The Night Detectives (David Mapstone Mystery 7)

She had spilled her purse on the asphalt behind the truck. She knelt down and slowly gathered up her stuff. Now she was most vulnerable, but neither truck door opened.

After an interminable time spent picking up the contents of her purse and slipping them back in, cursing all the time, she finally made it around the berm and slid into the passenger side of the convertible. Peralta nonchalantly backed up and drove in the opposite direction from the freeway, toward the Big Lots store, and disappeared.

I was left to eat my meal for as long as it took for the Dodge Ram to leave. It consumed a leisurely half hour. They left after twenty minutes but I waited longer before I dared move.

My pulse gradually went down. I called Peralta and reported in.

“So what next?”

“Next,” he sa

id, “we go home.”

“I thought you were following them?”

“We are, Mapstone. With you there to help distract him, Lindsey inserted a tracking device inside his rear bumper. She also got a good description of him through the windshield.”

I’m not sure he needed me there. Lindsey did a fine job of distracting him all by herself.

29

I was about to turn south on Third Avenue into Willo when the xylophone sound made me jump. Exactly like before, the digital readout said, UNKNOWN.

I answered professionally. “Fuck you.”

There was a long pause and I thought he might hang up. Then: “You think you’re clever. You think you’re putting the pieces together. But you’re wrong. You can’t solve this case without my help.”

“Why would you help me?”

“I thought we could do business.”

The past tense didn’t give me hope for the baby.

I said, “You’re wasting my time.”

“Lose anything tonight?”

I was silent.

“You better check, absent-minded professor.”

I didn’t say a word. Let him think he outwitted us and found where we were hiding the flash drive, in a motel on the freeway.

Finally, I spoke. “I’m tired of games. Drop a baby doll on me? What does that mean to me?”

I feared what it meant. But I didn’t say it. Instead, I pushed on. “I used to solve historic cases for a living. There was a mobster in Seattle who liked to dispose of his victims by having them pushed out of an airplane into Elliott Bay, while he watched from a skyscraper downtown. Unless you’re him, this call is over.”

“You didn’t like the airplane? I wanted to get your attention. To get you in a bargaining frame of mind. Where would the fun have been if I had just left the package in the vacant lot for you to find? Anyway, if we can drop a baby doll out of an airplane, we can drop other things, too. Just a simple civilian airplane can be quite lethal. Wait until we steal a drone…”

Taking a chance that he was full of his own grandiosity, I said, “I’m hanging up.”

“Wait.”

“For what? I bill by the hour. You’re not mysterious. You’re not scary. You’re an ordinary douchebag. You’re wasting my time.”

“You put up a brave front, professor, but you know it’s over. Because of your carelessness, now you have nothing to bargain with. That’s a good thing for you. I’ll let you and everyone you love live. I got what I want.”

Mustering my best acting, having studied theater under Peralta, I filled my voice with surprise. “You son of a bitch!” As if it was only now dawning on me that I had lost the briefcase.