In Tall Man’s hands now were his cigarettes and disposable lighter — answering the minor question of what he’d reached for in his pocket. He shook a cigarette out of the pack, put it in his mouth, put away the pack, and flicked the lighter. Ricci saw a spark, but no flame. Tall Man hunched against the wind by the van, cupped a palm over the head of the lighter, tried again to get his smoke going. It still didn’t fire up. After a minute he ditched the exhausted lighter with an obviously annoyed shake of his head.
Ricci watched him stride across the motel’s guest lot into the office, the unlit cigarette poking from his mouth, his frustration explained by a prominent no-smoking sign on the office window.
Less than ten minutes later, he walked back along the deck to his corner room and let himself through its door with a key-card.
Ricci sat for a long while, on the look again. It was about the time of night when his thoughts would start getting away from him lately, turn all sorts of wrong corners, but it helped to be concentrating on the action, to be mentally outside himself, and he was hoping he’d be okay without needing anything else to keep his head straight. He saw the driver who’d been gassing up at the pump return to his car — it was a late-model Buick, similar to his requisition — make a K-turn out of the station, drive across into the McDonald’s parking lot, exit the car, and head into the restaurant. He saw the lights go on behind Tall Man’s drawn curtains, and after fifteen minutes or so saw them go off — bedtime. Chances were the U-Haul didn’t have a theft alarm, and Ricci visualized himself breaking into it in the darkness of the lot, getting into the cargo section with his digital camera… a notion he might have seriously entertained if the van hadn’t been parked right outside Tall Man’s window, where the chances were too great he’d see or hear something.
Ricci leaned forward, meshed his hands over the steering column. Even as he’d dismissed the one idea as wishful thinking, another had taken shape for him. There was something to what Noriko Cousins had said about not trying to do too much, though in a different sense than she’d meant it. If he couldn’t find out what the dark-suits had loaded into the van, maybe he could still learn something about any personal freight Tall Man might be carrying with him.
He let another few minutes pass, keeping an eye out for anybody in the motel lot, or on its ground floor decks, or on its upper-level terraces. Watching for anybody who might be looking out the office window, or any sign of movement anywhere around or in front of the place. When none came up, he got a small brown-paper evidence bag out of his glove box and crossed the road.
The faint neon gleam of the motel sign at the lot’s entrance was enough to reveal the shape of Tall Man’s ditched lighter — a plastic Bic — on the ground near the left front tire of the U-Haul.
Ricci waited a second, alert. No doors opened. No lights came on. Nothing happened to surprise him.
He crouched, picked up the lighter, and dropped it into the bag. He folded the top of the bag over once, a second time, peeled off the adhesive label, and stuck it on over the double fold to seal it. Then he put the envelope in his coat pocket and quickly backtracked to the fast-food joint’s parking lot.
Ricci noticed that the guy in the baseball cap and mackinaw had returned to his Buick and seemed to be dozing, leaning against the headrest with his eyes shut, his seat semi-reclined. Instead of going over to his own car, he strode over to where the guy was parked across the lot and rapped his knuckles on the Buick’s roof to get his attention.
The guy opened his eyes, sat up straight, looked out his window. Ricci put on a smile, gestured toward his own car, made a winding gesture in the air, and he lowered it.
“Something I can do for you?” the guy said, shifting around behind the wheel to face him.
Ricci nodded, and as he did, moved slightly closer to the driver’s door and shot a right jab through the open window, getting most of his arm and shoulder into it, connecting hard with the side of his chin. The driver grunted with pain and surprise as his head snapped back, his hand going up to his face.
“You’re out of your goddamned mind,” he said.
“Rather be that than the one who got made,” Ricci said, and held out his palm. “Come on, show me your tag.”
The driver sat there massaging his chin.
“Up yours,” he said.
Ricci had kept his hand out.
“Your tag,” he said. “Either show it to me, or I can run a check on you. But I have to go to the trouble, you better believe I’ll have you busted down.”
The guy looked at Ricci a second, frowning. Then he dropped his hand from his chin, got a cardholder out of his mackinaw, and passed it out the window.
Ricci flipped it open, studied the UpLink Security ID card inside, read the name below its holographic Sword insignia.
“Bennett,” he said, repeating it aloud. “Cousins put you on me, or you pick me up on stakeout over at Kiran?”
The op stared out the window.
“You’re so smart, California, figure it out,” he said.
Ricci looked at him in silence.
“Atta boy,” he said. “Wouldn’t want a demerit on the report card.”
“Yeah, well, screw you, too.”
Ricci’s smile was cutting.
“Here’s one you can answer,” he said. “That van… it going to stay in sight?”
“What do you think?”
“I meant after your shift ends.”
“I know what the hell you meant.”
Ricci looked at him another moment, reached into his pocket for the sealed evidence bag, handed it through the window with the cardholder.
“I want what’s in the bag tested for prints right away… I’m talking first thing in the morning,” he said. “You ever try tailing me again, you might want to be smarter yourself, use a car I won’t have seen in the same req lot where I got mine.”
Bennett looked at him, flexed his jaw.
“Thanks for the advice, hump,” he said.
Ricci pulled into a public rest stop shortly before reaching the large barrier toll plaza between I-87 and the southbound Garden State Parkway to Manhattan.
In the empty parking area outside the visitor’s building, he got his palmtop out of a utility pocket in his tac vest and typed out a brief e-mail, addressing it to a Yahoo mobile account: O.W.K.Ready to meet tomorrow. Where and when — preference?R.
He sat for perhaps ten minutes afterward, staring at the computer screen, considering whether to hit SEND or DELETE on his keyboard.
Curtain number one, curtain number two, he thought. You bet your life.
Finally, his choice made, Ricci brought up the computer’s WiFi interface and zipped off his message.
He could almost feel the lion’s breath as he did.
Malisse’s elevator was dangerously out of control.
At first everything had seemed normal. He’d stepped inside alone, pushed the button for the tenth floor, and leaned back against the rear of the car as it rose. To his surprise, it had stopped on the third without opening either its inner or outer doors. When he’d pushed the DOOR OPEN button to get them to retract, his car had plunged down the shaft so sharply his stomach had lurched into his throat, jolted to a halt midway between the first and second floors, then reversed itself and shot up to the fifth. Again the doors had stayed shut, trapping Malisse behind them. Again he pushed ten on the number pad, repeatedly jabbing the button with his finger until his car had seemed to resume normal operation, its indicator lights telling him he’d begun to move up the shaft. Six, seven, eight, nine, and coming level with ten….