'I don't talk money. You'll have to settle it with my business manager.'
'You can have her for two bucks,' Herb said. 'That includes my cut.'
Bill grinned wickedly, and I watched in amazement as the sixty-eight-year-old rolled his hips. They made a cracking sound.
'Unfortunately,' I cut in before he pounced, 'the taxpayers require my time first.'
'You're a tease, Jack, getting an old man all hot and bothered and then turning him away.'
He pinched my cheek and walked out.
I turned to Herb. 'Thanks for informing Bill of my recent availability.'
'Payback for siccing the Feds on me. You want the last burger?'
I shook my head and popped the tape in the VCR. As expected, the quality was poor. It was black and white, grainy from having been reused several hundred times, and speeded up so one six-hour tape could accommodate an entire day.
There was a time code in the lower left-hand corner, in military time, and I rewound to 1800 hours and let it play.
Lo and behold, at 18:42 a young man entered the store, made a beeline for the magazine rack, and then fell over and started shaking like a leaf. The two other patrons who were in the store, along with the clerk, went over to take a closer look.
The seizure lasted almost two minutes, or about twenty seconds on the speeded-up copy we had, and then the kid got up and left the store, keeping his head down, avoiding the overhead camera with obvious experience.
'If that was a real seizure, I'm trying out for the ballet,' Benedict said.
I pushed the image of Herb in tights out of my mind and rewound the tape, letting it run in slow motion so it was closer to real time. As evidence, the tape was practically inadmissible. The picture quality was that bad. I took it out and plunked in the tape from the 7-Eleven earlier today, hoping for a better quality.
Sometimes wishes come true.
This time the tape was in color, crystal clear. Rather than the annoying pan back and forth of the previous tape, this tape used four different cameras to record four different parts of the store, which broke the screen up into quarters.
'This is more like it,' Herb said.
I rewound to the part where the kid walked in, and he gave us a perfect full frontal face shot. Then he went from one screen to the next, and we watched as he popped something into his mouth and went into the familiar convulsions.
'Looks like he's spitting something up.'
'Alka-Seltzer. It's an old trick, makes you look like you're foaming at the mouth.'
'Let's get some uniforms up here to look at this.'
Benedict got on the horn and rounded up half a dozen or so officers on duty. They piled into my office and watched the tape. No one recognized the kid.
'This has got to be an MO he's used before,' I told them. 'Probably shoplifting, maybe causing a distraction while his partner made off with some goods. Ask around, see if anyone's heard of a petty thief who fakes seizures.'
After they'd left, the desk sergeant called and informed me that we now had a composite sketch of our suspect, drawn from descriptions given by Steve the pharmacist and Floyd the leg-breaker broker. Herb went down to get it, because the vending machines were en route. I put in the video of the first crime scene and scanned it for gawkers with cameras. Nothing.
Benedict came back a few minutes later, sans foodstuffs but with telltale chocolate smears in his mustache. He handed me the sketch, which was vague enough to look a little like every average middle-aged white man in the world. The eyes were closer together than most, and the head was more triangular, giving the perp a ratlike appearance. But under low lighting conditions, after a couple of drinks, the picture might have been of Don, or Phin, or half my squad. We could rule out Herb because the face was lean.
The phone rang, and Benedict graciously picked it up for me.
'It's Bains.' He hung up the receiver only seconds after putting it to his ear. 'He requests the company of your presence in his office as soon as you have a moment.'
I got up and stretched, wincing as all of my aches and pains came to life. Perhaps the captain wanted to discuss the fight last night, or our progress on the case, or my brush-off of the Feds, or my unauthorized overtime, or to tell me he liked my outfit.
I was right on four of the five.
'Jack, have a seat.'
I sat across his desk and faced the man. Captain Steven Bains was short, stout, about ten years my senior, and had a hair weave that looked unrealistic because it had no gray in it, whereas his mustache did. He finished peering at the paper in front of him and removed his reading glasses to look at me.
'You weren't carrying last night.'
'I know. Maybe it was a good thing, because if I had my piece I might have killed one or more of them.'
'Wear it from now on. It looks like this guy is gunning for you.'
I nodded.
