Free Fourth Victim by Reed Farrel Coleman Page B

see. It was no use.
    “Hi,” she said, tears in her eyes.
    “Going somewhere?”
    “Away, yeah.”
    “Where?”
    “Just away.”
    “You need some money?”
    She hesitated. He took all the money he had out of his wallet plus the fifty dollars he used as a bank and folded it into her hand.
    “If you need more, call me,” he said. “If you don’t wanna call me, call Bob. If you need me, I’ll come get you.”
    “I know.”
    “You sure you won’t tell me where—”
    “Shhh.” Marla put her index finger across his lips and then wedged herself into his arms. “Just let met go, Joe.”
    “Okay.”
    “You know I miss this smell sometimes, the way it stays on your work clothes even after you wash them.” “Heating oil?” “Crazy, right? But I do.” “Crazy.”
    “It’s Saturday morning, you’ve gotta go,” she said, gently pushing him away.
    “I love you.”
    “I know you do. I’ve gotta go.”
    He stood and watched her disappearing around the corner of the town house. As she went, Joe searched for signs of the fifty-first gallon in her gait.
    Bob Healy was pretty used to the Blue Wall of Silence. He’d banged his head against it for over twenty years. Cops didn’t give up other cops; that was the myth. Yeah, and the Mafia had
omerta,
their code of silence. The reality was a lot less romantic. Healy had never made a big case without the cooperation of other cops and one look at the state of the American Mafia revealed that the RICO statutes were a lot more persuasive than
omerta.
What Bob Healy didn’t expect to find was a conspiracy of silence amongst the owners of body shops, but that’s pretty much what he’d run into.
    He had gone all the way from Kings Park, to Commack, to Smithtown, to St. James, twelve shops in all, and he couldn’t find anyone willing to talk to him about Noonan’s Collision. He guessed it made sense. With all the insurance fraud and stolen parts floating around, these guys weren’t anxious to open themselves up to investigation or retaliation. That said, Healy was losing patience. And as any one of the cops he had targeted during his career could testify, that wasn’t a good thing.
    He walked into Pete’s Towing and Collison on Middle County Road in St. James and asked the guy at the counter for Pete. A bald, wiry man in his forties, wearing a ripe tomato red sweater—the name Pete embroidered in blue above his heart—stepped out of the office.
    “I’m Pete. Can I help you?”
    “I don’t know, maybe. I was gonna bring my kid’s car here to get the fender fixed and repainted because I heard good things about your shop, but I was having a brew at TGI Friday’s at the mall and met this guy named Hank from Noonan’s in Kings Park.”
    Pete’s skin turned as red as his sweater. “Yeah, and what’d he say?”
    “Said you guys did shabby work, bought used parts and charged for new, and that—”
    “Fuck him!” The veins throbbed in Pete’s skinny neck. “Noonan, the dad, he was a good guy, but the kid’s an asshole. We don’t ever buy used parts. People hear that, they don’t come back. We’ve been here for twenty years and we got good accounts with every car company and supplier on the island. That schmuck Noonan’s so fucked he can’t even buy sandpaper on credit.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “They’re on credit hold with all their suppliers. He’s burnt so many bridges that the local Honda dealerships won’t even sell him parts for cash. He’s gotta go all the way down the South Shore for cash parts from Honda.”
    “Amazing.”
    “Yeah. I don’t know how he fucked up that business, but he did. Noonan’s was a great shop for years. Great rep, lotsa cash walking through the door, but I guess you do sloppy work, start cutting corners and word gets around …”
    Healy stopped himself from rolling his eyes. Now that he found somebody to finally talk about Noonan’s, he couldn’t get him to shut up.
    “This your business card?” he