Backfire
Page 34

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.”
Eve poked him in the ribs. “You’re telling me you never pray when you’re stopped dead on one of those Pacific Heights inclines?”
He shook his head and gave a tug on her ponytail. “I guess you drive a wuss automatic.”
“And I’m proud of it.”
“Siles’s law firm has the entire eighteenth floor,” Savich said. “There are a total of ten equity partners, a gazillion assistants, lawyers, and secretaries on salary. I verified Siles is in, but I didn’t make an appointment; better to catch him by surprise. It seems a lot of folk work on Saturdays, including Silas’s secretary. Harry, this guy knows you very well. Eve, how about you?”