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pedestrian with a car is no easy feat. Unless I wanted to piss off every driver behind me by coasting along at fifteen miles per hour, I couldn’t just tail the guy, and even if I did, all the blaring horns would blow the whole stealth aspect of the job.
    Nor could I just keep circling the block again and again. If he went into one of the many old houses that had been converted into offices that crowded the side streets in this part of Reno while I was on the other side of the block, I’d be screwed.
    I had to improvise. Luckily, I’d gotten good at this part of the job thanks to years of waiting out reluctant witnesses who didn’t want to be served with the subpoena or the summons they were trying to duck.
    The parking spots along both sides of Hill Street were crammed with cars, but there was an empty loading zone near the back of a two-story mansion that had been converted into office suites.
    I pulled into the loading zone, switched on my car’s hazard lights, and picked up a clipboard I’d stashed in the pocket behind the passenger seat. I pretended to look through the documents I kept on the clipboard—a phony but authentic-looking subpoena complete with notes on where to find a non-existent witness—while I kept one eye on Mr. Not So Subtle.
    He crossed the street in the middle of the block, and then cut across another parking lot, this one behind the Nevada Museum of Art. When he got through the parking lot, he headed east on Liberty Street, still on foot.
    I could barely see him now, so I pulled back into traffic. I got to the corner of Hill and Liberty just in time to see him go into one of the many bank buildings near the intersection of Liberty and Virginia Streets.
    I swore under my breath. This particular building had at least ten stories full of offices. I should have gotten out of my car and followed the guy on foot. Even though he’d been walking at a pretty good clip, I might have been able to follow him closely enough to tell whether he took the elevator, and to which floor.
    I did have one advantage, though. I had his picture on my camera.
    I parked in a space in the building’s attached garage earmarked for bank customers. Before I got out of my car, I brought up the clearest picture I’d taken of the guy on my camera’s display screen and then took a picture of the picture with my cell phone. The end result wasn’t perfect, but at least now it looked like something I’d snapped with my cell.
    I took a twenty dollar bill out of my wallet and shoved it in the pocket of my jeans, and I was ready to go.
    This building had a security guard instead of a concierge. The lobby where he sat was a vast open area with no locked gates or metal detectors, so I wasn’t quite sure what the elderly Hispanic security guard was supposed to secure. The entrance to the bank was at the other end of the lobby from where he saw behind a built-in desk. I doubted he could get to the bank in time do to anything constructive if robbers hit the place.
    Maybe his real purpose was to help lost souls. If that was the case, he was just the person I was looking for. Next to the man I was really there to find, that is.
    I put on my best “trust me” expression and headed toward the guard desk.
    He looked up from his own clipboard, and I smiled at him. He didn’t exactly smile back, but he didn’t look like he wanted to shoot me, either.
    “Hi,” I said. “I wonder if you could help me.”
    “I’ll do my best,” he said. He had a faint accent, not exactly south of the border but definitely not a local.
    “This is kind of silly, and maybe I’m being too honest, but I was having lunch at that cafe on California—you know the one all the lawyers go to?”
    His expression said he knew where I meant but it wasn’t someplace he cared to go.
    “Well, this guy dropped twenty dollars on the sidewalk.” I pulled the twenty out of my pocket. “I yelled at him, but I guess he didn’t hear me. He just took off down the