This last burst took something out of her, and, reeling, she flapped her hands for balance. They came down on the counter, spilling Harry’s coffee and spraying the laptops.
“Okay, that’s it!” said the counter guy. “You’ve both got to leave.”
As the man hustled away for a rag, Harry grabbed Lily and shoved her back down on her stool.
“Stay! Don’t move!”
Frantic with worry as he waited for Harry’s response, Ezra stood up and stepped away from the computer. He wanted to stomp his feet and yell, but if he did he might wake the monster in the closet. Ezra didn’t believe Geiger was a monster, but he was certain there was one living inside him. Ezra had felt its wrath when he’d watched it bring Geiger to his knees, and he didn’t want to rouse it again.
Trying to contain his panic, Ezra wandered away from the desk and spied the two bags lying where Geiger had dropped them near the CD racks. He picked up the bag with the Burger King logo, stuck a hand inside, and took out a burger. In two bites he’d devoured half of it, and his head drooped with narcotic pleasure. Then he snapped upright and gave a eureka cry.
“Receipt!”
He tore the Burger King bag apart, French fries flying everywhere.
“Receipt… c’mon, receipt!”
But there was none. He snatched up the drugstore bag and shook it upside down. The bottle of Advil fell out, and behind it came a small white slip of paper, drifting slowly toward the floor. Ezra snatched the receipt out of the air and scanned the printed data.
“Yes!”
He lunged for the desk.
The counter guy started soaking up the mess with a cloth.
“I said leave, didn’t I?”
“Give me a break, man,” said Harry. “Five minutes. That’s all I need. She won’t do it again.”
“Leave.”
“Three minutes.”
“Now,” the counter guy said, and to put an exclamation on the command, he sent a pointed finger down toward the laptop’s power button. Harry’s hand closed around the guy’s forearm and stopped him. He knew he was a clenched fist from disaster.
The counter guy stared at him open-mouthed. “Let go of my arm or I’ll call the cops.”
“Let me send one more IM, man,” Harry said. “ One more.”
“Just get the hell out of here-and take Miss Jingle Bells with you.”
The guy was practically yelling now, but his words were punctuated by a cheerful ding, as another message appeared on the laptop.
GGGG: im near la vida discount drugs at 1474 amsterdam!
Harry reached for the keyboard, but now the counter guy’s finger found its mark and landed on the power button. The screen went black.
“Out! Both of you!”
Harry took Lily’s hand and pulled her off the stool. They started for the door, the hobbled leading the helpless. But Harry was elated; he had an address, a place to go.
Ezra stood at Geiger’s desk, reading the IM’s new declaration.
STICKLER has signed off and cannot receive messages offline.
He retrieved the half-eaten burger and sat down again. The cat came by and curled up in his lap. Ezra fed himself with one hand, stroked the cat with the other, and refused to cry.
15
Mitch’s coffee was cold. He drank coffee day and night, but he hated it cold. When the heat was gone, something happened to the milk and three sugars that left a coating on his tongue, making him scrape it back and forth against the edges of his front teeth.
He poured the coffee out the window and checked the trace locator. Boddicker and his sister were still in the diner, setting a record for the world’s longest breakfast. Or maybe Boddicker was spiking his coffee and getting an early start on happy hour. From the look of him, he’d taken a few hits when he’d gotten into the ring with Ray.
Years ago, when Ray had first come aboard, Mitch had sized him in five minutes: big dick, tiny brain, no rearview mirror whatsoever. If you cracked his skull open you’d find IRREGULAR stamped on his frontal lobe. But Mitch had no problem with Ray-the guy had the instincts of a fart, but he knew how to do what he had to do.
Though Mitch trusted his read on Ray, he still found Hall baffling after all these years. Mitch looked at life as a game of football, X’s and O’s on a chalkboard, and he read people’s actions the same way an offensive or defensive coordinator tries to decipher and react to the other team’s schemes. With Hall, the X’s and O’s said one thing, but they didn’t always tell the truth. As often as not, the whys of Hall’s behavior and decisions completely eluded him.
Hall was not the sum of his parts. He was far from a tight-ass, but he dressed like one, button-down head to toe. He told a great joke, but rarely laughed at anyone else’s. He usually went by the book, but he showed obvious contempt for it. He always had your back, but he clearly resented having to watch it. And he was very good at his job but seemed to dislike doing it. Hall was the anti-Ray, and to Mitch that meant he couldn’t be trusted.
Mitch reached into a knapsack on the floor, took out a Nitro-Tech protein bar, and started to nibble. He never went anywhere without his Nitros. In his business you could never count on getting a meal, and who knew what’d be in it when you did? There was too much shit in the world-in the food, the water, the papers, the movies, people’s bodies and heads. Mitch worked hard to eat right and stay lean. Half a dozen times a day he’d grab a pinch of flesh at his waist with his thumb and forefinger just to see if he was getting soft.
Now he wished he hadn’t tossed his coffee. The Nitros went down a lot easier with it, and sticky nuggets were clinging to the walls of his throat. Mitch could see a food cart on the corner at Columbus Avenue. If he walked over to it, he was almost certain that no one looking out the diner’s windows would have a line of sight to him. He had to have something to drink. He eyed the dot on the tracer’s grid, got out of the cab, and headed for the corner. With a glance across the street at the diner’s sun-glazed windows, he racewalked for a few steps and arrived at the food cart. The swarthy proprietor’s dense beard and forehead glistened with sweat from the steam billowing up from some cooking apparatus. Mitch took up a position where the cart hid him from the diner’s vantage point.
“Bottle of water,” he said.
“Got no water today, mehster. They scroot me at pehkup place.”
Mitch nodded. The i ’s coming out like eh ’s meant Mideastern. A Ranee, or Rocky, or a Leb. Maybe even an Izzy. Not that it made any real difference.
“Tough work, huh?” said Mitch.
“S’okay. Back home, they scroot you worse. ’Bout everytheng.”
“Yeah? Where’s home?”
“Damascus.”
Mitch nodded again. He liked being right. “Gimme a Red Bull.”
“Yes, sehr-one Red Bull.”
He dug his hand down into an ice-filled drum and came out with a can of Red Bull. Mitch paid him, popped the can, and took a sip. He had a decent view of the diner’s interior. He could see about three-quarters of the booths and tables and their denizens-but he couldn’t see Boddicker or his crazy sister, and now it wasn’t the Red Bull’s megadose of caffeine that was starting to pump up his pulse. He was getting that tight pinch of stress in his temples.
He glanced at a minivan parked across the intersection, directly in front of the diner. A delivery truck was coming across Columbus; Mitch used it as cover as it passed by and hustled across the street. Peering through the
