I took a step back from the counter and waited for greedy old Cap to notice the bulge at my right side. I wasn’t carrying a sap. I had a Glock 19, fully loaded with a fifteen-round magazine, but I wasn’t going to use it unless I absolutely had to; and, unless I’d completely misjudged the old man, I didn’t think I’d have to. I stood there, waiting, watching, as Cap slowly realized that he’d brought a sap to a gunfight.

“All right,” he groused, jamming the sap into his pocket. “What the hell do you want?”

“Vincent Darby—white guy, dark hair, bedroom eyes—you know him?”

“So what?”

“Which boat does he own out there?”

Cap clamped his lips shut to keep the information inside, obstructive to the last. I stood silently, giving him a chance to think things over. “He doesn’t own. He sits. A few of them out there hire slugs like him to sit on their boats so they don’t get broken into. Darby’s on the Magnifique. Slip eight.”

“Blue canopy?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure.”

Tim’s boat was in slip eleven. Three slips down from Tim’s. “If he doesn’t own it, who does?”

Cap took his time, still fighting it. He was boxed in, but that didn’t mean he had to like it, that didn’t mean he had to make things easy. There had to be something really juicy in that back room he didn’t want anybody to see. “His name’s Nick Spada. Now get the hell out of here.”

Darby was sitting on his boss’s boat, which was moored at the same marina where one of their clients, Tim Ayers, was living out his last days. Darby, the ex-con, was also driving his boss’s Mercedes and living in a dead man’s house. What about that sounded hinky? Everything.

“Did you ever see Darby and Ayers together?”

Cap shot daggers at me. “They were friendly till they weren’t. None of my business why.”

“And you and Reese?”

“He’s just another rich cream puff with too much time on his hands, and that’s all you get out of me with or without the cops. Now shove off.”

I smiled, backed out of the office. No way I wanted a sap to the back of the head. When I stepped through the door, Cap rushed over and locked it behind me. Guess he’d had enough for one day.

Chapter 22

Chapter 22

The Magnifique was dark, locked up tight. Darby was living high on the hog for somebody just recently out of the stir. I wondered what he was giving in exchange for all the luxury.