the concrete support in the six-level Adirondack Plaza parking structure and grabbed Gage as he was leaving to pick up Elaine Hennessy.
A punch to his kidney from the opposite side stunned Gage. He threw an elbow at where he thought the fist came from, but missed, and the two men spun him down to the pavement. They then twisted his wrist behind his back and knelt on him.
“You… got… the wrong… guy,” Gage said. The frozen concrete burned his cheek, and the weight of the men squeezed the air from his lungs. “My name is Graham Gage… and I’m not on bail.” “So you say.”
While the second man held him, Strubb emptied Gage’s pockets, then stood up and laid everything on the trunk of his rental car.
Car doors opened and closed. An elderly couple approached. Strubb flashed a badge at them and said, “I’m a bail agent. This guy skipped out and missed his court date.”
They looked away and hurried on. Strubb flipped open Gage’s ID case. “Who’d you steal the California private eye license from? “
“It’s mine.” “Yeah, right.”
Strubb bent down and compared the picture on the license to Gage’s face. “Good likeness.”
He straightened up and opened the envelope that Elaine had given Gage.
“Coupons?” Strubb said. “You’re a fucking local boy. No out-of-towner would be carrying coupons.”
“Who do you think I am?” Gage asked.
Strubb pulled out a folded piece of paper from the inside pocket of his leather jacket.
“Says here you’re David Michaels and you skipped out on a child-molesting case.”
The second man punched Gage again, and pain daggered into his side. He leaned in close to Gage’s ear and said, “You pervert motherfucker.”
Gage held his breath for a few seconds and gritted his teeth, and then asked, “What’s Michaels look like? “
“Six-two. Two-ten. White guy. Blue. Brown.” Strubb laughed. “I’d say we’ve got a match.”
“Me and a thousand other guys in Albany.”
“Hold on to him,” Strubb told his partner. “Lemme go make a call.”
Strubb walked ten cars away and called Gilbert.
“He’s says his name is Graham Gage and that he’s a-“
“I know who Gage is. Got a big operation out in San Francisco. Lots of international stuff. This guy must’ve stolen his ID. What about the envelope? “
“All it had was coupons.”
“What?”
“Just what I said. Coupons. Grocery store coupons. Cut out of the Albany newspaper.”
“He probably switched out what was in there when he was in his room. Go up there and take a look.”
Strubb slipped the envelope into his back pocket, then returned to where Gage lay and said to his partner, “Hook him up. We’re going to his room.”
After they’d handcuffed Gage and lifted him to his feet, Strubb said, “Just stay cool. If everything checks out, we’ll be on our way in a couple of minutes and you can get on to wherever you were going.” Strubb grinned. “We’ll just call it no harm, no foul.”
Gage decided not to fight them. If they intended to kill him, they’d have stuffed him into a trunk and they’d be on their way to the highway by now. He had the feeling they were just puppets and didn’t have a clue about the purpose of what they were doing or the meaning of what they’d been directed to look for.
Strubb walked close behind Gage to conceal the handcuffs as they walked through the lobby to the elevator and then again down the tenth floor hallway to his room. Strubb opened the door, then pointed Gage toward one of two fabric-covered chairs near the window facing the backlit stained glass of the gothic Episcopal church and the floodlit state capitol beyond.
Gage sat down on the front edge so he wouldn’t be pressing back against his hands and watched them paw through the drawers of the desk and nightstand and then search the closet and his Rollaboard.
Strubb’s partner found a second cell phone in an inside compartment and held it up.
“Why do you need a second one? “
“Taxes. One’s personal and one’s business,” Gage said. The man hadn’t recognized that it was an encrypted model he used to communicate with his office. “I once got audited by the IRS.”
Strubb dropped Gage’s wallet and ID case, along with his keys and the other cell phone, on the desk, and picked up Gage’s portable printer. He turned it over in his hand and set it down again. He then opened and closed the lid of the laptop, not realizing that the printer was also a scanner and that whatever Gage had collected from Elaine, he might’ve hidden on his hard drive.
“No paper in this place at all,” Strubb spoke into his cell phone. “No other ID or nothing.” He fell silent, listening, then pointed back and forth between his partner and Gage.
The partner smirked and then walked between Gage and the window behind him and unlocked the handcuffs.
Gage rose from the chair.
Strubb disconnected the call and slipped the phone into his shirt pocket.
“Sorry man, nothing personal,” Strubb said.
“Why don’t you send your friend outside for a minute?” Gage said, glancing toward Strubb’s partner. “He knows even less than you what this is really about. And it’s better if he stays ignorant. I’d hate to see him go down on a kidnapping.”
Strubb smiled and shook his head. “We ain’t going down on nothing.”
The partner reddened and glared at Strubb. “Kidnapping? What you get me into, Strubb? You said-“
“This guy’s not gonna call the cops,” Strubb said.
“He’s right,” Gage said. “I won’t.”
Strubb jerked his thumb toward the door. “Wait in the hallway.”
His partner shrugged and then walked out.
Gage stepped over to his Rollaboard and searched through it making sure that nothing had been taken, then went to the desk where Strubb was standing. Gage leaned over as if to inventory his possessions, then spun and slammed his fist into Strubb’s side, just below his rib cage. He then faked a jab to the head, and when the man’s hands flew up to block it, dropped him to the carpet with an uppercut to his diaphragm.
Strubb groaned as he rolled onto his side and curled up.
Gage bent over and grabbed Strubb’s cell phone and wallet, then straightened up and glared down at him.
“You make a move and I’ll kick you until I’ve broken every bone in your face.”
“Son of a bitch… I’m gonna-shit this hurts… I’m gonna be pissing blood… for a… for a fucking week.”
Gage called Alex Z at the office in San Francisco and read off the numbers in the memory of Strubb’s phone and the personal data on his driver’s license.
“See what you can find out about them,” Gage told Alex Z and then disconnected.
Gage looked down at Strubb. “Whose numbers are the last ones you called?”
“Fuck you.”
“The only reason I didn’t hit you in the eye socket is that I didn’t want to damage my hand,” Gage said. “I’m not so concerned about my shoes. Worse that happens, they get a little bloody.” Strubb didn’t answer.
“My guy is working on it now,” Gage said. “No reason to get yourself kicked in the head for something I’ll find out anyway.”
“Jesus-fucking-Christ this hurts… Gilbert. Tony Gilbert. Works out of New York City.”
“How’d you hook up with him?”
“A referral from a PI who hires me to do little jobs once in a while.”
“Like kidnapping.”
Strubb grunted as he sat up, and then leaned back against the side of the desk.
“It ain’t kidnapping when a bail agent does it. He said you was an absconder and that you had some papers somebody wanted. It was supposed to be a two-fer. Double the pay. Anyway, we didn’t move you that far. Just up a couple of floors.”
