“Mort,” I said, wincing. I drew back a flap of my windbreaker, exposing the flyweight .357. “Should I check this thing at the door, or are you expecting trouble?”
Dale’s face turned white. Her typing stopped altogether.
“Just kidding,” I assured her, concealing the weapon again. In fact, there was a point to my showing her the gun, other than yanking her chain a little, which I’m prone to do. If I was going to work for her and Greg, they might as well know I intended to carry, because I’ve done so for a long time and wasn’t about to quit now, about the time things might finally get interesting, with car chases, bullets flying around in the dark, and all that.
“Greg in?” I asked.
She pointed toward his door. “He’s with a client.”
“Uh-huh. Want I should take any dirty photos?”
Her eyes widened. “What?”
“Someone cheating on their significant other, maybe? I can bust down a door like nothing you ever saw.”
She was aghast. “We…we don’t take those kinds of cases, Mr. Angel.”
I shrugged. “Mort. So, here I am. Guess you’ve been expecting me, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Great.” I looked around. “Now what?”
She pulled a paper-clipped wad of papers from a desk drawer. “I gathered these up for you on Friday. If you could fill them out…”
I sifted through them. Federally mandated health insurance form, request for PI trainee status, a bond questionnaire, 401(k) plan.
And a W-4 withholding form. I held it up, waved it at her. “This one’s unconstitutional, sweetheart.”
She gawked at me. Not sure if it was the sweetheart or the form, but the gawk was pure Dale.
“I oughta know,” I informed her. “Government can’t take one dime of my money before I know how the hell much I’m gonna make during the year. I mean, what if I lost my job, or changed jobs and started making less? Which I am, by the way.”
“I…I…but, you’ve got to…”
“Just kidding. Where do I fill these out?”
She sat me on the couch with a ballpoint pen and a clipboard, and I did my civic duty, adding to the paperwork mill that’s choking the life out of this country.
When I finished up, Greg was still in there with the client. Dale’s phone rang once. Wrong number, but I was impressed. Carson & Rudd was doing a land-office business, or might at any moment. Tom Carson of Carson & Rudd had been dead for eight months—liver failure at age fifty-eight—which is why I’d thought Greg might be in a position to hire another PI. All this turmoil and stress had probably driven Carson to drink and other forms of excess, God rest him.
In fact, the excitement of my new job was beginning to stiffen my joints, so for all I knew I might be headed for the same untimely end. Back home, I had a naked girl in my bed, the dream-stuff of every 24-carat, bonded PI in America, and here I was with W-4’s and 401(k)s in my lap.
“Done,” I said. Dale was Xeroxing stuff that had whirred out of a laser printer. “What’s next?”
She shrugged. “Gregory’ll be out soon.”
“Am I getting paid for all this sitting around?”
“Well…yes. You’re hourly, at least for the time being.”
I sat back. “Pretty easy work. Easier than slamming tax dodgers upside down against a wall and picking up nickels.”
Finally she smiled. At least I think it was a smile.
“I’m serious,” I said.
Her smile, if that’s what it was, faltered.
“Kidding,” I said, putting her on an emotional roller coaster. “We never picked up anything smaller than dimes.”
The inner door creaked open. Greg held it for a fiftyish woman the size of a minivan.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Newman,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll hear something in a day or two.” He gave her a smile. She smiled back, lifting pounds of flesh to do so, then glanced at me with dead gray eyes as she went out the door.
“Hear what in a day or two?” I asked.
“Missing person,” Greg said. He was an inch under six feet tall, a shrimp. Skinny but tough. Wiry. He ran marathons. Nice suit, though. He looked good. I, on the other hand, looked more like a potential client. “Her son,” he added.
“Now we’re talking. What’s his name? Want me to go track him down?”
Gregory’s lips quivered, as if he didn’t know whether to laugh, smile, or cry. “She thinks he’s somewhere in Wisconsin or Michigan. I’ll contact an agency out there, have them look into it. It’ll cost her less in the long run. Local firms know the territory, have their own connections.”
“Terrific. There’s money in handing the work to someone else, is there?”
“She pays us, we pay them and keep 20 percent.”
“So you’re…we’re, what, middlemen?”
“Sometimes. Not that often, but it happens.”
“Uh-huh. Pretty heart-stopping stuff.”
His look told me he didn’t get it. He was a literal kind of guy. “I told you about that, Uncle Mortimer. Investigative work isn’t anything like what you seem to—”
“Mort. So…got anything for me?”
He rubbed his hands together. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, it was something his great-great-grandfather might’ve done. He looked eighty years old, like Scrooge, but it wasn’t in anticipation of firing anyone or ripping a drumstick out of their mouth. This, then, whatever it was, was what passed for high drama in my nephew’s life.
“I’ve got just the thing,” he said. “Came in last week. Thursday afternoon. We’ve been saving it for you. It’s right up your alley.”
I pulled my gun and swung the cylinder out, checked its load and peered down the barrel. No obstructions. Good.
“Uncle Mortimer—”
“Mort.” Four gleaming rounds, one empty chamber under the hammer. Perfect. If you can’t get the job done with four bullets, that fifth bullet isn’t likely to matter. Yanking Greg’s chain was part of the point—okay, a big part—and now he was aware I was carrying, in case he’d forgotten. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen the gun before.
“Uncle…Mort.” His voice was strangled, half an octave
