“Twenty-five minutes,” Darrel replied. He clicked off his cell phone and dropped it on the floor of the Honda. “Piece of cake.”
“You really think Karsten Mabus is going to come downtown and write you a check?” she said.
“If he wants to stay alive. Wait here just a minute.” He went inside the convenience store and returned with a large container of black coffee. “Nothing like it to get the day started,” he said.
They drove into Missoula, passing the old military fort that resembled Scofield Barracks in Hawaii, where Darrel had once been stationed. They crossed the new bridge over the Clark Fork, one that was lined with carriage lamps mounted on stanchions. Down below, Darrel could see the smooth rush of green water through the pilings, rafters bouncing through the current, and off to the left a sandlot baseball diamond couched between the bridge and the riverbank. This might be a hard place to let go of, he thought. He rolled down the window and let the coolness and smell of the morning blow into his face.
“You look mighty pleased with yourself,” Greta said.
“When you add it all up and it comes out to zero, you got to take your kicks where you can,” he said. “That make sense to you, Greta?”
“I don’t know what I ever saw in you,” she replied.
He waited until they were at the red light before he stared directly into her face. “Say that again?”
“We had fun for a while, didn’t we? It wasn’t all bad,” she said. She let her eyes rove over his face. “Maybe there’s still time.”
The light changed. “You almost had me going,” he said.
He pulled into the alley behind Brendan Merwood’s law firm and parked between two nineteenth-century brick buildings. Then, with his large Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand, he and Greta entered the back door.
Merwood had two law partners, but both of their offices were empty and the receptionist and secretary who usually worked behind a curved counter in front were gone as well. “Hello?” Darrel said.
Merwood stepped out of his office, porcine, solid, wearing a striped shirt with French cuffs, his brown skin shining as though it had been rubbed with tanning lotion. “Sit down. Please,” he said. When he smiled his mouth had the dislocated stiffness of a patient in a dentist’s chair.
The Venetian blinds were closed, the soft tones of the walls, carpet, and furniture even softer in the muted light, the interior of the office humming with the sound of the air-conditioning vents.
“Where’s Mabus?” Darrel said.
Merwood didn’t answer. Instead, three men wearing business suits came out of Merwood’s conference room. Darrel remembered having seen one of them at his health club, a silent, lean-bodied man with silver hair who had smacked the heavy bag with murderous intensity.
“What’s this?” Darrel said.
“We need to make sure everybody’s operating in a pristine environment here,” Merwood said.
“You know the routine,” the man with silver hair said. His accent was East Coast, from the streets, an over-the-hill wiseass who’d moved west after the collapse of the Mob, Darrel thought.
Darrel set down his coffee container on the counter, then placed his hands on each side of it. He spread his legs slightly, looking back over his shoulder. “I’m carrying, so don’t get excited,” he said.
He felt the man with silver hair pull the Beretta from the holster clipped onto Darrel’s belt and slide the sap and switchblade out of his side pockets. The silver-haired man’s hands groped Darrel in the scrotum, between the buttocks, between his thighs, and down both legs, retrieving the .25 hideaway and its Velcro-strap holster from Darrel’s right ankle.
“This guy’s a walking torture chamber,” the man with silver hair said.
But Darrel was not paying attention to the man with silver hair. He was watching the other two security men as they searched Greta Lundstrum. They had told her to place her hands up against the wall and spread her feet, but they seemed to a
void touching her body in an invasive way, at least to any greater degree than was necessary. One man gingerly touched the inside of her thigh and stepped back.
“You want to deliver it up?” he said.
“Look the other way and I might,” she said.
With her back to them, she lifted her skirt slightly, bent over, and untaped the recorder Darrel had put on her earlier.
“We were hoping to have reciprocal trust here, Mr. McComb, but that fact seems to have eluded you,” Brendan Merwood said.
“That’s a recorder, not a wire. It’s just backup. This isn’t a sting,” Darrel said.
“And you want to sell Karsten Mabus the whereabouts of Johnny American Horse?”