There was an electronic sound close among them, faint but insistent, a mechanical voice saying beep beep beep beep-until Raymond opened his coat and shut it off. Going to the payphone he heard the girl saying to Hunter, “Jesus Christ, you’re cops. I knew it. That’s the next thing I was gonna say.”
Everybody knows everything, Raymond Cruz thought. How’d everybody get so smart?
BECAUSE OF THE LIGHTS Raymond Cruz thought of a movie set. The overhead burglar spot and the headlights illuminating the scene. He thought of an actor in a television commercial saying, “The victim’s suit is light blue, the blood dark red and the gravel a grayish white.” He thought of a movie running backward in a projector, seeing the uniformed officers sucked into the blue and white Plymouths and the squad cars and the EMS van and the morgue wagon yanked out of the picture. Stop there-leaving the silver Continental and the murder victim. He heard Jerry Hunter say, “Well, somebody finally did in the little fucker.”
It was difficult to think of Alvin Guy as victim.
“When I talked to Herzog,” Raymond said, “the first thing I thought was how come it hasn’t happened before this?” He stood at the edge of the scene with Hunter and his executive sergeant, Norbert Bryl. “Who found him?”
“Car from the 11th,” Bryl said. “The judge’d called nine-eleven on his car phone, but the operator couldn’t get the location. Then a few minutes later a woman on the next street over there, 20413 Coventry, she calls at one-thirty-five to report gunshots.”
“How about witnesses?”
“Nothing yet. Wendell’s talking to the woman. Maureen’s around someplace. American La France doesn’t have a night number, but I don’t think Judge Guy was here buying fire equipment.”
“The squad-car guys make him?”