Creepers by David Morrell Page B

bastards who slaughtered his buddy. Whoever they were. No matter how long it took.
    "Hey, Willie," a voice rang out from behind him.
    Hoyte stopped and turned. Frank Corelli was right behind him. Christ, what the hell did he want?
    "I just missed you," Corelli explained as he pulled up next to Hoyte. "How ya doin'?" He extended his hand.
    Willie answered the question by ignoring the proffered handshake. "How you 'spect I'm doin' after spendin' the night in the lockup?"
    "Sorry." Corelli's untouched hand fell to his side. "The report said you were causing a public nuisance. Were you?"
    "I was lookin' to see what happened to my man Slade. And I found out. If I caused some nuisance, that's too goddamned bad." To his surprise and confusion, tears sprang into his eyes. With a quick awkward motion he jerked his head around and yawned as a cover.
    "Too bad about Slade. Did you see him?" The sight of the ravaged body was fresh in Corelli's mind, too. He wondered what it would have been like to discover the body, not just view it antiseptically in the hospital.
    "Sure I saw him. What was left of him, anyhow. But what the hell do you care, anyway?" It now dawned on Willie that Corelli was way off his usual beat. This meeting downtown was no coincidence. "Say, what do you want from me, Mr. Detective?"
    "I want your help."
    "Sorry, I'm fresh outta help this morning. Maybe if you come back tomorrow." He began to walk away.
    "Hold it right there, Hoyte," Corelli commanded. "I know you take Slade's death personally, but I take it as official police business. Now, shall we do this the friendly way, or would you like to spend a little more time in the cooler for obstructing justice?"
    Willie held Corelli's eyes for a full half-minute. Corelli had him. In his official capacity as leader of Dogs of Hell, Willie Hoyte garnered a great deal of respect and admiration from the public--not from the cops. When it came to real power, his reputation meant nothing more than a hill of beans. Dogs of Hell was just a neighborhood group that had fired New Yorkers' imaginations. Willie could play king of the mountain with subway passengers and with his men, but not with Frank Corelli.
    "What you want from me?" Willie finally acquiesced.
    "Let's talk, that's all."
    A minute later they sat on a park bench, momentarily caught in a peaceful eddy off the tumultuous mainstream of the street. Early lunch hour was beginning and the streets were filled with pushing, shoving crowds that flowed from the hundreds of office buildings jammed into this part of the city.
    "Tell me everything you know about Slade's death." Corelli got right to the point.
    "You got the report, read it."
    Corelli ignored Willie's sarcasm. He had to play this one diplomatically. If this case evolved the way it had begun to look, he'd need all the help he could get--Hoyte's included. Still, he had to emphasize just who was the boss, and who would remain so. "Willie, there's an easy way to deal with me and a hard way. I prefer the easy way, but if it'll make you feel more at home, I'll use force; the choice is yours."
    Willie didn't want to pass on free information to the TA, but Corelli had made it clear there was no choice. As he recounted Miguel's story of that night at the Ninety-sixth Street station, Willie felt a certain grim sense of irony that the truth, even in broad daylight, still sounded so much like fiction. That had been the problem last night, too. The cops who'd grabbed him uptown thought he was bullshitting them. They'd handed him over to the NYPD less than an hour after finding Slade's body. They, in turn, methodically interrogated him, attempting to make him change his story about why he was in the subway tunnel in the first place. But Willie hadn't changed one word of his story. And the more he repeated that he was looking for something gray that crept along the tunnel wall, the more the cops looked at him like he belonged in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue.
    "So, that's it,