Free Urge To Kill by John Lutz Page A

on the cheap.
    They pushed all the way inside.
    “Busy, busy,” Pearl said.
    She was talking about the four people in work clothes, three men and a woman, scurrying about with tools and ladders. They ignored the three detectives, concentrating on running wires across the scarred wood floor and taping them tightly so no one would trip over them. The woman, young and wearing a Red Sox cap with her blond ponytail flouncing out the back above the plastic size-adjustment band, was up on an aluminum stepladder with both arms above her head, fiddling with a light fixture.
    One of the workers, a handsome guy with lots of curly black hair and a serious cast to his eyes, stood up from where he’d been applying duct tape to run wiring and looked inquisitively at the three detectives.
    “Help you?” he asked.
    “That’s what you were doing when we came in,” Quinn said. He explained who they were.
    “I’m Rusty,” said the man with coal black hair. “We got another four hours’ work here, then the place is all yours. Gotta finish running wiring to where the desks are gonna sit, then put in some ceiling fixtures. It’ll all be crude, but it’ll work and keep working.”
    “Like us,” Fedderman said.
    “We were told it’s all temporary.”
    “Like us,” Fedderman said again.
    “You gonna set up the computers?” Pearl asked, thinking she might use her laptop.
    Rusty shook his head no. “Somebody from the NYPD’s gonna do all that, fix you up with Internet access, printer, fax machine, whatever. We’re supposed to let him know when we’re done here.”
    “It always smell like this?” Pearl asked.
    Rusty looked confused. “Like what?”
    “Never mind,” Pearl said.
    Rusty grinned. “Hope it isn’t me.”
    “Not unless you’re flammable.”
    His grin widened. “You never know, but there are ways to find out.”
    “You don’t flirt with a cop,” Pearl said. “You’ll get run over so flat you’ll never get back up.”
    Rusty looked surprised, then thoughtful. Then he nodded.
    “We’ll check back this afternoon,” Quinn told him.
    “But she won’t have changed her mind,” Fedderman told Rusty, as they were leaving.
    Rusty, a fast learner, said nothing.
     
    Quinn drove them to Pizza Rio in Queens, next to where Galin’s body had been discovered in his parked car. Then he assigned Pearl and Fedderman to check with people in nearby buildings to find out if anyone had seen or heard anything unusual the night of the murder—in particular the sound of a shot. Much of this was double-checking, as they’d already read the responding officers’ reports. But that was what police work was all about—double-, triple-checking. Then checking again.
    Quinn went inside the pizza joint to see if whoever was in there had been working last night.
    It was a small take-out place that smelled great. Quinn thought he might actually be able to reach out and feel the spicy garlic scent wafting from the ovens. There were only three small tables with chairs. They were more for people waiting for carryout orders than for sitting and enjoying a meal. One employee was working behind the counter, a young black guy in his twenties. He was bone thin and had a soul patch growing under his lower lip and a silver Maltese cross dangling from his left ear. He was wearing a stained white apron to protect a stained white shirt. He grinned hugely at Quinn with stained white teeth. The plastic name tag on his shirt said he was Mickey.
    “Help you?” he asked.
    “Second time today,” Quinn said.
    “Help you?” Mickey said louder, thinking Quinn hadn’t heard him over the deafening rap music booming from the kitchen: “Kill the bitch, do the snitch, got the itch, don’ matter which…”
    Quinn smiled back and flashed his shield. “Turn that crap off.”
    Mickey looked injured, disappeared into the kitchen, then returned. The abrupt silence seemed to reverberate with a decibel life of its own. “You don’t like