“My charm is not pretending,” Cab replied. “I’m equally honest about my faults.”
“Which are?”
“I’m not a team player. I’m a loner. I hate bureaucracy, because I like to do things my own way. I get bored easily. I want to give Lala what she wants, but I can’t. I’m too selfish for that.”
“If you were Chinese and eighteen inches shorter, you could be me,” Maggie said.
“And a woman.”
“Yeah, that, too,” she said.
Cab finished his wine and stared down at her, and she stared back. The music thumped in her ears. Neither one of them needed to say it was time to go. It just was. Cab put a hundred-dollar bill under his wineglass, which was way too much for the bill, and then the two of them made their way out of the restaurant. It was peaceful in the night air, walking beside the docks with the laughter of the crowd behind them. Cab didn’t wait long. Just outside the restaurant, he took her face in his hands and kissed her. She had to get on tiptoes, and he had to bend down to reach her like a heron hunting a lizard. It was still great.
Outside Tin City, the neighborhood turned industrial. They walked next to the warehouse wall of a marine manufacturer on their way back to Cab’s car. Boat trailers and vans lined the street. There were no lights, making the area dark except for the glow of the restaurants on the other side of the water. Cab had his arm slung around Maggie’s shoulder. He hummed a tune under his breath, and she thought it was a Frank Sinatra song, “Ring-A-Ding-Ding.”
His Corvette was parked at the end of the street, near a boat lift that hauled speedboats in and out of the water. The night made it hard to see, but she knew something was wrong when glass crunched under her feet. Ten feet from the sports car, they both stopped dead.
Every window in the car was shattered. Some windows had been broken all the way through, scattering sharp fragments in and out of the car; some were simply dotted with starbursts. The candy-red chassis was a sea of dents, as if it had been caught in a massive hailstorm. The mirrors had been knocked off the car and smashed. The tires were slashed and flat. The license plate, catcha, lay at their feet, bent in half.
Cab bent over to pick up the plate. Doing so saved his life.
They were too shocked by the destruction of the car to hear the man sneaking up behind them and swinging a baseball bat at Cab’s head. As Cab ducked, the man missed, and the bat sailed by with a hiss of air only inches above Cab’s skull.
Maggie screamed a warning. She reached for her gun, but her gun was 2,000 miles away in Minnesota. She dived across the short space and shoved the man’s chest with both hands, but she only bumped him a few inches backward. It was like pushing against a horse that didn’t want to move. She tried again, but he was ready for her. He swatted her off her feet with a backhand thump of his forearm. She landed hard on her back on the pavement, and the pain was like a cattle prod to her neck.
Cab jabbed a fist at the man’s face. The blow jerked the man’s head back and bloodied his nose. With a grunt, the man swung the bat again. Cab dodged out of the way, but not quickly enough, and the bat hit him in the meat of his upper arm and knocked him to his knees. The man cocked his arms like a baseball player, but before he could take another swing, Maggie scrambled to her feet and threw herself in his face. She wrapped her arms around his back and sank her teeth into his shoulder. He howled in pain and wrenched free, throwing her to the ground again.
The bat dropped from his hands and rolled.
It rolled right into Cab’s hands, and he picked it up and got to his feet.
“Hi,” Cab said to the man.
Maggie and Cab closed on him from both directions. The man reached for his back pocket, pulled out a knife with a six-inch blade, and slashed the air. Cab swung the bat, and the man jumped back. Cab swung again, and this time the bat caught the metal tip of the knife and sent it flying. The man heard the clatter of the knife and knew he was done. He turned and ran. They watched him go, disappearing into the Naples streets, and they were in no condition to chase him. Cab let the bat fall to the pavement. He grimaced as he rubbed his arm.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I’ll live. How about you?”
“I’ll have a headache tomorrow, but I’ll be fine.”
He came up to her and touched her back, neck, and hair, looking for blood and tender spots. His fingers were surprisingly soft and graceful. She felt along his arm and shoulder but found no breaks. They stayed close to each other. Their skin was bathed in sweat, and they were both breathing hard. The fight had attracted no attention from Tin City. The two of them were still alone near the warehouse.
Eventually, Cab separated himself from her and surveyed the wreckage of his Corvette. He walked through the field of glass.
“Well, it was time for a new car anyway,” he said.
Maggie laughed, but that sent spasms through her neck. “I don’t suppose this was random.”
“Oh, no. This was a message. Stay the hell away from Dean Casperson.”
“Except we can’t prove it.”
“That might be the one advantage we have,” Cab said.
“How do you figure that?”
“He’s arrogant enough to think there’s nothing we can do to him.”
“So what do you suggest?” Maggie asked.
Cab didn’t answer. He went around to the back of the Corvette and pried at the damaged trunk, which opened with a screech of metal. He dug inside and emerged with a look of triumph on his face. There was a bottle of wine in his hand.
“I always keep a bottle of Stags’ Leap in the back for emergencies. Thank heavens it came through unscathed.”
“You really are something,” Maggie told him. “But you haven’t answered my question. What do we do now?”
“First we go to my place and open the wine,” Cab said.
“And then?”
“You’re not going to like it. Remember, you’re still a cop, but I’m not.”
“Tell me,” Maggie said.
“The rich play by their own rules,” Cab replied, “so we need someone who’s willing to beat them at their own game. That’s why I sent Peach up there in the first place. We need to find someone who doesn’t care about the rules. We need someone who’s willing to cheat.”
25
Cat parked her Honda Civic in the parking lot of the Ordean-East Middle School. Her car was the only vehicle in the lot in the middle of the evening. She and Curt slipped out into the cold. There was no snow, but the gusty wind down the hill almost stole the gray trapper hat from her head. A recycling bin had been blown from someone’s garage and tumbled down the street; it rattled and rolled around on the asphalt. She shoved her hands into her coat pockets and pointed her face down, and they trudged to the corner.
Through the trees on the other side of Fourth Street, she could barely make out the corner of the red brick wall protecting the estate that Dean Casperson was renting. The wall followed Hawthorne Road up the hill. The intersection of the two roads was empty. They had the neighborhood to themselves.
“So now what?” Curt said.
Cat tapped her foot on the sidewalk as she thought about what to do next. “Do you think we can climb that wall?”
“I could boost you up. You should be able to reach the top.”
“Well, let’s see if anything’s going on over there first,” she said.
Cat headed diagonally across the intersection under the glow of a streetlight. She was on the other side of the street from Casperson’s mansion. It was dark here, sheltered by tall bushes. She took deep steps through the snow toward the corner house, which was a white Colonial with a green roof. Curt stayed close behind her. They followed the walkway in front of the house, crossed a plowed driveway, and ducked quickly through the snow in the open yard until they reached the next house. They took shelter behind a tall arborvitae.