Catherine Coulter - Backfire

Ruth said, “Yes, very bad. The Hammer wasn’t trying to help you out, Teddy, and deep down, you knew that, didn’t you?”

Teddy swallowed. He looked scared and miserable. “Yeah, I worried about it, Agent ma’am, but it was two hundred bucks and I didn’t think it could be that bad. I mean, it was only a dippy white envelope, nothing lumpy in it, like a bomb or anything. I’m sorry, I really am.” He looked from one to the other. “Am I in real bad trouble?”

The kid looked so scared Dane hoped he wouldn’t pee his pants. He said, “Let’s see if you can redeem yourself. Agent Warnecki asked you if the guy sounded young, older, or really old. Tell us what you can and we’ll see.”

Teddy’s head snapped up, hope beaming out of his eyes. “He sounded-well, I never knew my pa or my grandpa, never had either one of those, though I guess everyone has to, even if they’ve never met them, right?”

Ruth smiled. “So he sounded what, forty? Sixty? Eighty?”

“In the middle, I guess.”

“Did he have an accent?”

Teddy shook his head. “No, he didn’t sound like anything I recognized, and his voice was kind of raspy, you know, like a longtime smoker’s voice, not very deep, but scratchy, like I said.”

“Do you have the script the Hammer sent you?”

Teddy shook his head. “I’m sorry. He told me as soon as I memorized it I had to burn it, and so I did. It sounded kind of neat, you know? Kind of like I was a spy or something, and so I borrowed Mr. Garber’s Redskins lighter and burned it out in back of the station.”

Dane pushed over a sheet of blank paper. “Was the script written in pencil or pen, or on a computer?”

“He handwrote it-a pen. It was black ink.”

Dane pulled out his pen and handed it to Teddy. “I want you to copy his handwriting the best you can. Write the script down as close to the way it looked. Take your time, Teddy. This is very important.”

Dane’s unspoken message this time was Do it well and I might let you live. After five minutes Dane and Ruth studied the script. The lettering was cramped and slanted really far to the right, like the Hammer had fisted the pen and written nearly upside down. A left-hander? Or someone who was trying to deceive?

Dane said, “Not bad,” and Teddy looked suddenly like he might survive.

Ruth said, “Now, Teddy, I want you to write down everything the Hammer said to you when he called you on your cell, from beginning to end. I know it’s been a couple of days. Do the best you can.”

Teddy scrunched up his face and labored. After another five minutes he had written phrases, some single words, and some complete sentences, enough for them to see exactly how he drew the kid in.

Ruth said, “Think a moment, Teddy. What was your impression of the Hammer? What I mean by that is what did you think while you spoke to him? Did he frighten you? Did he make you laugh? Was he sincere? Did you believe him?”

Teddy fiddled with Dane’s pen as he thought about this. Finally, he said, “He sounded like I always thought my daddy would sound if I’d ever known him.”

Good enough, Ruth thought. Confident, probably some hardnose expecting obedience, and he’d gotten it from Teddy Moody.

Teddy said, “I didn’t think you’d ever find me. I mean, I know there are cameras everywhere, but I’ve never even been arrested for anything, and why would anyone in the lobby know me? The Hammer told me you’d never find me, since I was just another tourist. See? I wrote that down, right there.” And he pointed. “How did you find me?”

Dane said, “An agent who watched the security video saw something black under a couple of your fingernails. Once we enlarged your hands, we saw it was something thick and oily. We had photos of you. All we did was show them around some of the gas stations and body shops in the area. There aren’t that many. We found you on the third try.”

Teddy Moody blinked. He looked from Ruth to Dane and back again. “That is so cool,” he said simply. “I’d sure like to do stuff like that.”

Ruth smiled at him as she patted his shoulder. “You’re still too young, Teddy, but maybe in ten years or so, if you don’t take any more money from strangers, you could try out.”

Dane leaned over the table close to his ear. “You better keep your poker game stake at fifty bucks, Teddy, no higher. You don’t want any more Hammers searching you out. If something had gone wrong, believe me, he would have slit your throat and walked away, whistling.”

Teddy looked like he was going to faint. “But you’re not going to arrest me or anything, are you, Agent sir?”

“Not this time,” Dane said.

Teddy gave both Dane and Ruth a blazing smile. “I got rent money and I won’t have to go to jail, either. What a great day.”

Ruth and Dane’s eyes met when the elevator doors closed on Teddy Moody and the security guard who was escorting him from the Hoover Building. They both smiled.

“That’s one lucky kid,” Dane said. “And so are we. I have an idea where to look for this guy.”

California Street

San Francisco

Saturday afternoon

Harry carefully steered his Shelby into a parking space in the California Street garage of the Mason Building, which housed Milo Siles’s law firm. He looked over at Eve. “Savich told me he hates driving that rental car, says it hurts his soul.”

Eve laughed, flipped her hand one way, then the other. “Well, red Porsche, uck-tan rental-tough choice.”

Harry cut the engine, fiddled with his keys. “Congratulations, by the way, on what happened with Cindy and Clive. You did good.”

“It was Dillon who told me to rattle her. I’ll tell you, though, when she spit out Sue I nearly fainted.”

Harry fiddled some more with his keys. “I guess I never made her mad enough. Yeah, I scared her, but she never stopped trying to play me, and all the while Clive sat back and grinned like a fathead, and watched her work me over. What she did to the other agents who interviewed her was just as sad.” He hit his fist hard against the steering wheel, then looked closely to see if he’d done any damage. Luckily, he hadn’t. What, Eve wondered, would he do if he’d wounded his baby?

He looked out the window, watched Savich pull the uck-tan Taurus into a parking slot. “I’d like to have been there when she lost it.”

Eve grinned. “She claimed right away she’d made it up, then she tried to provoke me back. She’s really pretty good at it. What I liked best was when she asked me what I’d do with a difficult man, like Savich. He’d turned her off, you see, and she saw he wasn’t interested, and couldn’t stand it.”

“You can tell me later how you answered that,” Harry said, getting out of the Shelby. He said to her over the roof of the car, “But none of that means you need to be along on this interview.”

She tilted her head, swinging her ponytail, and one of her eyebrows went straight up. “What? You don’t want my incredible brain at work on Milo Siles? Hey, he might spit out Sue’s name, too. How can you afford to miss out on that chance?”

Harry was being a dog in the manger. He knew it and wanted to punch himself out. He sighed and stepped away to join Savich.

Savich said, “I like the Shelby, Harry, it oozes style. How do you like driving a stick in San Francisco?”

“Newbies around here tend to pray hard when they have to stop on a steep incline, but not us old-timers. All we old-timers ever worry about is how often we have to buy new tires.”