The Last Dance by Ed McBain

night in question.
    They checked the register for anyone from Houston, Texas. There’d been a guest from Fort Worth who’d checked in on the fourth and out the next night, and another from Austin, who was here with his wife and two kids; they did not bother him. Their computer showed no outstanding warrants for anyone named John Bridges. Neither was anyone listed under that name in the Houston telephone directory.
    Carella called Houston Central and talked to a man who identified himself as Detective Jack Walman. He told Carella he’d been a cop for almost twelve years now and knew most of the people doing mischief in this town, but he’d never run acrosst one had a knife scar down the left-hand side of his face and a blue star tattooed on his pecker.
    â€œThat does beat all,” he said. “What’s the star stand for? The lone star state?”
    â€œCould be,” Carella said.
    â€œWhat I’ll do,” he said, “I’ll run it through the computer. But that’s a unusual combination, ain’t it, and I’d sure remember something peculiar like that if I’d ever seen it. Unless, what coulda happened, he mighta got the knife scar
before
he got the tattoo. Lots of these guys get jailhouse tattoos, you know. In which case, there wouldn’t be
both
of them on the computer, you follow? We get plenty knife scars down here. Is your man Chicano?”
    â€œNo. A Jamaican named John Bridges.”
    â€œWell, we got something like two thousand Jamaicans here, too, so who knows? What’d he do, this dude?”
    â€œMaybe killed two people.”
    â€œBad, huh?”
    â€œBad, yes.”
    â€œMusta hurt, don’t you think?” Walman said. “Gettin tattooed that way?”
    He called back an hour later to say he’d searched the system—city
and
state—for any felon named John Bridges and had come up blank. As he’d mentioned earlier, there were plenty facial scars in the state of Texas, and if Carella wanted him to fax printouts on each and every felon who had one, he’d be happy to oblige. But none of the facial scars came joined to tattooed dongs. One of the old-timers here at the station, though, remembered a guy one time had a little American flag tattooed on
his
wiener, if that was any help, it waved in the breeze whenever he got an erection. But he thought the guy was doing time at Angola, over Louisiana way. Aside from that, Walman was sorry he couldn’t be of greater assistance. Carella asked him to please fax the facial-scar printouts, and thanked him for his time.
    They were right back where they’d been on the morning of October twenty-ninth, when they’d first caught the squeal.

4
    THERE WERE three airports servicing the metropolitan area. The largest of them, out on Sands Spit, flew three direct flights and six connecting flights to Houston on most weekdays. The airport closest to the city flew nine direct flights and eleven connecting flights. Across the river, in the adjoining state, direct flights went out virtually every hour, starting at 6:20 A.M. Twenty-one non-stop and connecting flights left from that airport alone. Altogether, a total of fifty flights flew to Houston almost every day of the week. It was a big busy city, that Houston, Texas.
    Starting early Wednesday morning, the tenth day of November, twelve detectives began surveillance of the check-in counters at Continental, Delta, US Airways, American, Northwest, and United Airlines, looking for a Jamaican with a knife scar who might be headed for either Houston-Intercontinental or Houston-Hobby on a direct flight, or on any one of the flights connecting through Charlotte, Dallas/Fort Worth, New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia. None ofthe men boarding any of the flights even remotely fit the description Harpo Hopwell had given them.
    There were still a lot more flights going out that