Free Liars & Thieves by Stephen Coonts Page A

swabbed her face with the tail of her blouse. When she finished she said, “Yes.”
    “May I use it?”
    She removed it from a pocket and passed it over. I threw it out the window.

Liars And Thieves

CHAPTER SEVEN
    The neighborhood where my lock shop partner, Willie the Wire, lived was quiet that soggy evening. I drove through once, looking for cars parked with people in them. Didn’t see anyone, so I decided to try the dead man’s cell phone.
    I turned it on, waited for it to find the network, then dialed Willie’s number.
    “Yeah,” Willie growled when he picked up his phone. He answered the telephone at the lock shop the same way—a nasty habit I had tried to argue him out of.
    “It’s me.” He had told me a dozen times that relying on other people to recognize your voice was impolite, an ego trip, but I wasn’t going to drop it until he said hello in the conventional manner. Okay, so we were both a bit childish.
    “Where are ya?”
    “Driving by on your street.”
    “Give me two minutes, then drive by again. I’ll jump in.”
    “It’s a four-door sedan, white. Not the Benz.”
    “Okay.”
    He was on his stoop as I braked to a stop. He intended to get in the passenger seat. When he saw Kelly he got in the back. I had the car rolling before he could get the door closed.
    “Kelly Erlanger, Willie Varner.”
    She wasn’t talking to me at that point—still fuming about me tossing her telephone, I suppose—but she tossed off a “Hi” to Willie.
    He grunted at her, then addressed me. “Carmellini, you idiot, what have you got your silly ass into this time?”
    Keeping my eye on the rearview mirror, I told it straight, leaving nothing out. The stuff about the archivist was classified, of course, as was the existence of the CIA’s Greenbrier River safe house. Being a convicted felon, Willie Varner couldn’t have gotten a security clearance if his life depended on it. As I saw it that night, one more little felonious security breach wouldn’t blacken my character more than it already was. What the heck, the killers that morning probably didn’t have security clearances either.
    When I finished my tale of woe, Willie gave a low whistle. “Jesus, Carmellini. Send you out of town for a day and all hell breaks loose. I never saw you so deep in shit before, man. Gonna need a backhoe to dig yourself out.”
    “I should have let them shoot me?”
    “Sounds like somebody’s gonna do you sooner or later.”
    “You going to help or not?”
    “Oh, sure. I’ll pop over to Langley tomorrow and ask to see the director. Get this all cleaned up.”
    “Terrific.”
    “Like, whaddaya want me to do?”
    I held the cell phone up, offered it to him. “I took this off the guy who was driving the crashed car. There must be a bunch of telephone numbers on it. I want to know who they belong to. All of them.”
    He didn’t reach for the phone. “I don’t want to go back to the joint,” he said. “I been there and I didn’t like it.”
    I took my foot off the accelerator and half turned to look at him.
    “Oh, all right!” He grabbed the phone. “Goddamn you, Carmellini.”
    As we headed back for his house he muttered—loud enough for me to hear, naturally—“As if I didn’t have enough misery in my goddamn life . . . goddamn Russian assassins now.”
    I could never do anything with Willie when he got pouty, so I didn’t try. Kelly Erlanger knew this mess wasn’t my fault, and she was in high dudgeon, too.
    When I was braking to a stop in front of Willie’s house, he said, “They bust down my door and shoot my innocent black ass, Carmellini, I’ll torture you in hell until the end of time.”
    He got out and slammed the door. As we drove away, Erlanger said, “What if he calls the police?”
    “He won’t,” I assured her. “Willie Varner’s my best friend.”
    She made a rude noise, which I ignored.
    Erlanger was sulking, doubtlessly angry the killers didn’t wax her, when I remembered Dorsey