LJ Idol 9.32.1: Wrong place, wrong time...

The shooter walked in through the door fast, raised his pistol, and smartly put a round through the clerk's left eyeball before turning his attention to me. Normally, that'd be the way to do it─nail the guy standing next to the alarm button first─but it wasn't the right plan for that day in that particular place, because I had a throwing knife in my hand when he came in, and it was in the air by the time the killer's arm was absorbing the pistol's recoil. The tip of my knife missed all the arteries and cartilaginous tissue in the shooter's neck, driving through his spinal column instead. The gunman fell quickly, his eyes displaying a mixture of resolve and determination, with just a tinge of surprise. He may have wanted to get another round off at me in those last few seconds of life, but it wasn't going to happen.

It was the beginning of November, and I was in town after completing a successful job doping out a scam involving a schooner named Rapture of the Deep as it darted between ports in the Adriatic Sea. The grateful client's bonus made it possible for me to visit this so-called "spy shop," which catered to investigative specialists like me, where I was checking out the latest styles in protective Kevlar vests when my attention was drawn by the knife I had ended up using. I bent down to take a closer look at the dead guy, but didn't recognize him, or at least that part of his face that I could see. Male, white, fit, right-handed, in his late twenties or early thirties, black hair, five o'clock shadow, well-groomed, wearing a hooded warmup suit and high-end running shoes. Given that his weapon was a suppressed Glock 20, I concluded the shooter was no casual thug.

I toyed with the idea of searching the dead guy, but decided against it. Places like this had surveillance systems in operation, and since this was a spy shop, it was a pretty good bet that there was a tap somewhere between the cameras and the recording unit that went offsite somewhere, so that if someone was able to get to the store's recorder and swipe the recording medium, there'd still be a record of what happened that could be turned over to the cops to serve the cause of justice, or to a private "consultant" to make things right some other way.

And since I wasn't working on any project just now─and since my face was undoubtedly on the surveillance stream─it didn't make sense to go out of my way and make trouble for myself with the local cops. My story—and it would be easy to stick to it because it happened to be true—would be that this was a simple case of self-defense by a currently unemployed private investigator. I used my handkerchief to pick up the store's phone and dialed 911.

I went through the standard rigmarole with the first two cops that arrived on the scene─a salt-and-pepper pair of patrol drones─who came at me with their guns drawn and ordering me about in too-loud voices. After making sure I wasn't armed and so on, I ended up cooling my heels in the back of their car, where I entertained myself by checking out the crowd that had gathered outside the yellow tape the patrol guys had put up to create a cops-only zone, and I waited for someone with a little more authority to show up.

Someone finally did, a detective named Smith. He pulled open the front door of the patrol car and planted himself sideways to me in the front seat, with his feet resting on the pavement. He was carefully examining my wallet, as if it was a prayer book worthy of careful reading and rereading.

"Quentin Macauley," he said. His inflection didn't change, but the way he said my name made it a question.

"That's me," I said.

"According to this identification card, you're a licensed private investigator, but not in this jurisdiction." He looked up at me through the grate that was installed between the back and front seats.

"That I am," I said. "And yes, not in this jurisdiction."

"Are you aware that there are no substantive reciprocity agreements between here and where you live concerning private investigators?" he said.

"I don't doubt it," I said. "Then again, I'm not here as a private investigator. The fact is, I'm a tourist in your fair city, Detective."

"Uh-huh." The way Smith made the sound said he wasn't buying my answer.

"Must everyone in your city be working on something all the time? Hell, my life over the past few days is an open book," I said. "Check it out yourself, if you aren't doing so already. I got back from an overseas trip three days ago and have generally been goofing off in your fine metropolis, jump-starting my wardrobe, visiting steak houses, art galleries, and any place that strikes my fancy. To be frank, I'm not even sure I've used my cell the past three days, except to check email."

Smith looked at me for a few moments, then proceeded to ask the same series of questions the patrol cops had asked, about the sequence of events that had left the clerk in a huddled heap behind the counter and the shooter dead on the floor at my feet. Once I'd finished describing what had happened, Smith asked the question he'd been wanting to ask all along.

"So how did you just happen to end up in that spy shop just when someone happened to go in and start shooting up the place?"

"I have no idea," I said. "Wrong place, wrong time, as far as I can tell. That'd be my guess, anyway."

Smith said nothing, but he bared his upper incisors and nervously started flicking his thumbnail against them.

"The dead guy with the knife in his throat," said Smith, "you ever see him before?"

"Nope," I said, "but then again, I didn't move him around after he fell. I can only imagine how upset law enforcement can get when crime scenes are contaminated."

"Uh-huh," said Smith again, and continued to flick his thumbnail and look at me through the grating.

I said nothing, and we stayed that way for a couple of minutes. Smith turned his attention to the wallet again.

"You have any enemies? People who might seriously consider popping you?" he asked.

"Consider it seriously? No," I said. "Nobody back home and certainly nobody here. Whatever the shooter's reason for hitting that shop, it wasn't me."

I could see the gears turning in Smith's mind as he considered my answer. His thumbnail paused.

"That knife in the throat, by the way," said Smith, "that was a pretty precise piece of work. Not the kind of skill you'd expect out of your average PI from out your way." He left the question unasked.

"Two tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, working with local fighters," I said, by way of explanation. "I picked up what I could. It turns out I was an apt student." I hoped I didn't sound smug.

"Uh-huh," said Smith. "Your knife?" he continued, stressing the first word.

"No," I said. "I happened to see the knife in the display case and asked to see it."

An officer walked up to the car. Smith stood up and whispers passed between the two. The officer then took his leave and, after a moment, Smith sat back down sideways in the front seat.

"Aside from making the emergency call," he said, "did you touch anything else after putting down the shooter?"

"No," I said.

Smith gave a little nod. "Then I don't suppose you have any idea what happened to the disk from the surveillance recorder, do you?" he said. My eyebrows went up just a fraction of an inch.

"No, I don't," I said, "and I certainly didn't take it. Maybe the clerk was sloppy and didn't put a new one in when the old one got full?"

"We'll find out soon enough," said Smith. "You planning on staying in town for a while?" he said.

"I had planned on a few more days," I said.

"The key card in your pocket says you're staying at one of the ritzier places in town," he said.

It wasn't a question, so I provided no answer.

"Hotel confirms you're registered there, too." He was letting me know he checked. "You planning on staying there?"

"Yes."

"Okay. You're free to go, but if you change hotels, or plan on leaving town early, let me know, got it?" he said. He handed me his business card.

---

Continue with Part 2...

LJ Idol 9.32.2: Hounds and fox...

If you have not read my post for LJ Idol 9.32.1,
(the other half of this week's "assignment")
please click the above link and read that post first!

---

My body was relaxed as I walked away from the yellow crime-scene tape toward the nearest subway stop, but my mind was racing. What had I interrupted? Had my being in the shop caused or contributed to what happened? If so, why, and who might it be that was after me? And after everything else—or maybe before—why was there no disk in the surveillance recorder?

I had spent enough time sitting in the claustrophobic back seat of the cop car, so I chose to stand while riding the nearly empty subway going uptown. And wouldn't you know it, the same rather nondescript guy in a gray newsboy hat and gray overcoat, whom I had seen standing next to a knockout redhead back behind the police tape, was in the car behind mine, also standing and faced sideways, reading a newspaper.

Was this guy tailing me? Maybe. On the other hand, I was on a train traveling on one of the main subway lines that passed through the vicinity of the shop, so there was a pretty good chance that being on the same train as the man in gray was coincidental.

Still, I got off the train a half dozen stops past where I needed to go and walked briskly up to street level. I was in the posh midtown section, which was all but deserted at this time of day. The streets were lined with storefronts offering the daytime crowd every manner of conspicuous consumption. A few dozen yards from the subway exit, I stopped to admire a window of Japanese shubusa pottery displayed sparingly within, with no price tags in evidence (a sure sign I was in "if you gotta ask, you can't afford it" country), but I quickly focused my gaze past the window, onto the reflected image of the subway's exit.

After a few moments, the man in gray came into view. He had ditched the paper and had a cell phone up to his ear. I decided I was through with giving the guy the benefit of the doubt, reclassified him as a likely hostile, and decided that, in his place, I'd be on the horn calling for reinforcements. I casually resumed my walk down the street and when I got to the end of the block, I looked around the corner and was happy to see an unoccupied cab. I flagged it down, got in, and instructed the driver to turn up the avenue I had been walking on just a moment before, taking me past the man in gray. As we drove past, my tail got a good look at the hack's number, but I got a good photo of him we drove by. It was an even trade, in my book.

I had given the driver the name of a midtown hotel a good distance away from where I was staying, with the idea that by the time whoever it was that was interested in me tracked down the cabbie and found out where he had dropped me off, I'd be back at my hotel enjoying a nightcap down in the bar and figuring out what to do with the photo of the man in gray. However, about five minutes into my fare, the driver answered a call that came in on his cell, and after a few mumbled exchanges, the guy behind the wheel stiffened a little and involuntarily glanced at me in the rear-view mirror. I was getting a bad feeling.

When we stopped at a red light, I asked him, "Was that your dispatcher?"

"Excuse me?" said the driver in a strong accent. The accent was so thick, it led me to believe that my driver wished to convey the impression that he had developed a sudden inability to communicate in English, a condition that had not been manifest when we had spoken upon my entering his vehicle.

"Cut it out," I said. "On the phone. That your dispatcher, right? And he wanted to know where you were taking me, right?"

His reaction answered my question.

"And he probably said something that made you think badly of me, am I right?"

My driver tried to smile, apologetically. And failed.

"Did you tell your dispatcher where you were taking me?" I asked. The driver tried another smile. And failed again.

It was time for a change of plan. Sort of.

"Take me the long way," I said, after a minute.

"What?" said my driver. "What do you mean?"

"I want you to drive around for a while before you take me to my hotel," I said. "I need to make some phone calls." I shoved two hundred dollar bills through the slot to him. "That should cover it." I don't know what the driver had been told about me, but the sight of those two Franklins significantly eased the tension from the driver's side of the cab.

Still, I kept a wary eye out on the driver as I took out my cell, looked up an email, sent off the photo, and then made a rather lengthy call. After I hung up, I instructed the driver to go directly to my real hotel instead of the hotel I had instructed him to deliver me to. Saying "You can keep the change," ensured the fastest and most direct route as there was an opportunity to turn most of a hundred dollar bill into a tip.

I had changed my destination because I had concluded that anyone who could so quickly track my cab could easily check if I was registered with the hotel I had originally instructed the driver to take me to. When they found out I wasn't registered there, I was sure they'd call around the other hotels in the area using some pretext until they found me. They would expect me to show up with my guard down, feeling that I had pulled one over on them. I was confident, however, that my arrangements would turn the tables.

I felt naked and exposed as I stepped out of the cab, so I strode quickly and purposefully through the entrance doors into the lobby. I did a quick scan of the place as I approached the front desk, and in my peripheral vision, I caught sight of the man in gray sitting on a couch. His hat and coat were on a low table next to him, and he seemed to be again engaged in reading a newspaper. Suddenly, he folded the paper up and dropped it onto the floor, at which point I felt more than saw two things happen.

First, the redhead who had been standing next to the man in gray at the crime scene appeared from behind the elevator banks, walking directly toward me with a raincoat draped over her right forearm, awkwardly covering her hand. I was pretty sure what she was holding in that hand, and wished I had that throwing knife from earlier in the evening in my possession.

Second—to cries of "Freeze!"—both the woman and the man in gray found themselves looking down the barrels of pistols held by plainclothes police officers. The pair surrendered quietly.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see Detective Smith.

"I see you have matters well in hand," I said.

"Thanks for the call," said Smith. "I appreciate you not trying to work this one on your own. It's enough to renew one's faith in the private investigative profession, or whatever you people call yourselves." I said nothing, but extended my hand. We shook.

"We checked your room here and I've asked the security guys to keep an eye on the camera covering your hall, to make sure there'd be no unpleasant surprises for you when you got back," Smith continued, and then handed me a room card. "Still, I did as you requested and registered a room under my name, to be billed to your account. I must say, you're one careful fella, for a tourist."

I cracked a crooked smile and said nothing. You can never be too careful.

"Anyway, sleep tight," said Smith, "Stay in touch and I'll keep you in the loop about what we learn about what happened tonight."

I thanked him, took the key and headed off to the elevators. Unanswered questions remained, but it was late, and I was confident they would be cleared up over time.