Backfire

clean fingernails today, but his hand was moist with sweat, he was so afraid, mostly of Dane, who looked perfectly ready to shove his tonsils into his sneakers. Good. “Ted—may I call you Ted?”

He whispered, “My mama calls me Teddy even though I’m grown up and even have my own apartment now, since last April, over on Washburn Street. It’s not much, but I pay the rent on it all by myself, and I’ve got a bed and a couch and a TV.”

“Teddy, then,” Ruth said in the same gentle voice she used with her eldest stepson when he lost a ball game. “We really need your help. We need to know who hired you to deliver that envelope into the Hoover Building and recite that story to the security guards.”

“But I don’t know, I mean—is it national security?”

Dane opened his mouth to blast him again, but Ruth gave him a look she made sure Teddy saw, and Dane made do with a silent message to Teddy: Fear me.

Ruth kept touching Teddy’s hands, kept her voice gentle. “Teddy, was it a man or a woman who gave you the envelope?”

Teddy shot a look at Dane, grabbed Ruth’s hand like a lifeline. “All right, ma’am, I’ll tell you. It was a man. Look, I really needed money because I lost most of my pay in a poker game and I didn’t want to have to ask my mom to help me with the rent. He offered me two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, and all I had to do was deliver that envelope here. I didn’t have to run over anybody or break any laws, nothing like that, which I wouldn’t do anyway.”

Ruth beamed at him, patted his hand. “Tell us about this man. What did he look like? Was he young, old?”

Teddy leaned really close to Ruth. “I never saw him, I swear.”

Bummer. Both Dane and Ruth knew he was telling the truth, so there was no reason for Dane to pound the table and yell at him.

“Then how do you know it was a man, moron?” Dane asked him, sitting forward.

“He sounded like a man on the phone. I mean, why would a woman do something like that? Really, he sounded like a man—honest.”

Dane said, “All right, then tell us how you happened to connect with him.”

Teddy said, “You know I work at the Union Seventy-six gas station over on Bowner Avenue. Mr. Garber hired me because I’m real good at figuring out what’s wrong with a car, so anyway, this guy called me on my cell phone —said he’d seen me work, said he’d heard people say they could count on me, that I was reliable.” Teddy Moody tried not to puff up, but he did. “Really, ma’am, Agent ma’am, I don’t know anything about him, but he said he knew I was good to the bone, and he surely admired responsible young people like me, that’s what he told me, exactly. My mama’s always telling me I was good, but you can’t always believe your mama.”

And that made all the difference, Dane thought. It was strange logic, but he understood it. A nerdy twenty- year-old kid with one shining skill and the guy had the brain to praise him, drew him right in. That was clever.

“So then he told me what he wanted me to do, and I didn’t see anything wrong with it, I swear I didn’t.”

Ruth said, “He called you only once?”

Teddy nodded.

“Did he tell you his name?”

“I asked him who he was, and he laughed. He said people used to call him the Hammer, but his name didn’t matter. He told me he would mail me an envelope inside another envelope, and in the second envelope there’d be two one-hundred-dollar bills and a script—that’s what he called it, ‘my script’—and all I had to do was tell the security guards in the lobby exactly what he’d written on the script.”

“And that was, exactly?”

Teddy closed his eyes and repeated word for word the conversation Ruth and Dane had heard on the security tape.

“That’s very impressive, Teddy,” Ruth told him.

“The Hammer told me to practice the script in front of the mirror until I had it memorized and it sounded all natural, and so I did. That was all, Agent ma’am, I swear.” Teddy’s eyes shimmered with tears. “He promised I couldn’t get into trouble. He said it was only a joke on this Agent Dillon Savich. He said no one would ever even find out who I was. How could they? I’m a law-abiding person, and I could just walk out. I believed him. I was in this knot of tourists and everything happened like he said it would. I simply slipped back into the crowd when the guards were talking about the envelope.” He dropped his head again, studied his hands. “I wanted to believe him, you know? I mean, I really did walk out and nobody said a word to me. And there were the two brand-new hundred- dollar bills—I really needed that money. What was in that envelope? Was it bad?”

Ruth said, “Yes, very bad. The Hammer wasn’t trying to help you out, Teddy, and deep down, you knew that, didn’t you?”

Teddy swallowed. He looked scared and miserable. “Yeah, I worried about it, Agent ma’am, but it was two hundred bucks and I didn’t think it could be that bad. I mean, it was only a dippy white envelope, nothing lumpy in it, like a bomb or anything. I’m sorry, I really am.” He looked from one to the other. “Am I in real bad trouble?”

The kid looked so scared Dane hoped he wouldn’t pee his pants. He said, “Let’s see if you can redeem yourself. Agent Warnecki asked you if the guy sounded young, older, or really old. Tell us what you can and we’ll see.”

Teddy’s head snapped up, hope beaming out of his eyes. “He sounded—well, I never knew my pa or my grandpa, never had either one of those, though I guess everyone has to, even if they’ve never met them, right?”

Ruth smiled. “So he sounded what, forty? Sixty? Eighty?”

“In the middle, I guess.”

“Did he have an accent?”

Teddy shook his head. “No, he didn’t sound like anything I recognized, and his voice was kind of raspy, you know, like a longtime smoker’s voice, not very deep, but scratchy, like I said.”

“Do you have the script the Hammer sent you?”

Teddy shook his head. “I’m sorry. He told me as soon as I memorized it I had to burn it, and so I did. It sounded kind of neat, you know? Kind of like I was a spy or something, and so I borrowed Mr. Garber’s Redskins lighter and burned it out in back of the station.”

Dane pushed over a sheet of blank paper. “Was the script written in pencil or pen, or on a computer?”

“He handwrote it—a pen. It was black ink.”

Dane pulled out his pen and handed it to Teddy. “I want you to copy his handwriting the best you can. Write the script down as close to the way it looked. Take your time, Teddy. This is very important.”

Dane’s unspoken message this time was Do it well and I might let you live. After five minutes Dane and Ruth studied the script. The lettering was cramped and slanted really far to the right, like the Hammer had fisted the pen and written nearly upside down. A left-hander? Or someone who was trying to deceive?

Dane said, “Not bad,” and Teddy looked suddenly like he might survive.

Ruth said, “Now, Teddy, I want you to write down everything the Hammer said to you when he called you on your cell, from beginning to end. I know it’s been a couple of days. Do the best you can.”

Teddy scrunched up his face and labored. After another five minutes he had written phrases, some single words, and some complete sentences, enough for them to see exactly how he drew the kid in.

Ruth said, “Think a moment, Teddy. What was your impression of the Hammer? What I mean by that is what did you think while you spoke to him? Did he frighten you? Did he make you laugh? Was he sincere? Did you believe him?”

Teddy fiddled with Dane’s pen as he thought about this. Finally, he said, “He sounded like I always thought my daddy would sound if I’d ever known him.”

Good enough, Ruth thought. Confident, probably some hardnose expecting obedience, and he’d gotten it from Teddy Moody.

Teddy said, “I didn’t think you’d ever find me. I mean, I know there are cameras everywhere, but I’ve never even been arrested for anything, and why would anyone in the lobby know me? The Hammer told me you’d never find me, since I was just another tourist. See? I wrote that down, right there.” And he pointed. “How did you find me?”