The flutter of movement was so slight that had Decker not been a pro, he would have missed it. He yanked the wheel to the left and braked. The brown unmarked screeched, bucked, then rebelliously reversed directions in the middle of the empty intersection. Decker began to cruise down the vacant street, hoping for a second look at what had attracted his attention.
The Plymouth’s alignment was off again, this time pulling to the right. If he had a spare minute, he’d check it out himself, haul her onto the lifts and probe her belly. The department mechanics were a joke. Overworked and underpaid, they’d fix one problem, cause another. The guys in the division were always laying odds on what would bust first when the vehicles were returned from service — six-to-one on a leaky radiator, four-to-one on a choked carburetor, three-to-one on the broken air-conditioning system, the odds improving to two-to-one if it was summertime.
Decker ran his fingers through thick ginger hair. The neighborhood was dead. Whatever he’d seen had probably been nothing significant. At one in the morning, the eyes played tricks. In the dark, parked cars looked like giant tortoises, spindly tree boughs became hanging skeletons. Even a well-populated housing development like this one seemed like a ghost town. Rows of tan-colored stucco homes had gelled into a lump of oatmeal, illuminated by moonbeams and blue-white spotlights from corner street lamps.
