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“Well, you’re the one that can make it happen,” Murray said. “You sure as h.e.l.l aren’t on this job because of your good looks or your physical prowess. You’re old, you’ve got a gut, and you have a bad hip. You have only two things that make you worth a squirt of p.i.s.s—you shoot when you’re told to shoot, and you figure things out. Get Dawsey to play ball, and get . . .me . . . a . . . live . . . host.”

Murray broke the connection.

Maybe he was an a.s.shole, but that didn’t shake a nagging feeling that he was right.

“That’s why they give you the tough jobs, old boy,” Dew said to the empty room. “Because you can figure things out.”

So how the h.e.l.l was he going to get through to Scary Perry Dawsey?

THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY

Sometimes having a black budget was fun.

Bob’s Breakfast Shack wasn’t a shack at all. It was actually part of the motel—a nice little greasy spoon with twenty tables, four of which were kind of off in their own room. For the small price of five Ben Franklin portraits, Dew’s people had the room to themselves.

f.u.c.k it. It was only taxpayer money.

You could spend just so much time in the MargoMobile’s computer area. Buying out the diner’s back room let them talk openly. Dew sat at a table with Clarence Otto, Amos Braun and Margaret Montoya. Gitsh, Marcus, the black-eyed Milner and the nose-braced Baumgartner sat at another. Marcus was quietly whistling the melody from the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun.”

Dew had sent the other men home last night after they secured the scene. They were local talent, which he used for muscle when he needed it—the tactic gave him just-in-case firepower yet cut down on people who knew the whole story.

Amos had the menu open in front of him. He could barely see over the top. Dew considered making a crack about a child seat, but he a.s.sumed Amos had heard that one a million times. They didn’t get to do this often, maybe two or three days a week. Dew not only looked forward to it, he found time to make it happen. The whole situation had grown so dark, so desperate, that they needed a release. Breakfast meetings provided a rare chance to do something normal, to laugh and joke, even if it was gallows humor most of the time.

“Okay, Margaret,” Dew said. “Give me the rundown on last night’s autopsies.”

She looked up from her menu. “What, here?”

“Yep, right here,” Dew said. “I’m pretty sure the Russkies haven’t bugged Bob’s Breakfast Shack.”

“Russkies?” Otto said. “Doesn’t that phrase show your age?”

“Actually, my uneducated friend,” Amos said, “Russkies is accurate, since we now have a country called Russia. Commies would be inaccurate, since it’s the USSR that’s no longer around.”

Otto frowned, then smiled. “Say, little white man, don’t you owe me twenty bucks?”

“Aw, c.r.a.p,” Amos said. “That’s right.” He fished out his wallet and handed over a well-folded twenty.

“What’s that for?” Margaret asked.