “Are you gonna go?”
“Tell me what you said to the cops this morning.”
Tony didn’t answer. “I thought you were my friend, Bud. I can’t believe you’re going out with her.”
Will couldn’t believe he was having this conversation. “What’d you tell the cops, Tony? Don’t make me beat it out of you.”
He still sulked, but answered, “That the car musta been stolen. They asked me to come down to the station and file a report.”
“You stay out of that station,” Will warned. “They get you in there, you won’t ever come out.”
“I ain’t tellin’ ’em nothin’.”
“You think that matters? Two cops were almost killed. They’re gonna pin this on the first idiot they can find.”
“They got the idiots,” Tony said. “Them two guys from last night—one’s dead. The other one can’t even move, and they’s no way in hell he’ll open his mouth. I keep tellin’ you—Big Whitey, he’s got reach. He’ll take ’em out in the hospital. In the jail. In the prison. Ain’t nowhere Big Whitey can’t get to you. Trust me, man. He’s a bad dude.”
Will gritted his teeth. Every conversation he’d ever had with Tony Dell tended to turn down Big Whitey Way at some point. Something about that didn’t feel right, and Will’s instinct was to shut it down. “Whatever, man. Just keep me out of it.”
Tony sensed he was losing his audience. “We could talk to him. Let him know we ain’t gonna rat. Maybe get on the payroll.”
“No.” Will picked up his helmet off the floor. He wiped the scuffs with the back of his sleeve. He tried more biker talk. “I gotta kid to pay for, my PO’s up my ass. I don’t need to be looking for more trouble.”
“It don’t gotta be like that.”
“Whatever, bro. Just keep my name out of it.”
Will yanked open the door to the locker room. The space was empty. Blue lockers ran down the walls and divided the room into three sections. He waited a few seconds, wondering if Tony Dell would follow. When the door stayed closed, Will headed toward the lockers on the back wall.
Bill Black’s name was written on a piece of masking tape stuck to his locker. Will had used a Sharpie to cross it out and write BUD. Three letters. It wasn’t pretty—Will’s handwriting had never been stellar—but it beat the locker next to his, where someone had drawn an ejaculating penis that had only one ball.
Will assumed it was an inside joke.
To secure his locker, Will had bought a luggage lock instead of a combination dial. Left and right had never been easy, but Will was good with numbers. He spun the four digits to the date he’d first kissed Sara. Or, technically, the date Sara had kissed him. The lock didn’t need to know the details.
Will hung his helmet inside the locker and took out his folded work shirt and pants. Maintenance duty wasn’t a bad job as these things went. Will was good at fixing things. The forms they made him fill out were designed for someone with little grasp of the English language. There were only five boxes to check or not check, and only one long line with an X beside it, which made it easy when it came time to sign his name. Not that Will signed his name. He wrote two capital letter Bs and left it at that.
Will took off his street clothes and dressed for work. He wore Bill Black’s photo ID on a lanyard around his neck. A security card and set of keys were attached to a retractable wire on his belt. A flashlight hooked through a metal loop on the side. Will transferred the still-moist cash from Tony Dell into the front pocket of his work pants, hoping the bills would be dry when he logged them into evidence later. In a blue Velcro wallet were a few of Black’s credit cards, a copy of a speeding ticket that served as his license, and some receipts that indicated Mr. Black preferred to do all his shopping at the RaceTrac near the mouth of the Ocmulgee Trail.
He checked the battery on his iPhone. Will didn’t use a smartphone in his real life, but Bill Black was a little more sophisticated. Not that the device was the sort of thing you had to be a rocket scientist to operate. Will had figured out most of the programs on his own as he whiled away the hours at the fleabag efficiency motel where Bill Black rented a room by the week.
Black’s primary email account was on the hospital server. The secondary account was through Gmail. The inbox contained some increasingly nasty messages that appeared to have been written by an angry pregnant woman in Tennessee. There were a few mildly racist forwards from some dummy accounts, but Bill Black didn’t have many friends. The bulk of his mail consisted of junk sent from mailing lists that advertised hunting gear and naked women, and coupons for things like beef jerky and Old Spice.
Black’s musical tastes ran toward country, with some Otis Redding thrown in as a hat tip to the singer’s hometown of Macon. There were some pictures of scenic views taken from the highway. Black was a hunter, so it made sense that he would appreciate woods and trees. Black also liked the ladies. There were several risqué photos downloaded from the Internet. Blondes and Asians mostly. Will had briefly considered putting a few redheads on there, but that felt weird because of Sara. And also because of Sara, he knew they weren’t really redheads.
The tech specialist at the GBI had done the rest of the heavy lifting, adding some stealth features to the phone. The apps ran in the background and were invisible to anyone who didn’t know exactly what to look for. One of them automatically erased all phone numbers and texts going in and out. Another turned the speakers into a recording device when you tapped the power button three times. Yet another provided a rolling phone number in case Will had to make a call and didn’t want his location to come up. The most important app patched the device into the military’s tracking system—not the GPS available to the entire world, but the real-time global positioning used for things like targeting drones and delivering bombs.
This last app was the reason Will kept checking the battery. Amanda was right about many things, but none more than the belief that there was a link between Will’s investigation into Big Whitey and the attack on Lena Adams and Jared Long. Even Tony Dell had made the connection.
Will didn’t want to go off the grid because he forgot to plug in his phone.
The door banged open. Will turned around. He was half expecting to find Tony Dell, but the new guy was beefy looking with a full head of hair and a jaw that was sharp enough to cut glass.
Will knew a cop when he saw one. He did exactly what Bill Black would do—slammed his locker closed and headed toward the exit.
The cop held up his badge. “Detective Paul Vickery, Macon PD.”
Lena’s partner. That made sense. Will still didn’t acknowledge him. He kept his beeline toward the door.
Vickery grabbed Will’s shoulder and spun him around. He was a few inches shorter than Will, but he had a badge and a gun and obviously felt that gave him the right to be an asshole. “Where you going?” He glanced at the name stitched on Will’s shirt. “Buddy.”