Sachs laughed to herself. So she’d got the Starbucks invite after all. “Probably shouldn’t. I’m going to drop this book over at the lockup. Then I have to go over to the hospital in Avery. How ’bout a rain check?”

“You got it.”

… chapter twenty-one

In Eddie’s, the bar a block from the lockup, Rich Culbeau said sternly, “This ain’t no game.”

“I don’t think it’s a game,” Sean O’Sarian said. “I only laughed. I mean, shit, was just a laugh. I was looking at that commercial there.” Nodding at the greasy TV screen above the Beer Nuts rack. “Where this guy’s trying to get to the airport and his car—”

“You do that too much. You prank around. You don’t pay attention.”

“All right. I’m listening. We’re going in the back. The door’ll be open.”

“That’s what I was gonna ask,” Harris Tomel said. “The back door to the lockup’s never open. It’s always locked and it’s got that, you know, bar on the inside.”

“The bar’ll be off and the door’ll be unlocked. Okay?”

“You say so,” Tomel said skeptically.

“It’ll be open.” Culbeau continued, “We go in. There’ll be a key to his cell on the table, that little metal one. You know it?”

Of course they knew the table. Anybody who’d spent a night in the Tanner’s Corner lockup had to’ve barked his shins on that fucking table bolted to the floor near the door, especially if they were drunk.

“Yeah, go ahead,” O’Sarian said, now paying attention.

“We unlock the cell and go in. I’m going to hit the kid with the pepper spray. Put a bag over him—I got a crocus sack like I use for kittens in the pond, just put that over his head and get him out the back. He can shout if he wants but won’t nobody hear him. Harris, you be waiting with the truck. Back it right up near the door. Keep it in gear.”

“Where we gonna take him to?” O’Sarian asked.

“None of our places,” Culbeau said, wondering if O’Sarian was thinking they were going to take a kidnapped prisoner to one of their houses. Which, if he did, meant the skinny kid was even more stupid than Culbeau thought he was. “The old garage, near the tracks.”

“Good,” O’Sarian offered.

“We get him out there. I got my propane torch. And we start on him. Five minutes is all it’ll take, I figure, and he’ll tell us where Mary Beth is.”

“And then do we…” O’Sarian’s voice faded.

“What?” Culbeau snapped. Then whispered, “You gonna say something you maybe don’t want to say out loud in public?”