Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

“I understand.”

“What was it Mr. Schneider wanted you to ask me?” he asked.

“He said I should see if I could find out if you would consider subletting one of your garages.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I need one for the Jaguar, and my other car belongs to the city, and that has to be kept in a garage.”

“Why?” It was not a challenge, but simple curiosity.

“Well, there’s a couple of very expensive radios in it that the city doesn’t want to have boosted.”

“Boosted? You mean stolen?”

“Right.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “I’ll tell Mel.”

She got off the couch, displaying a large and not at all unattractive area of inner thigh in the process.

“Well,” she said. “I’ll let you go.”

He followed her to the door, aware that as a gentleman he should not be paying as much attention as he was to her naked gluteus maximus, which was peeking out the hem of her shorts.

“Naomi,” he said, as he pulled the door open for her, “when you talk to your husband about me, would you tell him that I would consider it a favor if he didn’t spread it around that I’m a cop?”

“I won’t even tell him.”

“Well, you don’t have to go that far.”

“There’s a lot of things I don’t tell Mel,” Naomi said, softly.

And then her fingers brushed his crotch. Peter pulled away, in a reflex action, and had just decided it was an accidental contact, when that theory was disproved. Naomi’s fingers followed his retreating groin, found what she was looking for, and gave it a gentle squeeze.

“See you around, Peter,” she said, looking into his eyes. Then she let go of him, laughed, and went quickly down the stairs.

SEVEN

Peter Wohl glanced at the fuel gauge of the Ford LTD as he turned the ignition key off in the parking lot on Walnut Street near the DaVinci Restaurant. The needle was below E; he was running on the fumes. Since he had driven only from his apartment here, that meant that it had been below E when he had arrived home; and that meant he had come damned close to running out of gas on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, or on the Schuylkill Expressway, which would have been a disaster. It would have given him the option of radioing for a police wrecker to bring him gas, which would have been embarrassing, or getting drowned in the torrential rain trying to walk to a gas station. Drowned and/or run over.

Periodically in his life, Wohl believed, he seemed to find himself walking along the edge of a steep cliff, a crumbling cliff, with disaster a half-step away. He was obviously in that condition now. The gas gauge seemed to prove that; and so did Naomi of the traveling husband and groping fingers. And, he decided, he probably wasn’t going to like at all what Mike Sabara had on his mind.

He got out of the car, and locked it, aware that when he got back in it, the inside temperature would be sizzling; that he would sweat, and his now natty and freshly pressed suit would be mussed when he went to see Chief Coughlin. And he had a gut feeling that was going to be some sort of a disaster, too. It wasn’

t very likely that Coughlin was going to call him in on a day off to tell him what a splendid job he had been doing and why didn’t he take some time off as a reward.

A quick glance around the parking lot told him that Sabara wasn’t here yet. He would have spotted a marked Highway Patrol car immediately, and even if Sabara was in an unmarked car, he would have spotted the radio antenna and black-walled tires.

And, he thought, as he walked into the DaVinci, if what Coughlin was after was to hear how his current investigation was going, the reason he had been in Harrisburg, he wasn’t going to come across as Sherlock Holmes, either. The only thing two days of rooting around in the Pennsylvania Department of Records had produced was a couple of leads that were weak at best and very probably would turn out to be worthless.

The DaVinci restaurant, named after the artist/inventor, not the proprietor, served very good food despite what Peter thought of as restaurant theatrics. As a general rule of thumb, he had found that restaurants that went out of their way to convert their space into something exotic generally served mediocre to terrible food. The DaVinci had gone a little overboard, he thought, trying to turn their space into rustic Italian. There were red checkered tableclothes; a lot of phony trellises; plastic grapes; and empty Chianti bottles with candles stuck in their necks. But the food was good, and the people who ran the place were very nice.

He asked for and got a table on the lower level, which gave him a view of both the upper level and the bar just inside the door. The waitress was a tall, pretty young brunette who looked as though she should be on a college campus. Then he remembered hearing that the waitresses in DaVinci’s were aspiring actresses, hoping to meet theatrical people who came to Philly, and were supposed to patronize DaVinci’s.

Her smile vanished when he ordered just coffee.

Or can she tell I’m not a movie producer?

When she delivered his coffee, he handed her a dollar and told her to keep the change. That didn’t seem to change her attitude at all.