The images on the TV I was watching were black-and-white and fuzzy and small, a miniaturized, capsulated reality.
Cold and clean and a medicinal staleness-though no one had been in this room for a long TIME
I'd been in it most of the day and all of the evening.
Into the night.
The door was bolted shut. The room was dark, except for a focused yellow parabola from a corner floor lamp. Double drapes blotted out Hollywood. I sat on an orange chair, as confined as a patient. The piped music barely leaked through from the hallway.
The man who called himself Huenengarth sat across the room, near the lamp, cradled by a chair identical to mine that he'd pushed up to the empty bed. A small black hand radio rested in his lap.
The bed was stripped down to the mattress. Resting on the ticking was a sloping paper ramp. Government documents.
The one he was reading had kept his interest for more than an hour.
Down at the bottom was a line of numbers and asterisks and a word that I thought was UPDATE. But I couldn't be sure because I was too far away and neither of us wanted to change that.
I had things to read, too: the latest lab reports on Cassie and a brand-new article Huenengarth had shoved at me. Five typed pages on the subject of pension fraud by Professor W W Zimberg, written in starchy legalese with lots of words blacked out by a broad-tipped marker.
My eyes went back to the TV No movement on the screen other than the slow drip of sugar-water through plastic tubing. I inspected the small, colorless world from edge to edge. For the thousandth TIME
Bedclothes and railings, a blur of dark hair and puffy cheek. The I.V gauge, with its inlets and outlets and locks.
I sensed movement across the room without seeing it.
Huenengarth took out a pen and crossed something out.
According to documents he showed Milo in the deputy chief's office, he'd been in Washington, D.C the night Dawn Herbert was butchered in her little car. Milo told me he'd corroborated it, as the two of us drove to the hospital just before sunrIse.
'Who exactly is he working for?' I said.
'Don't know the details but it's some sort of covert task force, probably in cahoots with the Treasury Department.'
'Secret agent man? Think he knows our friend the colonel?'
'Wondered about that myself He found out pretty damn fast that I was playing computer games. After we got out of the D.C. office I shot the colonel's name at him and got a blank stare, but it wouldn't surprise me if the two of them attended some of the same parties. Tell you one thing, Alex, asshole's more than just a field agent, got some real juice behind him.'
Juice and motivation,' I said. 'Four and a half years to avenge his father. How de you think he managed the million-dollar budget?'
'Who knows? Probably kissed the right ass, stabbed the right back. Or maybe it was just a matter of the right person's ox getting gored.
Whatever, he's a smart cookie.'
'Good actor, too-getting that close to Jones and Plumb.'
'So one day he'll run for President. Did you know you were going twenty over the limit?'
'I get a ticket, you can fix it for me, right? Now that you're a real policeman again.'
'Yeah.'
'How'd you pull it off?'
