Ridley Pearson - Choke Point

“Not all of the funds will be recouped.”

“I’m listening,” he says.

A figure lurks in a dark corner of a dismal bar in the heart of the red-light district. Knox holds off, eyeing things in the reflection of the bar mirror. The bar is peopled with men of every age, stoned and drunk and smoking cigarettes. The women, far fewer in number, are overweight and overly made up, with piercings and too much pale, pimpled skin showing. The bartender looks like he could hold his own in a fight. He nods at Knox, Knox taps the bar and another beer is delivered. Knox pays cash. No tabs are run in a place like this.

He takes his beer over to the corner. Sonia Pangarkar is revealed out of the shadow. Knox sits down on a bench next to her.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Steele,” she says.

“I can think of nicer places to meet.”

“No one knows me in a place like this. My television work . . . it comes at a price.”

“You don’t want to be seen in my company?”

“It is dangerous, this work, Mr. Steele. We’ve discussed this.”

“You’re afraid.”

“I am careful.”

“Can’t be too careful,” he says.

“She’s a teacher. She knew the other one I told you about. She has a student who attends infrequently. She noticed the calluses I wrote about in my story. The girl’s father, or a man claiming to be her father, because the teacher has never met the father, showed up at school yesterday. The girl escaped out the window. She’s willing to talk—the teacher—if I keep her name out of it.”

“Not much for me to work with. For you, yes, of course.”

“There is, or I wouldn’t have contacted you.” Sonia is abrupt, verging on dismissive. He hears a new tension in her voice. She isn’t sleeping well, judging by her gloomy eyes. The gin in front of her isn’t her first.

“Are you sure?” he asks. “Maybe you wanted the company.” He has a role to play; he has to fight to stay in character.

She hangs her head. “Leave,” she says.

“Time and place.” Knox upends the beer. He sets the half-empty bottle back on the table and stands. “Text or voice mail. Give me at least an hour advance notice.” He only checks his various SIM chips once an hour.

She glances at her watch. “Forty minutes. You’ll need your camera, unless I’m mistaken.”

Knox is surprised by the timing.

“I’ll come with you to get it,” she says. “And I’ll take your phone until we’re finished.”

“I thought we trusted each other.”

“Why would you think that?”

“You’ve confided in me.”

“Have I?”

He thinks of her meeting with the scarf woman. “As far as I know you have.”

“Stick to the arrangement.” She holds out her hand. “I will return it after our appointment.”

“You’d better turn off your own first,” he says, passing her the iPhone. “It’s your phone these people would track, not mine. No one knows me.”

She calls a number from memory and speaks Dutch, telling whoever’s on the other end that she’s on schedule. Knox smells a setup as he contemplates why Sonia Pangarkar would lead him into a trap. She turns off his phone and pockets it.

“How do you know I don’t carry a second phone?” he asks.

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Then we can go now.”

She pulls a beige scarf up over her head and leads him out of the back of the pub, a door he should have known existed.

Knox is hit by something hot below the ribs. He’s thrown back and his knees fail and he’s down on the cobblestone. Tourists and pedestrians make room around him, barely breaking stride. A second man grabs Sonia, pulling for her bag. Knox cracks this man’s knee with the sole of his shoe, causing him to cry out and let go of her.

The first guy leads with the cattle prod, lunging at the fallen Knox like a swordsman. He wears a shiny black leather jacket and designer jeans. Knox rolls into the cobblestone lane and chops at the hand holding the cattle prod. He manages to force a miss, but fails to dislodge it. He’s hit in the right arm, and his arm goes instantly numb. His head spins. The device is designed to punish but not knock him unconscious. It’s riot gear, either stolen or bought on the black market, or the guy’s a cop.

Knox has use of only his left arm.

Sonia kicks the man who’s down.

“Go!” Knox manages.

She’s off at a run.

Knox pulls on a leg nearest him. A woman in her twenties falls across him and takes the brunt of the next burst of voltage. She tries to scream, but no sound comes out. Knox pulls his legs out from under her and drags himself across the cobbles.

Two guys attack the man with the cattle prod. Friends of the fallen woman. They go at him with haymakers. They’re rugby types, and drunk enough to want the fight. Knox keeps back-pedaling, one-armed, awaiting any sensation in his legs. When the tingling arrives, he draws himself to his feet and limps off in the direction Sonia ran. By the wet, thumping sounds behind him, the ruggers are winning.

Knox rounds the corner and nearly coldcocks Sonia as she grabs him by the arm. She leads him down into a waiting boat, the engine running, and they speed off in a water taxi.

“What the hell?” Sonia shouts over the motor.

John Steele can’t say what he’s thinking: police . The look of the guy, the leather jacket and jeans. The fact that he’d checked all three SIMs when just outside the bar, prior to the meeting. He’d given one of his numbers to Brower. He wants to trust the chief inspector, but he doesn’t trust the sergeant who first interviewed him, or the superintendent who busted him. John Steele can’t know any of this.

“They must have been after you,” he says, “but wanted to neutralize me first.”

“It didn’t seem that way.”

“I don’t think you’re paying me enough.” She isn’t paying him anything.

“If you want to quit, I understand.”

“Are you kidding? We just confirmed this is a hot story. I’m in.”

“I can talk to my editor. Maybe he can offer our per diem. Not that that helps all that much. Our paper is very cheap.”

“They wanted your bag,” Knox says.

She clutches it firmly.

“You should back up to the cloud and you should erase stuff once you do. You can’t leave anything important on your laptop. They’re clearly coming after your laptop.” He hopes a photographer would say things like this. “I’m something of a tech nerd.”

“I am not so good. You can show me how?”

He contrasts this with Grace, who is capable of hacking high-level systems, who rarely admits her limitations. He’s concerned he should think of her, wonders why it’s happening.

“Yes,” he says. “No problem.”

The yellow water taxi works through the labyrinth of canals that expand out from city center like concentric ring roads. Knox requests a stop near his hotel. He leaves Sonia waiting in the water taxi. A historical plaque on the hotel doorway steals his thought. He’d rather not be reminded at a time like this of the city’s history. But one can’t pick such things. The city dates back eight hundred years to a bridge built by fishermen. They put doors on the bridge creating a dam, holding back the spring floods of the IJ. The protected town became important to the shipment of beer, and eventually grain from the north. But it was a religious miracle that made it a place of pilgrimage, elevating its population and importance. Now it is seen more as Europe’s city of sin; the turnabout strikes him as ironic and even sad.