“Yeah, the DA’s really going to be happy about this one. You know what else is great about California, Milt? California’s got the death penalty. Killing a priest and an old woman, now there’s just no excuse for that at all—rotten childhood, too much sugar, chemical imbalance in your brain; none of that will work. They’ll drop-kick you right into San Quentin’s finest facilities. You can appeal for years, but eventually you’ll exhaust everything our sweet legal system has to offer you, and then you’re toast.”

Savich snapped his fingers in McGuffey’s face. “Dead. Gone. And everybody will be real happy when you’re off the face of the earth. See you at your trial, Milt. I’ll be waving at you from the front row.”

Savich walked out of the room, whistling.

McGuffey rose straight up and yelled, “Wait! Dammit, wait! You can’t just walk off like that!”

Savich just flapped his hand toward McGuffey, not turning around.

“Wait!”

SIXTEEN

Savich smiled at Dane, and very slowly turned, a dark eyebrow raised, obviously impatient.

McGuffey said, nearly falling over his own words he was talking so fast, “He’s a liar, he’d roll on his own mother, I didn’t do nuthing, do you hear me? You can’t believe a word he says. Old Mickey’s a king shit, got no sense of right or wrong, a real moral asshole.”

“Mickey seems just fine to me,” Sherlock said, coming to stand beside Savich, leaning against the door frame. “I spoke to him for a good ten minutes. He seemed real upright, not a lying bone in his body. I think everyone’s going to believe what he has to say, Mr. McGuffey, you know? I believed him.”

“No, no, you gotta listen to me. I didn’t kill no priest. I didn’t kill no old woman or any gay guy. It was Mickey who hired me. I didn’t hire him, I didn’t. I wasn’t going to kill her, just make a big noise, right? I was just supposed to scare her good, make sure she was on the next flight to China. I never murdered nobody! You’ve got to believe me, you’ve got to.” McGuffey was scrambling away from the chair, trying to shove the table out of the way so he could get to Savich. Delion simply clapped his big hand on McGuffey’s forearm and said very quietly, “No, Milt, you just sit right back down here.”

McGuffey yelled at Delion, “Mickey Stuckey’s a damned liar! Don’t believe him. He set the whole thing up.”

Sherlock said, “Mr. Stuckey told me you hired him, just to be his palm guy, to stand there, keeping his eyes on everything and take whatever you passed to him. He claims he didn’t have a clue about what you were going to do. He’s really against shooting a lady.”

Sherlock shut up and stepped back, no reason to lay it on too thick. The guy looked white now, not just pale, actually white.

Milt was on his feet, trying to pull away from Delion, who’d really clamped down on his forearm and wasn’t about to let go. “No! Man, you gotta listen to me. I told you, Mickey’s a liar.”

Savich sighed deeply, crossed his arms over his chest, and said, frowning, “All right, since I’m still here, why don’t you tell me your side of it. But don’t lie about it being Mickey who was the shooter because I saw you pass the gun to him. What you tell me better be right on target because I’ll tell you, Milt, I’m really leaning toward Stuckey’s story and I haven’t even heard him tell it yet.”

“Okay, okay, you gotta listen, okay? I’ll tell you the truth. Here it is.”

“Just a moment, Milt,” Delion said. “I want to tape-record this. You okay with that?”

“Sure, sure, let’s get on with it.”

Delion flipped the record button. He gave his name, the date, and McGuffey’s name, said, “You’re willing to make this confession, no one’s coercing you?”

“Dammit, yes. Let’s go!”

“You don’t want a lawyer present?”

“No, I just want you to hear the truth!”

Delion gave him his Miranda rights, asked him if he understood, to which Milt spewed out more obscenities before he said yes, he understood his rights, to the tape recorder.

“Okay, Milt, tell me what happened.”

McGuffey said, “Look, Stuckey called me a couple days ago, said this guy down in LA wanted me to scare this broad at a priest’s funeral. Stuckey said he’d give me ten grand, but I had to do it in the middle of the service, for God’s sake, in front of hundreds of people, which sounded real stupid to me, but he said that was the way it had to be. I didn’t want to do that, but Stuckey had me by the short hairs, you know? I owe him money, some bad investment decisions, you know? So I had to take the job or he might have broken both my legs. But it was never murder, oh no.