“Thank you very much,” I said, and Quirk stepped behind me.
“All yours,” he said, and I snapped a straight left out onto Vest’s nose and drew blood. He put both hands to his face and took them away and stared for a moment at the blood on them. Noses bleed a lot. His partner moved toward me, in a low crouch, swaying gently, his hands up and close together. I turned slightly and drove my right foot in against his kneecap. His leg went out from under him and he fell over. Vest lunged toward the door and as he went past me, I hit him on the back of the head with my clubbed left forearm and he sprawled forward and banged his head on the door and slid to the ground. His partner was on his hands and knees now, scrambling toward the bed. I caught him and dragged him to his feet and turned my hip as he tried to knee me in the groin and took it on my thigh. I banged his nose with my forehead, and pushed him away and hit him left cross straight right, and he fell over on the bed and stayed there holding his nose, which had started to bleed as well. Vest was not unconscious on the floor, but he stayed there on his stomach with his face cradled in his arms.
“You guys are in trouble,” Quirk said, “at several levels.”
I glanced around the room. There was a wallet and a set of car keys on the night table beside the other twin bed.
“First of all, when you had enough help you were banging on a guy, with a billy.”
I walked over to the night table and picked up the wallet. Nobody moved.
“Now you are alone, without backup, in a hotel room with the same guy, and look what happens.”
I opened the wallet and looked at the driver’s license. It was a Washington, D.C., license, issued to Reilly O’Dell. The Partner’s picture was there, unsmiling. And a Georgetown address.
“That’s one level,” Quirk said. He ticked it off on his thumb. His voice was quiet, without anger, a little pedagogical, as if he were discussing evidence evaluation at the police academy, but tinged with sadness at the plight these men were in.
“Then there’s the fact that this asshole”-he nodded at Vest on the floor-“told me to butt out and go back to Boston, and he made fun of my accent, by pronouncing it Bahston.”
Quirk ticked that one off on his forefinger. “I am, of course, en-fucking-raged,” Quirk said. “Which is not good either, because I also can whup you to a frazzle.”
Quirk smiled briefly and without humor at both of them, and held up a third finger. In Reilly O’Dell’s wallet I found some business cards, with his name on them, and the name of his company, Stealth Security Consultants. I passed the license and one of the business cards to Quirk. Still holding his third finger up, in mid-count, he read them. And put them in his pocket.
“Third,” he said. “You guys were participating in the illegal arrest and interrogation of a man whose constitutional rights you have violated worse than Sherman violated Atlanta. Fortunately, I happened by, and seeing an illegal injustice in progress, made a citizen’s intervention. And now”-Quirk held up a fourth finger-“I discover that Mr. O’Dell, here, appears not even to be a police officer.”
I bent over Vest and took the wallet from Vest’s left hip pocket. I opened it and learned that his name was Edgar Grimes and that he too lived in Washington. And he too worked for Stealth Security Consultants. I gave his driver’s license and one of his business cards to Quirk.
“Dandy,” Quirk said. “Now, what the fuck is going on?”
Grimes had turned over on his back and sat on the floor, his back against the wall. His head was in his hands and he was rubbing his temples. The blood continued to run between his fingers and soak his shirt. O’Dell sat up stiffly on his bed not looking at anything. There was very little color in his face, and I could see his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed. His nose seeped only a trickle of blood.
I went to the bathroom, put cold water on a facecloth, wrung it out, and handed it to Grimes on the floor. He held it against his nose.
“You can’t stonewall,” Quirk said. “You’re down here representing somebody with enough clout to get the cooperation of the local Sheriff. Since you’re from DeeCee, it’s probably somebody in government. You’ve participated in a kidnapping. You’ve been caught by a policeman. We get the U.S. Attorney down here from Columbia with one phone call. We get the press down here with one other phone call. You people have fucked the duck, and your only chance to step out of it is to talk to me, frankly”-Quirk flashed the humorless smile again-“and openly.”
I could hear both breathing, and then O’Dell sighed.
“You got a good argument,” he said. We waited.
The late morning sun beamed in through the east-facing bedroom window, and highlighted the dust motes, which drifted in and out of sight as they passed through the sunlight. The motel room was generic. Combination desk, dresser with a television set. A straight chair, two queen-sized beds separated by a table. A phone on the table, a lamp on the wall above it. The walls were beige, the rug was tan, there was an inexpensively framed print on the wall of some Anjou pears in a rose medallion bowl. The closet was behind a louvered door, the bath was past it. There was a brown Naugahyde armchair by the window. On top of the television set was a cardboard stand-up, which described the fun to be had in their lounge.
Grimes continued to hold the cloth against his nose. O’Dell sat up straight. His face was pale and scared; his wide, loose mouth seemed hard to manage.
“You used to work for the government,” Quirk said. “Twenty years in, you took your pension and your contacts and set up in business for yourself.”
“Yes,” O’Dell said.
“And when you were a Fed,” Quirk said, “you mostly spent your time subpoenaing records.”
O’Dell started to protest and stopped and shrugged his high shoulders and nodded.
“You’re in with tough guys, now,” Quirk said.
O’Dell nodded. His hands were folded down at his paralleled thumbs, and he studied them, as if to make sure they were perfectly aligned.
“Your original question,” O’Dell said.
