Chapter 28
Gerald Moffit should have been exhausted after the killings.
He’d kept Duvall and Pink moving with a couple of Black Beauties—biphetamine capsules—and then given them their marching orders.
Moffit had some pills for himself but hadn’t needed them yet.
The sun felt warmer against his skin; the air smelled crisper, fresher.
At least until he walked into Holly Odom’s sandstone blockhouse on Zion Hill Road.
He was sure it had been a nice place at one time.
Ricky Pink’s aunt had an eye for style, but she’d obviously been gone for some time.
Dust-laden cobwebs trailed from virtually every fixture and faded drape.
Half the light bulbs in the house were toast. The living room rug was scarred with cigarette burns and stained with food spills.
Something in the corner looked suspiciously like a desiccated squirrel.
Moffit hadn’t made his fortune by trusting people.
He was a liar, so he naturally assumed everyone was a liar, too.
No one yet had proven him wrong—especially the two morons he found himself working with at the moment.
Trust but verify, or so the saying went.
He preferred to verify, and then verify again.
To that end, he’d sent his useful idiots on another errand.
It wasn’t busy work—the job was bloody and needed to be done—but Moffit wanted them out of his hair long enough to check the house where they’d been staying before the job.
If they followed him, he’d know they were hiding something.
That would be a shame. The big kid showed promise.
He was still a moron, but with the right teaching, he and Moffit could make a lot of money together.
A supervisor’s salary at TexSafe wasn’t near enough to afford a ranchette on Lake Breckenridge, let alone seven classic cars.
He never told his neighbors what he did for a living, but an Air Force bumper sticker and a couple of decals depicting fighter jets on the rear window of his Chevy were enough for them to assume he was an engineer at General Dynamics.
No one from work had ever taken the trouble to visit him at home.
His lack of scruples combined with his natural inclination to scheme was what made him the real money.
Most shipments were well-documented and cataloged, but every few weeks someone on one end of a job or the other made a counting error.
Moffit watched and waited, pouncing at each opportunity.
People were lazy. There were lots of opportunities.
Moffit stepped one foot in the kitchen and then stopped.
He’d save that for last. The smell of sour milk and something that might be rotting pork hit him like a gut punch, making him dry heave.
He shuddered and held his breath until he was back in the front room.
The dead squirrel didn’t smell as bad as whatever it was in that kitchen.
The odor of mildew and stale cigarettes reminded him of a fleabag hotel he’d stayed at in Matamoros.
He’d picked up a bad case of scabies there. The memory made his skin crawl.
He pulled a leather case of lock-picks from his pocket and used it to push items around on the table or slide open drawers, avoiding leaving fingerprints or inviting any bugs to burrow in and feast on his blood.
He grimaced at the thought, stifling the temptation to scratch the skin off his bones.
If these idiots had taken the diamonds, they would surely have moved on by now.
Still, he had to be sure. He’d personally witnessed Hiram Dietrich lock the diamonds in the back of the TexSafe truck.
Someone had taken them. But who? Moffit’s money was on Vince Millner, which meant one of the cops had lifted them, probably the same one who’d done the fancy shooting at the Interstate roadblock.
That one was going to be interesting to deal with.
The front bedroom was next. It must have been the aunt’s, judging from the furnishings and the dusty Robert Penn Warren novel on the nightstand.
The rumpled quilts and pile of girlie magazines told him it was now likely Duvall’s.
There were plenty of girlie mags in the next room, too, but there was no bed, just a mattress on the floor. That would be the kid’s.
Moffit had just stepped into the room when he froze at a distant sound. Someone outside had shut a car door—not slammed it, but eased it shut as if they didn’t want to be heard.
Moffit’s hand dropped to the butt of the Hi-Power on his belt.
As any hunter knew, sneaking feet were the loudest feet of all.