Gavin Holder Series

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

The door to the interview room closed behind us, and Duffy stopped me again – but less aggressively this time. “Sorry I was so intense before,” he said. “I know you wouldn't have taken anything that mattered. This case must have me a little spooked. I haven’t been shot at in a while, and I definitely haven’t had my actions in the field second-guessed in a good long time.”

“I shouldn't have taken anything at all,” I said. “It was stupid, and I'm sorry I did it. I just felt like puking after I shot Schroeder, and I wanted a cigarette to steady my nerves.”

The bit about wanting to puke was true enough. When I looked down at Schroeder's dead body on the motel room floor, it was fifty-fifty for a minute whether I would throw up or not. When I looked over at what he'd done to Bobby Bullet, I stopped feeling so weird about ending his life. I still felt like puking, though. The thing is, I still wasn't telling Duffy the truth about my mother's pocket-watch. I didn't quite know why yet. I just listened to the words coming out of my mouth and wondered silently why I was lying.

“Okay, let's forget about all that,” said Duffy. “We need to talk about next steps.”

“Huhn mentioned something about Double Bolt. That sound like a gang name to you?”

“Yeah, sure. Maybe what the UT called themselves before they got political? Before they declared war on Uncle Sam without Uncle Sam ever noticing?”

“That's exactly what I was thinking,” I said. “And Huhn grew up in Minneapolis. So we ask the branch office there about Double Bolt, and the names Eugene Huhn, Robert Hitchcock and Jeffrey Schroeder.”

“Makes sense to me,” said Duffy. “You handle that, and I'll look into all these robberies Hitchcock pinned on the UT. Maybe there's some detail there we can get something out of.”

“Alvin said the victims had all reported losses higher than what Hitchcock claimed they took. Like she said, there's always the possibility they were working an insurance angle. But that should be easy enough to check. If Hitchcock was trying to minimize how much money the UT actually stole, she could be right. There could be a stash out there somewhere.”

“Buried treasure,” said Duffy. “You're a romantic, Holder. A Don Quixote.”

“I like to think of myself as a shopworn Galahad.”

If he'd been drinking coffee at that moment, he would have sprayed it all over my shirt laughing. “You're actually just full of it, Holder. That's all you are.”

I can't say he was wrong.

We went back to our office, and spent what was left of the day sending emails and faxes and making phone calls. My mind wasn't in it, though. My mind was back at my own apartment, where the pocket-watch waited on my living room coffee table beside a bottle of Grey Goose.

It was my mother's pocket-watch, and it had been my only link to her memory for many years. But I wasn't thinking about my mother just then. I was thinking about the person who almost certainly stole the watch from me, the person I now realized I must be lying for.

Jackie Cole.