Guilty Minds

He looked up and saw me and stopped dialing. His ears, I noticed, were cauliflowered. He was a boxer. It took a beat or two for him to recognize me as the guy who’d been sitting with Kayla. I could see his face go through a whole series of reactions, as gradual as a cartoon: suspicion, slow-dawning recognition, hostility, aggression. He was not a quick thinker.

“You screwed up, man,” I said.

“The hell you talking about?” His voice was high and choked.

“The way she gave you the slip. The boss isn’t going to like that.”

He squinted, and his face went through another series of reactions: bafflement, more suspicion, anger. Like: who the hell are you?

I said, “Yeah, you’re shadowing her, I’m shadowing you. Operations assessment, call it.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Call the boss and see. Go ahead. Call him right now, come on.”

The bald guy hesitated, frowned, then held up his cell phone. He looked at it and punched a couple of keys.

I shot my right arm out and grabbed at his phone, but his reflexes were quicker than his cognition, and he closed his left fist over the phone so I wasn’t able to wrench it out of his hand. In the next instant, he jabbed his right fist toward my abdomen, at center mass, aiming for my solar plexus. A boxer for sure. Good technique. I torqued my body to one side so that his fist missed, just grazing my midriff. He was clutching his phone in his left hand, which handicapped him, limiting him to his right hand.

Boxers are trained to punch as hard and fast as possible, and they follow gym rules. One of the rules is that you don’t kick your opponent in the balls. Which is exactly what I did, slamming the stiff leather toe of my brogue hard into his crotch, sinking in, connecting with a sickening crunch.

There are no rules in street fights.

For a moment he looked stunned. He made a low oof sound. His right fist loosened, then the phone dropped from his left fist, and he crabbed forward and collapsed into a heap. I could hear the breath expelled from his lungs. He was all folded into himself, and he clutched his sides, letting out a high-pitched, almost feminine squeal, as the freight train of agony came at him a hundred miles an hour and he was vaulted into a realm of unworldly pain, like nothing else a man will ever experience, a pain that would crescendo and then explode, reducing him to a pile of limp rags.

I snatched up his phone from the sidewalk where it had clattered a few seconds before, and I jammed a hand into his hip pocket and extracted his wallet. Then I raced away for a block or two before I slowed down to a walk and disappeared into the crowds.

13

Still a little light-headed from the surge of adrenaline that was only slowly dissipating, I ducked into a Panera and sat at a table and examined the phone, a cheap no-brand throwaway. It looked okay, a bit scuffed up but not damaged by dropping to the sidewalk. An iPhone may be more secure, but it also would have had a shattered screen. Not this thing. The advantages of a cheap phone.

The bald guy had punched in a speed-dial sequence of digits but hadn’t had a chance to hit Send. The saved number he was about to call was identified as Home Base. As in “base of operations.” He was checking in with his boss, his controller.

Which meant that I now had his boss’s phone number. Which was a potentially significant piece of intelligence. Whoever was watching her-either to check up on where she went, because she was unreliable, or to protect her-was a phone call away.

Now at least I understood why Kayla had seemed so scared: she was being followed, openly and obviously. In a way meant to menace.

I pocketed the phone to use later and examined the guy’s wallet. His name was Curtis Schmidt, and he was a Maryland resident with about a hundred dollars in twenties, a small sheaf of credit cards, a health-plan card, and a state of Maryland license to carry Class A large capacity firearms.

Then I found something extremely interesting.

It was an ID card issued by the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police with a red stripe on it. It said that Curtis Schmidt was a police sergeant, retired.

Kayla was being followed by an ex-cop.

I thought about Kayla some more. I’ve learned to trust my instincts at reading people. She was lying, that seemed a certainty. But what was especially intriguing was how smoothly she was lying. Her lies were plausible, well thought out and well studied and expertly memorized. Her lies were built to withstand media scrutiny. She had been well prepared.

Figuring that the bald guy was out of commission for a while, I stayed in Panera and made a few calls on my new iPhone.

I glanced at my watch. Twenty-two hours remained. Time was slipping away.

Unfortunately, I had a lot of questions and not much time to answer them.

Who was behind Slander Sheet? Who owned it? If I could find out who owned Slander Sheet, I’d be closer to finding out who was spearheading the effort to destroy Claflin.