Designated Targets

His silence seemed to convince Bad Cop to ham it up even further. The guy put his foot against the heavy coffee table that sat between them and gave it a vicious push, slamming the edge into Slim Jim’s unprotected shins. He yelped in pain as tears welled up in his eyes.

“We know you’re in thick with these time-traveling assholes, Davidson. We know some of these companies of yours have picked up contracts from them. You mix with them, and you got the inside track. You’re gonna start working for your country again. Keeping us informed about them.”

Two painful lumps were already coming up on his shins. He rubbed at them and complained in his whiniest voice. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about, or what you need me for. They don’t make any secret of it, all the shit goes on there. They got nightclubs and bars for queers and lemons. They got all the races sleeping together. They don’t give a fuck what you think about them. And neither does Congress, or weren’t you paying attention. They’re in the Zone, man. That’s their world now.”

At that, the friendly one looked disappointed.

His unpleasant partner leaned forward and bared his fangs. “For now, smartass. Just for now.”

Bad Cop placed his foot on the edge of the coffee table again, causing Slim Jim to wince in expectation. But the agent just gave the apartment a good looking-over, and he didn’t appear to like what he saw. Again, Ms. O’Brien was responsible for much of the decoration.

She’d flipped the first time she saw how Slim Jim had decked the place out, with moose heads and porn and ratty old furniture. “This isn’t the image we’re trying to create, Mr. Davidson,” she’d said in that quiet, level tone that frightened him a little. “We are trying to establish you as a serious if somewhat rakish businessman, and this looks like the waiting room of a Chechen bordello.”

And so, instead of seeing hunting trophies and a pair of billiards tables, the still-nameless agents got to appreciate his taste in fine Italian furniture, restricted technology, and modern art. Lots and lots of modern art, which had cost him nearly three hundred thousand dollars. That had made no sense to Slim Jim, until O’Brien told him that in eighty years, all this art crap would be worth tens of millions of dollars.

“What the hell is that shit, anyway?” asked Bad Cop.

Slim Jim smiled. O’Brien had made him memorize the schtick for when that Hersey guy came around to write about him for the New Yorker.

“Those ones over there are by a guy called Pollock. He went nuts in ’38, and he started painting like that. It’s like he was cribbing from that Picasso guy over there, don’t you reckon? The three by the piano are called Bird, Male and Female, and Guardians of the Secret. My lawyer tells me they’re full of seething imagery.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” muttered Good Cop, falling out of character for a second. “My little girl draws better than that.”

“Yeah, looks like something a fruit would hang on his wall.”

Slim Jim just deadpanned them. “Well, at least I’m banging the welder’s wife, and not Assistant Director Tolson.”

Both men colored visibly, and Slim Jim actually wished he could take it back. What the hell was up with him, making fun of Hoover and his boyfriend in front of a couple of hired gorillas like this? He had to stop watching those wise-guy movies.

The roughneck leaned forward again, his face bright red and shoulders like bowling balls moving around under his suit. “Listen, you little pissant. You might think you’re a big man now. But you’re a fucking bug, and you’re gonna get squashed if you don’t cooperate. You’ll do as we say, or it’s gonna go hard on you. That fucking lawyers of yours, we’ve got her number. You’re going to start recording every conversation you have with her, every crooked fucking deal you put together. She’s about this close to being disbarred, anyway. Her papers mean nothing here. All those bullshit laws she goes on about that nobody here even heard of. If you’re smart, you’ll dump her and give this guy a call.”

A small slip of paper appeared in his hand.

“He’s Bureau approved. He’ll set you straight, and when you’ve done that, you’re going back to California, and you’re taking this with you.” He held out a small black disk, about half the size of a garden pea. Slim Jim recognized it instantly. A microcam. Commercial, not mil-grade. The sort of thing that’d be picked up by an elint sweep in less than half a second.

What a pair of fucking bozos, he thought. Probably don’t know what an elint sweep is. His expression, however, gave nothing away. “Okay, fellas,” he said, showing them his open, honest palms. “You got yourself a narc.”

“That’s great, Mr. Davidson.” Good Cop beamed at him. “You won’t regret it, and your country will be grateful.”

Slim Jim nodded and smiled nervously, as he figured he was expected to.

He never once looked at any of the eight microcams that had recorded everything in the apartment from the moment he’d opened the door. And those microcams were mil-grade.

HONOLULU, HAWAII

Detective Sergeant Lou “Buster” Cherry didn’t so much wake up as find himself more conscious than unconscious, a state in which he slowly became aware of how much he felt like a bag of shit. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. There were the usual sorrows of an elephant-sized hangover, the headache like a meat ax to the brain, the nausea, the burning throat, the taste of bile, and the sour stench of his own sweat and unwashed bedclothes.

Then there was a growing list of unrelated woes. The chronic pain of a bullet wound he’d received on the job what seemed like a hundred years ago. The hateful longing for his first shot of the day. A dreadful suspicion that there was no booze left in the apartment anyway. A fading twitch of resentment at the bitch he’d once called his wife—a woman he hadn’t heard from in well over a year.

There was something else this morning, too, as he lay on the fold-up cot in his studio apartment, under a pile of dirty laundry. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it but . . .

“You’re a disgrace, Detective.”

He would have sat bolt upright, but that would’ve hurt too much. So he groped about for his revolver, knowing in the back of his mind that it was futile.

“Don’t bother. We moved it out of reach, just to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself.”

“Who the fuck—?” The raspy voice was almost unrecognizable as his. He suddenly realized how long it had been since he’d spoken to another person.

He rubbed his eyes and lifted his head, taking in the two figures who stood in the center of his room. They looked as if they didn’t want to move, for fear of stepping in something nasty.

“We’re from the Bureau, Detective.”

At first he had no idea what they were talking about, but then some very rusty memories of his former life began to creak back into place. “Hoover men?”

“Yeah. Special agents.”

As they spoke, he became increasingly aware of just how much worse this headache was than normal.

“You got names?”

“Not today, Detective.”

Cherry could feel a small storm building inside his head, but he tried to ignore it. “I’m not a detective anymore,” he said. “They suspended me. Six years in uniform. Nine in plainclothes, and they fucking shit-canned me because that asshole Jewish kraut pulls some strings.” He pushed himself up in his cot and saw a half-empty fifth of Old Granddad lying on the floor. Hell, what’s half-empty is half-full, too. He was about to reach for it—thinking it’d make a fine breakfast, right about now—when one of them spoke again, and he froze in place.

“You think Admiral Kolhammer caused you to be suspended?”

“I don’t think. I know. I got my owns strings I can pull.”

The feeb grunted. “Maybe so. Because you’re back on the job.”

Then something—two things, in fact—landed in his lap: his badge and his gun.

A squall of confusion blew through his head, and there was no way to ignore it now. He’d been drinking something like a bottle of bourbon every day since they’d ass-fucked him.