Free When It All Comes Down to Dust (Phoenix Noir Book 3) by Barry Graham Page B

phone rang. He looked at the caller I.D. and sighed. “I have to take this. It’s my editor.”
    He walked away from her, until he was just out of her hearing range, and answered the phone. She stood leaning against his car, feeling the hot metal through the fabric of her jeans, and watched as he walked around in a circle, talking. After a minute he ended the call and walked back to her.
    “I’m guessing you have to skip breakfast,” she said.
    “Yeah. You know who Mad Marky is, right?”
    “Sure, who doesn’t?”
    Marky Moorhead was a legend in the Valley biker community. For years, he had headed up a local gang and violently resisted assimilation by the Hell’s Angels when the Angels moved into Arizona and forcibly assimilated every other gang. When the Angels eventually won the war – with the assistance of the Phoenix Police Department – they realized that they were going to have to either kill Marky or give him some serious compensation. They appointed him second-in-command of the Valley of the Sun chapter, and, when his commander-in-chief did too much crank and rode into the back of a semi, they decided to let Marky run the show. He turned out to be good at it, and the cops never managed to nail him for anything serious, until he beat his lover and her husband to death in front of witnesses, which he had been on trial for. But he wasn’t on trial any longer.
    “It seems he just walked this morning on some technicality,” David said. “Some police screw-up. I don’t know the details – I don’t think Jerry knew either, and he’s too dumb to explain even if he did. But he wants me to head over to Marky’s house and see if I can get him to talk to me.”
    “Why would he?”
    “Because I’m so charming.”
    “If he won’t talk to you, are you gonna write an article anyway, then bug him till he sleeps with you?”
    “Quack, quack, quack. Look, I have to roll. I’ll call you later, okay?”
    “Okay. Listen, I feel like a dork for saying this, but be careful.”
    “Sure will.”
    “Or as careful as you can be when you’re bugging hairy psychopaths.”
    He squeezed her ass as he kissed her, then got in his car.
    Laura walked back to her apartment. She logged on to the Internet and did a search on Marky Moorhead. She couldn’t believe how worried she felt, and reading Marky’s bio wasn’t making her feel any better.
    Mad Marky lived in a stucco house in a suburb of Mesa. When David arrived, the entire Valley media seemed to be camped there already. He recognized some T.V. guys, and Richard Ortega, the daily paper’s metro columnist, who hated David nearly as much as he hated having to leave his office and do some leg work.
    “Hey, man,” David called to a camera guy. “Any sign of him?”
    “Yeah, Ricky Ortega went and knocked on his door, and Mad Marky came out and actually chased him.”
    “No shit? Cool. What happened?”
    “Ricky pissed himself in fright. Seriously. He actually pissed in his pants.”
    “I’m surprised he’s still here.”
    “He left and then came back. His editors must have sent him back.”
    “Yeah. Or maybe he went home to change his pants.”
    The guy laughed. “So, what are you gonna do?”
    “Me? Nothing. Just hang out.”
    “As soon as it’s past our deadline and we’ve all gone, you gonna make your move?”
    “You know it, brother.”
    “Good luck.”
    David called his editor and told him what was happening. Then he called Laura and told her.
    “So you’re gonna stay there?”
    “Yeah. The T.V. people won’t stay all that much longer, once they know they’re not gonna get anything in time for the six o’clock news. Then I’ll see if I can get him to open his door.”
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    L aura had never thought of herself as being religious, but when she got off the phone with David, in absence of faith she still got down on her knees and prayed.
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    A s time passed and his bottled water ran out, David felt as