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When I got to her eyes, they were wide and locked on something in the distance, instead of squeezed shut like most people’s eyes would be under the circumstances.
    “You OK?” I said.
    No reaction. I pushed up to my knees. “Ms. Carmen, are you all right?”
    She was still wide-eyed and stiff.
    “Ms. Carmen,” I said, not sure why I was asking a question of someone in shock. “Please don’t tell me that was your brother.”
     
     
     

— 5 —
     
     
    “J ESUS, MAX.”
    As I said, Billy is not often taken to swearing. So when he starts out that way, it’s a warning that you’ve probably crossed one of his lines, and he is not pleased.
    “Your new client can be very convincing,” I said, trying that tactic where you bring in the fact that your boss was the one who sent you out there to begin with, hoping you might spread the blame.
    “Max, you left the scene of a crime.”
    “Well, technically, yes.”
    “Well, technically it was an assault with a deadly weapon. Nontechnically, it was a drive-by shooting, during which you were able to identify the car involved—and if I know you, the caliber of the gun, and possibly the license plate number.”
    “No. They were smart enough to remove that ahead of time,” I said, realizing that I was getting defensive now. I knew that any good law enforcement agency in the area would have a pretty good file on a metallic green, jacked-up Monte Carlo with blacked-out windows, even with no numbers.
    “No one was injured, Billy,” I repeated. “Once your Ms. Carmen was calm, she was adamant that we return to her office. She said if she came in late after lunch it would only raise suspicions among her bosses. She said she didn’t want to break any of her normal routine, because all eyes were going to be on her if you should get someone from the feds to raid the place.”
    I took a long breath, listening to silence on the other end of the cell phone.
    “See,” I finally said. “She’s pretty damned convincing.”
    “So you’re in the parking lot now?” Billy said, moving past it, like the good lawyer he is. What’s done is done; you move on and tackle the problems that you can.
    “Yeah,” I said. “She said she always leaves work at five fifteen. I’m going to follow her home, just to make sure.”
    I figured that the least I could do was keep an eye out for the woman, even if our little lunchtime surprise was just a carload of idiot punks getting a kick out of scaring people in the park. Of course, I didn’t believe that. Coincidence is crap in this business. And besides, since leaving the Philadelphia Police Department after getting shot, I’d had the luxury of time. I also had an off-the-clock burden of responsibility.
    If something happened to Ms. Carmen after I blew off the incident as an urban prank, wrote up a report, and forgot it after shift change, I’d be right back where I’d often been as a cop: cynical, depressed, and complicit.
    “OK, Max,” Billy said, perhaps forgiving. “That sounds prudent.”
    Prudent started with a
pr
that would have taken him three attempts to get off his tongue if we’d been speaking face-to-face.
    “What can you give me over the phone?”
    I told him about Ms. Carmen’s brother, gave him the name and the DOB, knowing he’d be punching the information into one of his array of computer databases as we spoke.
    “All right, Max, that’s a start. I’ll work on this and review it with you later,” Billy said. As a bit of a techno-wizard, he didn’t even like using cell phones to discuss business. Anyone with money could put together the kind of listening devices and triangulation tracking governments use surreptitiously these days. Billy is no Big Brother phobe, but you only have to read the newspaper to know the capabilities of these systems. And as every law enforcement officer in the world knows, if we have the equipment, the bad guys are usually a step ahead of us.
    After hanging up with Billy, I sat.