“Lou?”
“Looks like I’m going out,” Boldt told Liz. “I’ll ask Gaynes to come inside with you. That’ll still leave the cruiser and Heiman’s unmarked out front.”
“I don’t need babysitting.”
“Not up for discussion,” Boldt said, and the air froze between them.
A moment later the wall phone rang, and Boldt answered. He scribbled down the physical address for the phone that had made the strange call. A bar in Fremont, only a few minutes by car from the Boldt home. He now knew where the call had come from; the caller didn’t know he knew. He felt a flutter in his chest.
“They may have made their first mistake,” Boldt told Liz, who appeared frightened. But then he saw it not as fright, but doubt-a keen and penetrating doubt-and as he replayed this statement in his own head, even he found the sound of it foolish.
Fire codes required all commercial businesses to provide a minimum of two points of egress. No cop in his right mind walked through the front door of a establishment like Tanker’s Tavern when looking for a possible suspect. Even in blue jeans and a dark windbreaker, as he was currently dressed, Boldt knew he stuck out, indelibly marked
Boldt moved furtively down this narrow hall, alert for someone to spring out from the men’s room unexpectedly, attempting to grab him up. The miles he wore as lines around his eyes accounted for years of experience, qualities that could never be taught at the police academy or in college classrooms. They eventually instilled themselves as instinct, a kind of sixth sense of knowing when danger loomed. Boldt was not big on belief in a sixth sense, and yet he possessed the unusual ability to “see” crime scenes through the eyes of the victim, a faculty that he kept to himself, knowing others would not understand. He moved ahead with heightened senses, smelling the stale beer, disinfectant, and cigarette smoke, hearing the background grind of rock and roll behind loud conversation, seeing the spinning overhead fans in a kind of slow motion, the flickering television screen playing a football game, the bartender patrolling his narrow aisle between the regimented bottles and the cronies on stools, bent on elbows glued to the wooden bar that separated them from their spirits.
Mixed into this clamor, the faint but distinguishable ring of a telephone, a sound that Boldt’s brain elected to single out and bring to the forefront of his consciousness. Why, he wasn’t sure.
He stood with his back to a corner, the barroom now open before him. Pinball and a video game in a small room to his left, circular tables, mostly full, in front of him. Glassy-eyed men drinking beer. Women of every type, from fully available and advertising, to withdrawn and hurt, relationships forming and disintegrating before him.
From the din a word so incongruous in this setting that at first he fully ignored it, believing his brain was playing tricks on him, or perhaps not hearing at all. Not feeling. The events of late had numbed him, like a limb falling asleep and tingling without the ability to feel or stand. “Boldt?” a male voice called. Still his brain refused to process the information correctly. “Boldt?” Again.
He turned toward that voice. The bartender, his mustache and curly hair reflected in the mirror behind the bottles. He held a phone’s receiver, standing at the end of the bar, by a waitress with more cleavage showing than necessary, a tray filled with empties in her hand.
Boldt wondered if by identifying himself, he marked himself for abduction and a “manicure,” or if the call were actually a call meant for him. Then it slammed home: He’d been led here like a dog in heat, the caller to the police department knowledgeable enough to know how Boldt would proceed, that he would request the caller-ID information and investigate. And if not, what then? he wondered, believing a second or third call would have been placed, and eventually contact would have been made. But the caller had wanted this on neutral ground, someplace Boldt could not easily or quickly trace, and that implied either a substantial conversation or a threat that one wouldn’t want recorded. The first name to pop into his head was Svengrad’s, the Sturgeon General. When he accepted the phone and heard the metallic, distorted sound of voice synthesis, he felt caught off-guard. The caller was using a voice-altering device, readily available from Radio Shack, that made his voice sound inhuman, like a robot.
“Well done, Lieutenant,” the Darth Vader voice said. It sounded vaguely comical, and had the circumstances been different, he might have experienced it as such. As it was, he suffered under the realization he’d been sucker-punched.
Boldt resented his being so predictable, so easily baited.
“Why the cloak-and-dagger?”
“You have forty-five minutes to retrieve the software carried by Tony LaRossa when he collapsed in the bank lobby. I need your cell phone number. I’ll contact you.”
“I don’t think so.” Boldt hung up the call. The bartender flashed him an expression that asked if he was done with the phone. Boldt held up a finger, begging more time. He asked if this bar phone was used a lot by customers. The bartender replied that the one in the hall hadn’t worked in over a year.
“Anyone make a call from here about an hour ago?” Boldt asked.
“I don’t pay much attention.”
“You paid attention to me,” Boldt said.
“I don’t know you.”
“Know most of your customers, do you?”
“Part of the job.”
Boldt said, “Including the guy who used this phone about an hour ago?”
The bartender offered a smug look. Boldt flashed his shield, and the man’s composure wavered. He pulled out a twenty, and then another, and laid them both on the bar.
“Put it away,” the man said, somewhat apologetically. “I came on thirty minutes ago. I have no idea who used the phone an hour ago.”
“Someone we can check with?” Boldt inquired.
“Listen, it’s so damn busy in here between five and seven, there’s no way anyone’s going to be able to help you.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Okay, listen… ” The bartender stood within inches of the bar and leaned toward Boldt. “Truth is, officer, the hall phone is kinda wired into the house line. It don’t ring there; it rings here. But customers dial out on the hall phone.”
“And the house pockets the money from the pay phone.”
“Something like that. Hey, I’m not the owner.”
“So unless you were in the hall, you wouldn’t know who used the phone.”
“That’s about it.”
The phone rang. The bartender reached for the receiver, but Boldt held him off. “This is for me.” Boldt yanked up the receiver. “Boldt.”
That same synthetic voice said, “Your wife has nice hands. You hang up again, she’s wearing gloves for the next six months, and her little pussy dance is on the evening news.”
“I don’t talk to robots,” Boldt said. Inside, he decided he’d gone too far. He wasn’t sure what had possessed him to hang up the first time, to feign a lack of cooperation, except that it went so against his nature. This was, he decided, the call Liz had been expecting, except that the first step was apparently to collect the coveted software. Boldt had read two department e-mails on the analysis of the LaRossa disk. The first expressed optimism that the password cryptography on the disk could be “cracked.” The second explained in some detail the sophistication of the security protecting the software contained on the disk, and how it was never going to be compromised.
The bartender overheard Boldt’s comment, twisted his face, and walked away to service a customer.
“Forty-five minutes. Your cell number.”
Boldt repeated his cell number into the phone.
