Isaac shifted his feet into a more aggressive fighting stance. “You got that right, asshole.”
Hannibal’s first goal was accomplished. He had the man talking. The next step was to get him thinking. “You know, your wife could have called the police and told them you were harassing her. Why do you suppose she didn’t do that?”
While he talked, Hannibal floated lightly on his feet, keeping himself turned in such a way as to never offer Isaac a perfect target. Anger tightened Isaac’s face as he moved to try to reach the right position to land a solid punch. “You her new man,” Isaac said. “You tell me.”
“You know it’s not like that,” Hannibal said with a smile. “Your wife is my client and nothing more. She asked me to come here because she’s scared, Isaac, and trouble is my business.” Could Hannibal establish a token amount of trust? His Secret Service training told him that was the next step. He stopped moving and extended his right hand. “Hannibal Jones is my name.”
“Fuck you!”
Maybe establishing a was too much to hope for, but Isaac didn’t sucker punch him while his hand was out. The anger was under some sort of control. “Okay. But I can assure you of this much. Your wife doesn’t have another man. In fact, I’m sure she never has.”
“Bullshit!” Isaac’s fists were shaking with rage now. “Why would she leave me if she didn’t have another man?”
It was time to commit. Hannibal rooted his feet and let Isaac get close enough to crush him. “Look at me Isaac, I’m six feet tall and I’ve been kick-boxing since high school. Got years of police training. And if you really wanted to you could kill me with your hands.”
“Damn straight!”
“Your wife is five foot two,” Hannibal said. “Maybe, what, a hundred ten pounds? Think about what happens to her body when one of your big hands hits her.”
Isaac’s fist actually whistled through the air, down toward Hannibal’s head like a hammer. A sidestep allowed it to blow past, slamming down on the fender of a Taurus. He turned away from the impressive dent, following Hannibal with his eyes.
“If she was scared of me, she would have called the police!”
“You still don’t get it,” Hannibal said, beginning to dance around a bit, still working to keep the sun in Isaac’s eyes. “She’s more scared for you. She knew if you tried this crap with the cops they’d just as likely shoot your big dumb ass. And she doesn’t want you to get hurt. The woman loves you!”
Hannibal stopped to see what effect his words were having. Isaac bellowed “No!” and swung faster than expected. A fist as big as a twelve-pound ham raked across Hannibal’s jaw, lifting him off his feet. He rolled across the asphalt to give himself distance and sprang up ready for action, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a boxer.
“All right you get that one for free. Maybe you owed me one for the other night. Now you’ve got to call the next play, big man. You come in on me and you mash my face and the police come and throw you in jail. Or, you come in on me and I’m as fast as you know I am and I break your knee and put your face through a car windshield because I can’t go easy with a guy your size. Or, you go home and I promise Janet will call you tonight and talk about what’s wrong and how maybe you two can fix it.”
Isaac looked startled for a moment. Maybe he expected Hannibal to go down and stay down after getting hit. Or perhaps the sound of Janet’s name had an effect on him. His fists lowered a few inches.
“Tonight?”
“My word on it,” Hannibal rushed to say. When he pulled a card from an inside jacket pocket he watched Isaac’s eyes and saw him register the presence of Hannibal’s pistol. Now he knew Hannibal didn’t have to take that punch.
“My address is right there,” Hannibal said, slapping the card on a car hood. “If Janet doesn’t call you before the night’s over, you can come to me and we can pick this up where we left off if that’s what you want to do. Right now, you need to go home and relax a while.”
Isaac’s big fist closed on Hannibal’s card, but his eyes turned back toward the double doors into the motor vehicle building. Hannibal moved into his line of sight. “You can’t take her back, Ike. You have to let her come back. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it works.”
When Hannibal walked into the motor vehicle office, Janet deserted her post and rushed to him. She hustled him into the back offices and ran to the ladies’ room for a wet cloth to press against his face.
“God, thank you thank you thank you.” The words poured out of Janet, tripping over each other. “Are you all right? What about Ike, did you have to hurt him? You didn’t have to involve the police did you? Is he gone, really gone?”
“Not gone from your life, Janet,” Hannibal said, stopping her hand’s movement over his face and holding the cloth himself, applying less pressure. “I’ll be fine and he’s fine physically, but he’s a man in torment. If this is going to go on, I need to know how you feel about this guy. Do you still love him?”
Her answer was very, very quiet. “I don’t know.”
“What do you want, Janet?”
Janet turned and walked to the closed door. When she turned back, her face was composed again. Her strength was returning with her distance from Isaac. “I want to be safe.”
“I understand,” Hannibal said, “but it won’t be free.”
“I’ll figure a way to pay you,” she said. “I know this is business for you.”
Hannibal stood, dropping the cloth on her narrow desk. “That’s not what I meant. You can’t just avoid him. You’ve got to make peace with him one way or another. I told him you’d call tonight and talk to him. The two of you need to figure out what you want and how to make it happen. Counseling is probably a good idea.”
“I’ll call him if you think it’s important. But I meant what I said about paying you.”
Hannibal considered the inherent strength hidden in this woman and wondered how she ever came to a place where she would let a man beat her. “Janet, you can hardly afford my rates. But we might be able to handle this another way. Take it out in trade, maybe. Tell me, how hard is it to find a person if all you know is their license plate number?”
This brought Janet’s first smile of the day. “You kidding? I’m the shift supervisor. Why don’t you give me the number and a description of the car and let me see what I can do?”
When Hannibal pulled up in front of the palatial rambling home at the edge of Arlington he was replaying his last conversation with Janet in his mind. He had been little more than a mile from her office, stopped at a red light when she called, sounding chipper and in control again.
“You said a red Chevrolet Corvette with Kitty as the vanity plate? No such vehicle.”
“Damn,” Hannibal had muttered.
“But,” she added with an annoying dramatic pause, “I do show a 2004 ‘Vette with a plate reading KITTYCAR. Think that could be it?”
Hannibal pulled away from the light a bit faster than he should have. Irons would have considered that a gay license plate for sure. “Very likely, kid. Whose ride is that?”
“Vehicle is registered to one Langford Kitteridge. And if you’ve got a pad and pencil I can give you his Arlington address.”
Instead, he had memorized the address and driven straight there. Now he sat in the colonial’s extensive driveway, behind a low-slung midnight blue Lexus, gathering his official attitude. He had no doubt that this was the right place. The license plate on the Lexus read KITYCAR1. So the owners had wit and ego to spare. He didn’t know anything about the residents except their obvious financial security. Was this Dean’s last victim? If so, Hannibal might be no closer to tracking him down, but he accepted that as the way the job worked. You followed every lead. Detective work, unlike the romance of the movies, was in fact all about legwork.
The door’s chimes echoed like bells in a church steeple. Hannibal imagined house workers scurrying like bats at the summons, but it was soon clear his image was mistaken. A minute is a long time to stand at a door. In that time he decided no one was home. The parked Lexus didn’t mean anything. Owners of a house like this might well have a third vehicle, an SUV probably, and the owners would be off in that one. Oh, well, it was still good to have seen the place. He’d return later.
