“What you’re telling me is he’s a possessor of things, Inspector. I get it. What does that have to do with what he saw on the bridge?”

“Your mama ever tell you it’s impolite to interrupt?” He wagged his finger at me. “The gentleman in question was driving with a suspended license, failed a Breathalyzer, and was found with cannabis on his person. Your ‘witness,’ if that’s what you think he was, Mr. Kenzie, was under the influence of at least two mind-altering substances. He was arrested a few minutes after we left the bridge.” He leaned forward. “So, tell me what happened on that bridge.”

I leaned forward. Into the twin beams of his studied glare. And it wasn’t easy, believe me. “You got nothing but me and my partner holding smoking guns, and a witness you refuse to believe. So you’re not letting us walk. Are you, Inspector?”

“You got that right,” he said. “So run the story by me again.”

“Nope.”

He folded his arms across his chest and smiled. “‘Nope’? Did you just say ‘nope’?”

“That’s what I said.”

He stood up and lifted his chair, brought it around the table beside my own. He sat down and his lips touched my ear as he whispered into it, “You’re all I got, Kenzie. Get it? And you’re a cocky, white, Irish motherfucker, which means I hated you on sight. So, tell me what you’re going to do.”

“Send in my lawyer,” I said.

“I didn’t hear you,” he whispered.

I ignored him and slapped the tabletop. “Send in my lawyer,” I called to the people behind the mirror.

27

My lawyer, Cheswick Hartman, had caught a flight from Boston an hour after my phone call at six in the morning.

When he arrived at St. Petersburg Police Headquarters on First Avenue North at noon, they played dumb. Because the entire incident on the bridge had happened in a no-man’s-land between Pinellas County and Manatee County, they sent him to Manatee County and the Bradenton PD, feigning ignorance over our whereabouts.

In Bradenton, they took one look at Cheswick’s two-thousand-dollar suit and the Louis of Boston garment bag in his hand, and dicked around with him some more. By the time he got back to St. Pete, it was three. It was also boiling hot, and so was Cheswick.

There are three people I know who should never, and I mean never, be messed with. One is Bubba, for obvious reasons. The other is Devin Amronklin, a Boston homicide cop. The third, however, is Cheswick Hartman, and he may be more dangerous than either Bubba or Devin, because he has so many more weapons in his arsenal.