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He turned and walked to the door. As he opened it, a hot gust from the outside caught his left cuff, raising it briefly. Above the pricey loafer on his foot, I saw something that looked like it was out of a Terminator movie. A lower-limb prosthetic, very high-tech, titanium and graphite. He definitely hadn’t received it through the average health-care plan. I had read about ones embedded with a microprocessor that were worn by wounded soldiers.
When I looked up again, I saw him watching me watching him. The yellow eyes hated me.
3
“Feeling guilty?”
I did a little. I walked to the front window and raised the blind. Felix the Cat was sitting in a Mercedes Benz CL, silver, new, insolently bouncing back the sun’s glare. The driver’s window was down. Who needs air conditioning when it’s only 108? He had a cell phone against his head and he was talking animatedly, very different from the stone-like expression he had mostly shown us. He didn’t look happy.
“A rig like he had on his leg would only be issued to a disabled veteran.” Peralta made more notes as he spoke, his large head and shoulders hunched over the desk.
I let the blind fall and turned back toward him. “The cartel could afford it.” I told him about the car, which was not issued by the V.A.
He looked up. “Mapstone, you see Zetas and Sinaloa in your sleep.” His tone softened subtly. “Which is understandable, after what you went through.”
Yes, I was jumpy. But I saw other things in my sleep.
“I can guarantee you that Chapo Guzman doesn’t even know who you are,” Peralta went on. Chapo was the boss of the Sinaloa federation. And maybe he didn’t. But his lieutenants did.
“Did you catch the tat?” I asked.
He nodded and went back to writing. “Everybody has tattoos now.”
“Do you?”
“Maybe.” No smile. This passed for raucous Mike Peralta humor. I didn’t laugh.
“We shouldn’t take this case.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I prowled around the small room, absently slid out a file drawer, closed it. “He paid in cash.”
Peralta opened the envelope and counted. He peeled off five grand and held it out to me. The bills looked as if they had come out of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving that morning. I made no move to retrieve them. Someday soon I would need to set up an accounting and tax system in the computer if we were actually going to have a PI business.
Peralta gently tapped the Ben Franklins. “Paying clients are nice.”
“Cash,” I persisted. “Who pays in cash? A criminal.”
“That’s why you’re going to run a background check.”
This was a man who until recently had bossed around hundreds of deputies and civilian employees. Now only I was available. I made no move to pick up the phone. “He says his last name is Smith. Smith? Right.”
“Some people are actually named Smith.” He left my share of the retainer on his desk and slid the envelope containing the remainder into his suit-coat pocket.
“And his sister has a different last name?”
“Families are complicated nowadays. Lindsey and Robin had different last names.”
Bile started up my windpipe. Lindsey and Robin. I wanted to curse him. I bit my tongue, literally. It worked. I gained deeper knowledge about the provenance of a clichéd expression. And I said nothing.
Peralta, typically, bulled ahead. “How is Lindsey?”
“Fine.” How the hell should I know? She’s only my wife, a continent away physically and even further in the geography of the heart.
“When did you talk to her last?”
I told him I called her on Sunday. I called her every Sunday, timing it so I would catch her around noon in D.C.
