The Investigators (Badge of Honor 7)

“Grow up, for Christ’s sake, Charley. You almost got us killed, the way you was driving!”

Martinez got out of the car and walked toward the revolving door.

They had been stopped twice for speeding on their way to Harrisburg. The first time, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Detective McFadden had been at the wheel. In the rather pleasant conversation he had had with the state trooper, the state trooper told him, before waving a friendly farewell, that he had clocked him at eighty-seven miles per hour.

The second time, shortly after they had turned off the turnpike onto 222 and made a piss stop at a diner, Detective Martinez had been at the wheel. In the rather unpleasant conversation he had had with the local cop, Detective Martinez had been told that he had been clocked at sixty-four miles per hour in a fifty-five-mile per hour zone, and that the local cop personally didn’t give a damn for professional courtesy, and that unless he could come up with a better reason for Martinez having exceeded the posted limit than having to get to Harrisburg in a hurry, he was going to write him a ticket.

Charley asked the local cop if he could talk to him a minute, took him behind the car, and managed to talk him out of writing Jesus a ticket, but only on condition that he get back behind the wheel.

Detective Jesus Martinez had thereafter been in a rather nasty mood.

A doorman came out and told Charley he couldn’t leave the car where he’d stopped, and directed him to a parking garage.

Jesus was waiting, impatiently, slumped in an armchair, when, maybe five minutes later, Charley finally walked into the hotel lobby.

He got to his feet when he saw Charley, and motioned toward the bank of elevators.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded when Charley had joined him there.

“I stopped to get laid, okay? Where the fuck do you think?”

“He’s ‘not taking calls.’ Can you believe that shit?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I tried to call him,” Martinez said, and then, in falsetto, quoted the hotel operator: “ ‘I’m sorry, Mister Payne is not taking calls until seven forty-five. May I ask you to call back then?’ ”

Charley was amused—by Jesus’s indignation, his accurate mimicry of the telephone operator’s voice, and by Matt “not taking calls.”

He smiled, which was the wrong thing to do.

“Who the fuck does he think he is?” Jesus demanded indignantly.

“What’s the big deal, Jesus? He wants his sleep.”

“Fuck him and his sleep.”

They rode the sixth floor and got off.

McFadden consulted a well-battered pocket notebook and came up with the room number Inspector Wohl had given him.

“Six twelve,” he said. “To the right.”

There was a room-service cart with breakfast remnants in the corridor outside Suite 612.

“What the fuck is that?” Jesus asked. “He’s too good to eat breakfast in the fucking dining room, right?”

“If it feels good, Jesus, do it,” Charley said. “He can afford it, okay?”

“Knowing your buddy, he’s probably figured some scam to get the department to pay for it.”

There was a brass knocker on the door. Jesus thumped it, several times, and much harder than Charley thought was necessary to attrac

t the attention of someone inside.

When there was no immediate response, Jesus put his hand to the knocker again.

McFadden, who was nearly a foot taller and seventy pounds heavier than Martinez, shouldered him aside.