The young man glanced from me to his Mercedes and stared some more. All four tires were completely flat.
“Oh,” he said. He looked at his gum-covered key and sighed. “Well. Shit.”
I stopped across the car from him and smiled faintly. “Don’t feel too bad about it, man. I’ve been doing this longer than you.”
He gave me a sour look. Then he held up his key. “Bubble gum?”
“Coulda been superglue. Take it as a professional courtesy.” I nodded toward his car. “Let’s talk. Turn the air- conditioning on, for crying out loud.”
He eyed me for a moment and sighed. “Yeah. Okay.”
We both got in the car. He scraped the gum off of his key and put it in the ignition, but when he turned it, nothing happened.
“Oh. Pop the hood,” I said.
He eyed me and did. I went around to the front of the car and reconnected the loose battery cable. I said, “Okay,” and he started the engine smoothly.
Like I said, give Toot-toot and his kin the right job, and they are formidable as hell.
I got back in the car and said, “You licensed?”
The young man shrugged and turned his AC up to “deep freeze.” “Yeah.”
I nodded. “How long?”
“Not long.”
“Cop?”
“In Joliet,” he said.
“But not now.”
“Didn’t fit.”
“Why are you watching my place?”
He shrugged. “I got a mortgage.”
I nodded and held out my hand. “Harry Dresden.”
He frowned at the name. “You the one used to work for Nick Christian at Ragged Angel?”
“Yeah.”
“Nick has a good reputation.” He seemed to come to some kind of conclusion and took my hand with a certain amount of resignation. “Vince Graver.”
“You got hired to snoop on me?”
He shrugged.
“You tail me last night?”
“You know the score, man,” Graver said. “You take someone’s money, you keep your mouth shut.”
I lifted my eyebrows. A lot of PIs wouldn’t have the belly to be nearly so reticent, under the circumstances. It made me take a second look at him. Thin, built like someone who ran or rode a bicycle on his weekends. Clean-cut without being particularly memorable. Medium brown hair, medium height, medium brown eyes. The only exceptional thing about his appearance was that there was nothing exceptional about his appearance.
“You keep your mouth shut,” I agreed. “Until people start getting hurt. Then it gets complicated.”
Graver frowned. “Hurt?”
“There have been two attempts on my life in the past twenty-four hours,” I said. “Do the math.”
He focused his eyes down the street, into the distance, and pursed his lips. “Damn.”
“Damn?”
He nodded morosely. “There go the rest of my fees and expenses.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “You’re bailing on your client? Just like that?”
“ ‘Accomplice’ is an ugly word. So is ‘penitentiary.’ ”
Smart kid. Smarter than I had been when I first got my PI license. “I need to know who backed you.”
Graver thought about that one for a minute. Then he said, “No.”
“Why not?”
“I make it a personal policy not to turn on clients or piss off people who are into murder.”
“You lost the work,” I said. “What if I made it up to you?”
“Maybe you didn’t read that part of the book. The ‘I’ in PI stands for ‘investigator.’ Not ‘informer.’ ”
“Maybe I call the cops. Maybe I tell them you’re involved in the attacks.”
“Maybe you can’t prove a damned thing.” Graver shook his head. “You don’t get ahead in this business if you can’t keep your teeth together.”
I leaned back in my seat and crossed my arms, studying him for a moment. “You’re right,” I said. “I can’t make you. So I’m asking you. Please.”
He kept on staring out the windshield. “Why they after you?”
“I’m protecting a client.”
“Old guy in the wheelchair.”
“Yeah.”
Graver squinted. “He looks like a hard case.”
“You have no idea.”
We sat in the air-conditioning for a moment. Then he glanced at me and shook his head.
“You seem like a reasonable guy,” Graver said. “Hope you don’t get dead. Conversation over.”
I thought about pushing things, but I’ve been around long enough to recognize someone who was genuinely tough-minded when I see him. “You got a business card?”
He reached into his shirt pocket and produced a plain white business card with his name and a phone number. He passed it over to me. “Why?”
“Sometimes I need a subcontractor.”
He lifted both eyebrows.
“One who knows how to keep his teeth together.” I nodded to him and got out of the car. I leaned down and looked in the door before I left. “I know a mechanic. I’ll give him a call and he’ll come on out. He’s got a compressor on his truck, and he can fill up your tires. I’ll pay for it.”
Graver studied me with calm, intelligent eyes and then smiled a little. “Thanks.”
I closed the door and thumped on the roof with my fist. Then I walked back to my apartment. Mouse, who had waited patiently in the yard, came shambling up to greet me as I stepped out of the street, and he walked alongside me as I went back to the apartment.
Morgan was lying on my bed again when I came back in. Molly was just finishing up changing his bandages. Mister watched the entire process from the back of the couch, his ears tilted forward, evidently fascinated.
Morgan nodded to me and rasped, “Did you catch him?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A local PI had been hired to keep track of me. But there was a problem.”
“What’s that?”
I shrugged. “He had integrity.”
Morgan inhaled through his nose and nodded. “Pretty rare problem.”
“Yeah. Impressive young man. What are the odds?”
Molly looked back and forth between us. “I don’t understand.”
“He’s quitting the job, but he won’t tell us what we want to know about his client, because he doesn’t think it would be right,” I said. “He’s not willing to sell the information, either.”
Molly frowned. “Then how are we going to find out who is behind all of this?”
I shrugged. “Not sure. But I told him I’d get someone to come by and put the air back in his tires. Excuse me.”
“Wait. He’s still out there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Blue Mercedes.”
“And he’s a young man.”
“Sure,” I said. “A little older than you. Name’s Vince Graver.”
Molly beamed. “Well, then, I’ll go get him to tell me.” She walked over to my icebox, opened it, pulled out a dark brown bottle of micro-brewery beer, and walked toward the door.
“How you gonna do that?” I asked her.
