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    Earl Sawyer squinted at me. "Come closer."

    In their nests of bruises, the old man's eyes were shiny with malice. "Bend down."

    I leaned toward him.

    "Didn't I talk to you a couple of days ago? When I was letting myself in?"

    "Friday evening," I said.

    "You heard Mr. Hatch agree to my deal, didn't you?"

    “I did."

    "You got the wrong guy," Earl said. "You have to remember, I hardly saw the guy. But this isn't him."

    "Are you seeing double?" Rowley asked.

    "So I see two of the wrong guy. I see two of you, but I still know you're a son of a bitch named Rowley."

    "This is a travesty," Hatch said. "Earl can't see straight. He had us come in here to work out a pension deal."

    "He can see well enough to clear Mr. Dunstan," Mullan said.

    "Send the nurse in here, will you? Mr. Hatch, I want you to sign a written agreement."

    Outside the cubicle, June Cook gave me a small, triumphant smile and said, “I heard the patient's request." She leaned over the counter for a sheet of paper and drew a pen from the pocket of her green tunic.

    While Hatch signed away $25,000, the four of us drifted toward the top of the unit. I looked again at the bloody floor inside Prentiss's sealed cubicle. It reminded me of something I had heard in the past few days, but could not quite remember. Mullan was looking at the bloodstains, too, and I asked him how soon his men would be done with their work. “In there?" he said. "Rowley, we're finished with this scene, aren't we?"

    “I'll send a man over," Rowley grumbled.

    "Clothhead Spelvin," I said. “I knew this reminded me of something."

    Captain Mullan slowly turned his head to regard me in ill-concealed amazement.

    "What's that supposed to mean?" Rowley asked.

    "An oldie but goodie," Mullan said, still marveling at me. "That's very interesting. Would you care to say more?"

    "Wasn't Spelvin knifed to death in a cell? Whoever killed him got past the guards and the other prisoners without being seen."

    "Pretty good trick, wasn't it?" Mullan said.

    "Funny thing, nobody ever sees squat when jungle justice goes down. You close it as a suicide, right?"

    "That's how it was closed," Mullan said, still looking at me.

    Stewart Hatch thrust the curtain aside and stamped out. His face was tight with anger. No one spoke during the wait for the elevator, and the arctic silence continued as we descended, elbow to elbow with strangers, to the ground floor.

    Instead of ramming his way through the people before him, Hatch let them depart and nodded at me to get off. I thought he was going to go back to the ICU and rip up the agreement he had signed, but when the elevator had emptied, he moved out into the corridor. For a moment, he pressed his hands to his face and held them there, as if concealing his anger or reining it in.

    Hatch lowered his hands. He took a deep breath. “I didn't know the old bastard had it in him." His face split into a grin, and he chuckled. The chuckles built into outright laughter. I would not have been more surprised if he had started passing out hundred-dollar bills. All of us started laughing. Treuhaft boomed out huge bass cannonballs, and Rowley contributed a toneless noise that sounded like a child's first assault on a violin.

    "Old Earl," Hatch said through gasps of laughter. "Hesnookered me. He flatbushwhacked me." He tilted back his head and roared.

    I confess, this performance disarmed me. In spite of everything I knew or thought I knew about Stewart Hatch, at that moment I could not help liking him. His ability to laugh at himself put him in a different category from self-important toads like Grenville Milton.

    He wiped his eyes with the back of a hand, still chuckling. "All right. Live and learn. I can take Mr. Dunstan home. You guys have things to do, and it's on my way."

    When we had all spun through the revolving door, Mullan questioned me with a look, and I said, "Sure, why not?"

    Stewart Hatch opened the passenger door of his Mercedes and beckoned me in with a flourish.

 •66

 •We drove out of the hospital grounds like a couple of old friends. Hatch was smiling, and his eyes were filled with a comfortable, humorous light. Top down, the car flowed up the street with the weighty ease I remembered. "You liked this little sweetheart, didn't you?" Hatch asked me. “I keep forgetting how much I enjoy driving it."

    “If you're going to Ferryman's Road, I'll get out there. There's no reason for you to take me back to my place."

    "Let's drive around a while. It'll give us a chance to get to know each other. Wouldn't you agree we should talk?"

    “If you think so." I braced myself.

    "Oh, I do, definitely." He smiled at me again, his eyes dancing. "There's something I'd like to show you. We can get there in about twenty minutes."

    "What is it?"

     “I don't want to spoil the surprise. Can you spare the time?"

    "As long as you're not going to march me into a field and show me a gun."

    Five green lights and a nearly empty road had appeared before us. Hatch twinkled at me. "Watch this." He touched the accelerator, and the car concentrated upon itself for a tenth of a second before rocketing ahead. I watched the speedometer glide past sixty before we sped through the first light. It kept climbing as we blasted toward the second. The breeze whipping past our heads shifted the line of Hatch's hair about an eighth of an inch backward. He kept the car at a steady eighty miles per hour through the fourth light, and brought it smoothly down to thirty only in time to make it past the fifth and swerve right onto Commercial Avenue. His hair sprang perfectly back into place.

    "You can get this baby up to a hundred and ten before you actually feel like you're speeding."

    "Now that we're together like this, Stewart," I said, "can I ask you a couple of questions?"

    "Anything."

    "Between you and me, is Rowley your inside guy at Police Headquarters?"

    "Lieutenant Rowley works for the city of Edgerton. The man is a dedicated public servant. His passion for justice may sometimes get the better of him, but that comes with the job."

    "And you didn't tell him to order me out of town."

    "Of course not."

    "And you realize I had nothing to do with what happened at your building."

    “I'm relieved, as a matter of fact. Now I don't have to figure out how you broke in. We have the most sophisticated security system you can imagine. Nobody not on the inside could get around the pressure sensors and the electronic beams and disarm the contact points, so it must have been an employee of the security company. We'll get him, but that still leaves me with the computer damage." Hatch gave me an inquiring look. "Aren't you an expert in that area?"

    “I wouldn't go that far," I said.

    "Would you like to make ten thousand dollars a week? It looks like about half the files are missing from our hard disks, and I need to recover them. All I'd ask is that you sign a confidentiality agreement. The work might not even take as long as a week. You get me set up and running in a day or two, the money's the same. Sound interesting?"

    “It sounds great," I said, "but the answer is no."

    "Can I ask why?"

    "No offense intended, but I'd rather not be on the Hatch payroll."