Free The Barbed-Wire Kiss by Wallace Stroby Page A

set it up.”
    “You don’t need to do that. Christ, I can take him the goddamn money.”
    “Better if it’s me. Right now he’s a little nervous, and that’s to our advantage. I’m an unknown quantity to him, so he’ll want to be careful.”
    Bobby tucked the gun case beneath his arm, picked up the bucket.
    “You sure about that?”
    Harry nodded.
    They went to the office, where a half door opened onto the walkway. Bobby nodded to the old man inside, who handed him a clipboard, a ballpoint pen attached to it with string. On the wall behind the old man, Harry could see boxes of ammunition stacked on shelves, orange ear protectors hanging from nails. Bobby signed out, handed back the clipboard. They went down the steps to the parking lot.
    “So why’d you come out here?” Bobby said.
    He unlocked the tool chest welded to the bed of his pickup, set the gun case and bucket inside.
    “I had some luck this morning too,” Harry said.
    Bobby locked the chest again.
    “What do you mean?”
    Harry took a thick bank envelope from the back pocket of his jeans, held it out.
    “What’s this?” Bobby said.
    “It’s not much, but along with what you already raised, it should keep him quiet for a while. Consider it a loan. You can pay me back when all this gets settled.”
    Bobby took the envelope, opened the end flap. He looked at the hundred-dollar bills inside.
    “Take it,” Harry said. “If you don’t want to tell Janine about it, then don’t. I’m sure you’re good for it.”
    “How much is in here?”
    “Five thousand.”
    “I can’t take this.”
    “Yes, you can.”
    “I’m the one who screwed up, not you.”
    “Did I say otherwise?”
    Bobby leaned against the tailgate, closed the flap of the envelope.
    “Five is too much,” he said.
    “I can afford it.”
    “That’s not what I mean.”
    “I don’t want to get into this with you, Bobby. Take the money. If you want to thank me, do it by getting this business straightened out before someone gets foolish. For Janine’s sake if nothing else.”
    Bobby tapped the envelope against his knee, looked at it again.
    “You’ll get this back,” he said.
    “I know.”
    Bobby looked away, squinting in the sun.
    “But that’s not the only reason I came out,” Harry said. “Some new information turned up that you should know about.”
    “What kind?”
    Harry told him about the photos, about Andelli and Dunleavy. When he was done, Bobby took a long breath, let it out, and stared into the distance.
    “This just gets worse and worse, doesn’t it?” he said.
    “You needed to know.”
    “So how does this affect me?”
    “Maybe not at all. I’m not telling you this to scare you.”
    “I’m not scared. Just pissed. Pissed at Fallon, pissed at myself. You know this Dunleavy?”
    “By reputation mostly. We met once or twice. He chose to stay on the road as a trooper. Our paths didn’t cross much.”
    “And what was his reputation?”
    “Bad.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “He was the kind of trooper who specialized in stopping people for DWB.”
    “DWB?”
    “Driving While Black. When that whole racial-profiling issue broke a few years back, he was at the center of it. He already had half a dozen lawsuits against him for excessive force. Then he ended up in a shooting incident, down in Cocaine Alley.”
    “Where?”
    “Cocaine Alley. That’s what we called that stretch of Turnpike through Camden County. We used to catch a lot of drugs in motor vehicle stops there, people driving up from Florida with garbage bags full of pot in their trunk, that sort of thing. He worked that area for a long time, made a lot of arrests.”
    “What happened?”
    “One night he pulled over this van, two black guys in it. He later said he stopped them because they were driving erratically, but I don’t think anyone believed that. The way he told it, when he went up to the window, the driver reached beneath the seat, as if going for a weapon. He opened fire, killed