Mark Smith - The Inquisitor

The girl looked up at him. “Yeah,” she said. “Fuck you very, very much.”

“Don’t you be cursing, Laneesha,” the man said, but his eyes stayed on Harry, who was losing a battle to suppress a grin.

“What’s Laneesha mean?” Harry asked.

“Fuck if I know, man.”

“Pretty name.”

“You like it? Gimme five bucks, you can have it.”

“Okay,” Harry said.

The man squinted at the answer, and let go of Harry. “Yeah?” he said.

“Yeah. Sure.”

Harry went into his pocket and took out a money clip. He thumbed through the folded bills and frowned.

“No fives. Have to take a twenty.”

He pulled one free and held it out. The man snatched it with a thumb and forefinger, stuck it deep down in a pocket, and took a moment to reappraise his benefactor.

“Thanks.”

“Welcome.”

“You’re a weird guy,” the man said. “Cool, but weird.”

“Doubtful about the cool part.” Harry looked down at the little girl. “You and I have the same name,” he said.

Her brow crinkled with three undulating lines of confusion. “Your name’s not Laneesha!” she said.

“It is now,” said Harry, grinning. “I just bought it.”

She reached up and let her tiny hand disappear inside the giant’s. Turning, they walked down the street. It had started to drizzle, and the streetlights threw shadows everywhere, an irregular crisscross pattern like a huge net laid down across the wet concrete.

Harry hopped back inside the van, drove into the lot, and pulled up to the wall of the session house. He parked beside the gray canvas-sided awning that extended eight feet from the building, blocking the view of the side entrance door from the windows of adjacent buildings and passersby.

Drops of rain on the windshield were momentarily set aglow by a passing wash of light. Harry turned and watched a dark green van pull up to the open gate and stop, softly idling. He got out, stepped into the flood of the headlights, and motioned the vehicle forward like an airport gate man coaxing in a jet. Then he directed the van to pull under the canvas awning. The engine died, the door opened, and a man stepped out with an attache case and strolled toward Harry, headlights trimming the edges of his stocky silhouette with a backlit aura.

“Harry?” the man said.

“Right. Mr. Hall?”

“Yes.”

As he neared, Hall’s silhouette morphed into detail. His gray suit looked off the rack. His features were middle-American bland-the face of someone sitting in a Wichita diner or an office cubicle in Des Moines. You wouldn’t notice him in a crowd, but face to face Harry could see his busy eyes, always moving. Hall was one of those people who could look straight at you and see everything around you at the same time, his gaze shifting tiny degrees, scanning and rescanning the area like motion detectors getting signals from an internal command center.

He held out a ringless hand and Harry shook it. Harry’s fingers felt like they were caught in a vise.

“We set?” Hall asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good. Let’s do this.”

They headed for the van. Hall clearly had no interest in small talk, and that was fine by Harry. He could never ignore the absurdity of talking about the Mets or the traffic as a lead-in to torture. The worst ones were those who wanted to talk about Geiger, and what he did, and how he did it. Harry spent a lot of time building a wall around his special knowledge so he could consider himself a businessman. But the inquiries about Geiger were taps on his shoulder, whispers in his ear that made him look inward, and at those times his psychic Sheetrock couldn’t hide the Medusa’s head he’d grown over the last decade.

He unlocked and opened the building’s reinforced side door, revealing a wide, well-lit hallway. The center of the hallway’s floor was embedded with four rows of two-inch steel cargo rollers. Hall pulled out the van’s sliding ramp from beneath the back doors and laid the end down onto the rollers. He grabbed the handle of the trunk inside the van and pulled it down the ramp. When the trunk slid onto the rollers, he and Harry gave it a nudge, and then walked it down to an open freight elevator at the corridor’s end.

“Nice setup,” said Hall.

“Yup,” said Harry.

They shoved the trunk into the elevator and stepped inside. Harry pulled the accordion gate closed, worked the hand gear, and they slowly ascended with a jangle and rattle.

“Haven’t been in one of these in a long time,” Hall said.

Harry glanced down at the silver container between them. It was the same kind he used-a six-foot, seam-welded Zarges made of anodized aluminum. Harry had listed the brand in his prep e-mail.

“Have any problem finding a trunk?”

“No, not at all,” Hall said. He opened the attache case and showed Harry the contents. “Thirty-five thousand. Hundreds and fifties, as requested.”

Harry shifted the lever and eased the lift to a stop at the second floor. The room was bigger than the space in the Bronx-thirty feet square and twelve feet high, with speaker grids set into the glossy black walls and ceiling every ten feet. When Harry pushed the gate open the brassy clatter skittered off the surfaces like a handful of coins.

In the center of the room sat a motorized wheelchair, its black leather and chrome gleaming in the piercing overhead lights. Leather straps hung from the back, arms, and footrests. Otherwise the room was empty.

Hall glanced at Harry. “A wheelchair?”

Harry nodded.

“Is he here?”

“He’s here,” Harry said.

They dragged the trunk out of the elevator, and a tiny worm of thought wriggled to life beneath a rock in Harry’s brain. Something was not quite right. He was about to turn the rock over and have a look when Geiger stepped into the room.

“Geiger?” Hall asked, extending a hand.

Geiger came to them, giving a single nod, hands remaining at his sides. He was dressed in a black denim jumpsuit and high-top sneakers. Hall put the attache case down.

“Geiger,” he said, “there’s been a slight change of plans.”

Harry was perhaps the only person on earth who understood that the imperceptible shift in the muscles of Geiger’s face might be a frown.

“What kind of change?” Geiger asked.

“Matheson slipped us. He got away.”

Now Harry turned over that rock in his mind and winced. When they’d carried the trunk into the room, it had felt light. Too light.

“Then who is in the trunk?” Geiger said.

“Someone I’m pretty certain knows where Matheson is.” Hall flicked the trunk’s latches open. “His son.”

Hall started to lift the lid, but Geiger’s fingers came to rest on it, stopping its progress after a few inches.

“How old?” Geiger said.

“Twelve.”

Geiger pushed the lid back down until it closed. The action was relaxed but firm.

“I don’t work with children, Mr. Hall.”

“You don’t?”

Geiger’s fingertips did short drum rolls on his thighs. Hall’s hand went inside his jacket pocket, came out with a thick manila envelope, and dropped it on top of the trunk.

“Would another five grand persuade you to make an exception?”

“You should have let Harry know about the situation. He would have told you the policy. No exceptions.”

“You’re right, of course,” Hall said with a series of choppy nods, “but it never occurred to me that someone in your business would have any… exceptions.” He glanced at Harry, who was staring mournfully at the attache case as if it were a casket. The hundreds and fifties inside it were dead to him now.

“Listen, Geiger,” Hall said. “Seeing as how we’re here, let’s talk about this for a minute. The kid has been staying with his father for a few weeks, and we’re close to certain he knows where Matheson is, or where he’s headed. Now, my referral gave me two names for the job-yours and a Mr. Dalton. We came to you because we understand your methods are more understated, whereas Dalton has a reputation for getting carried away. I don’t want to see the boy hurt, Geiger, but I have to find out what he knows. We’re really fighting the clock now. So my point is this: if you don’t do the job, we’ll go to Dalton. So why not take the payday?” His hands rose out to his sides, palms up, as if he’d just finished a pitch at a sales convention. “And that includes the extra five thousand.”