Tinkerbell on Walkabout Read Online Free PDF

likes that theory too. The problem
is, they only find three bullets: one in Bob, one in the car, and one in the
ground near the car. The last of these has doggie blood on it. Three bullets is
hardly target practice.
    There is also the fact that the bullets are from different
guns. The ones that took nibbles out of the rear quarter panel of the car and
the Lab’s hip are from a Saturday night special, the one that killed Bob is
from a Glock. That ballistics bulletin doesn’t explode the favored theory, but
it makes it less tidy.
    By the time I leave Grass Valley, the Sheriff’s Department
is settling in for a long haul, crosschecking the million or so fingerprints
they’ve collected from the car and garage, and thoroughly tossing the wrecking
yard. So I’m surprised when, a little over two weeks later, July calls in a
deep funk to report that the case has been all but shelved.
    “So far, Perry is the closest thing to a suspect they’ve got
and he was with his girlfriend until around three a.m. The time of death was no
later than one. Right now, they’ve got two detectives on the case part time and
they’re not doing jack. The D.A.’s
put some pressure on them, but the Sheriff says they don’t have the resources
to maintain a full investigation. And I can’t help but think . . .” There is an uncomfortable
silence.
    “What?”
    “I think maybe they’d try harder if it was someone else. If . . . if it
wasn’t Bob.”
    “You mean, if he wasn’t black ?
For God’s sake, July—tell me
that’s not what you mean.”
    “A couple of years ago, a black man got beat up by a bunch
of white kids hanging out in a local park. No one in the Sheriff’s office would
admit it was racially motivated, despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary.
If the D.A. hadn’t been such a bulldog, that poor man would have been blamed
for instigating his own beating.”
    “You’re
saying nothing can be done.”
    “They’ve got no perp, no murder weapon, and no leads. None
of the prints on the car are complete and none match anything in the AFIS
database. Dammit, Gina, two agents who think they’ve hit a dead end are not
going to solve this.”
    “Have you asked Perry if there’ve been any more strange
goings on in the yard?”
    “He says not. The theory is that Bob caught some vandals in
the act. They killed him, maybe accidentally, and aren’t likely to return to
the scene of their crime. They’ll find some other place to hang.”
    “Yeah, or they might figure that with Bob gone, they’ve got
no reason to suspend their activities.”
    “What activities?”
    “Activities that caused them to swap a green Chrysler LeBaron
for a green Olds Cutlass.”
    July is silent in a way that is not at all silent, then
asks: “How soon can you be back up here?”

    I’m in
Grass Valley by suppertime, packing my Taurus and a new talisman. The matryoshka dolls just weren’t cutting it, so I swapped them for a
Saint Boris medal. Saint Boris’ feast
day happens to coincide with my birthday, which allegedly makes him
particularly interested in my welfare.
    It’s Sunday—a night on which we’d once observed activity in Bob’s lot. The
sky is overcast, the streets wet with recent, unseasonable rain. It will be
completely dark around nine, which leaves us very little time to plan.
    We dress in black, take cell phones—set to vibrate—and let
only Lee know where we are going. We leave him watching the front of the lot
from a car parked in the brickyard driveway across the street. He has
instructions to ping July’s pager if he sees anything suspicious. I’m skeptical
of this arrangement; God knows what a journalist finds suspicious.
    July is armed; I’m not, by her decree. If shots are fired,
she says, they should come from a police weapon. So I enter the junkyard
carrying nothing more deadly than a Nokia and a Saint Boris medallion.
    We enter the yard from the far end, hiking around the
perimeter in the dark, slinking through