“Check his shoes.”
“Good idea.” She overadjusted the elevation of the scope, and he disappeared. She brought the scope back up a bit and studied the man’s shoes. “I don’t think they’re cop shoes. They look more like those walking shoes you have.”
“Then he’s probably not a cop. Those things cost me three hundred bucks.”
“You never told me.”
“An oversight.”
“Sure. When I spend that much on shoes you sound like you’ve been stabbed.”
“They’re therapeutic. They prevent plantar fasciitis and shin splints.”
“Are you ready?”
“The guns are both lined up and loaded. If that guy down there is the lookout and they come now, we’ll at least get a shot. Keep watching him. If he does anything, it could be the all clear to signal them in.”
“He’s looking at his watch. Now he’s standing up. He’s walking.” She was quiet for a few seconds. “Nothing else is happening. I guess it’s a false alarm.”
“Good. Can you still keep watch for a little longer? I want to get the other stuff all ready to go.”
“Sure.”
She sat at the table and watched the front of the building. She was aware of Paul moving around in her peripheral vision, taking two folded police uniforms out of their suitcases. He laid them on the bed and examined them. The badge was pinned over the left pocket of each one, the nameplate pinned over the right pocket. Paul set the black leather utility belts beside them. They were bulky, with handcuffs, pepper spray, ammunition clips, sidearm. He put the black shoes on the floor at the foot of the bed. Paul was much neater than she was. She had years ago given up the pretense that she was as neat as he was, and since then concentrated on keeping her things out of his way. “There’s another one,” she said.
“What?”
“The guy we were watching left. Now there’s another guy in the same spot. He’s wearing a sport coat, too, and a tie. He’s not sitting. He’s standing.”
“Let me see.” Paul stood over her and she leaned away from the table so he could look through the spotting scope. “That’s odd. He doesn’t look as though he’s waiting for a bus, either. He’s walking over toward the corner of the building. Now he’s just standing there.”
“You don’t suppose it’s some kind of national-security thing—protecting the court buildings from terrorists?”
“I sure as hell hope not, but it could be.” He stared into the spotting scope. “I want to watch this guy for a while. You can take a break.”
For the rest of the day, one of them was always at the table in front of the window, staring at the front entrance of the District Attorney’s office below. They took two-hour shifts. Every time Sylvie returned to the window, she saw one of the two men in sport coats.
The men weren’t on duty for longer than an hour, and they moved around, so she could not always find the one on guard immediately. She made a game out of searching. Sometimes the man would be around one corner of the building or the other, just far enough so he could face in a different direction and not appear to be staring at Temple Street. Once he disappeared, but she found him ten minutes later across Temple Street from the building, coming out of the doorway of another building where he had been watching the street from behind the glass doors.
At six she put on her wig and Sarah Harkin skirt to walk to a restaurant down the street and pick up a takeout dinner. There were five good restaurants in the hotel, but she didn’t want to attract the attention of too many of the Otani Hotel’s guests and staff, so she used a back elevator to get to the street. When she returned, she took the stairs up two flights before she emerged from the stairs and took the elevator the rest of the way.
During her first evening shift, she used the nightscope sparingly. The bright green glow gave her a headache after a few minutes, and she knew she didn’t need it. A car pulling up in front of the building to let out passengers would be hard to miss.
Her rest periods were worse than the watch periods. Paul had sunk into his quiet mode, which made him no company at all, and she was afraid that watching television would light up the room and make Paul visible. Her eyes were tired anyway. At ten Paul lengthened the shifts to three hours, so she could sleep.
The bed was mostly taken up by the uniforms they had laid out, so Sylvie pulled back the covers and made a small space on the far edge. In the darkness and silence of the room, she went to sleep immediately. At one Paul gave her a small shake, and she managed to bring herself out of sleep and open her eyes. “I sure hope this is a one-day job,” she said.
“Just do your best. Wake me up at four, unless something happens first. If you find you can’t keep your eyes open, get me up.”
“All right. I think I’m awake now. Where are the two men?” She put her feet on the floor and stretched.
“I don’t know. I think they must be in the building or in a parked car somewhere. I haven’t seen them since around midnight.”
Sylvie kept herself awake by searching for the men for a time, and then by trying to use the nightscope to see into the cars that passed. The only pedestrians on the street were a couple of homeless men with shopping carts. It occurred to Sylvie that they could easily be cops, too, taking the night shift. She used the scope to study them, but could not reach a conclusion about them. Their clothes consisted of several layers to keep off the night chill, so it was impossible to tell if they were hiding weapons. She saw nobody else who interested her, and at four she woke Paul and went back to sleep.
When Sylvie awoke again, the light in the room was still dim. She looked in the direction of the window. Paul had it open, and she realized that the sound of his opening it was what had awakened her. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder.
“What is it?” she said.
“A car. Get up.”
Sylvie threw off the covers and rushed to join him at the window, snatching up the other rifle. While she had been asleep, he had removed the nightscope and put on the other sixteen-power Weaver. Sylvie brought the rifle up, opened both eyes wide to rid herself of the filmy blur left over from sleep, then stared into the rifle sight.
A black SUV had pulled to the red curb in front of the building. Two doors on the far side swung open. Sylvie cycled the bolt of the rifle and aimed at a spot just past the rear door, where somebody was going to step out in a second.
“Hold your fire.”
Something was wrong—she could hear it in Paul’s voice. She looked wide of her scope, saw running figures approaching the SUV, and placed her crosshairs on one of them. “It’s the man from yesterday. The one on the bus bench!”
Sylvie watched the man reach into his coat as he ran. His hand came out, holding a gun. There was a burst of fire from inside the car, but it was another volley of shots from somewhere else that caught him from behind and swept him forward onto his face on the pavement, where he lay with his arms out in a big embrace, blood pooling on the cement by his head.
There was another barrage of shots. Sylvie swung her rifle to her left to see, but Paul held her arm. “Put it down. We’ve got to go!”
She set the rifle on the table, her eyes still on the scene below. The second man she had seen yesterday was lying on the sidewalk, too. Three plain vans—white, blue, black—pulled up quickly and men and women in black nylon jackets began to pile out. Some of them knelt by the fallen men, while others spoke into radios. A couple of uniformed cops appeared a hundred feet down the street and tossed flares on the pavement to begin diverting traffic away from the scene.
“Did you see the girl?”
“I don’t think she’s even there.” Paul wasn’t even looking now. He was folding the legs of the spotter scope and putting it in a carry-bag. “It was an ambush, a decoy thing. It was set up for us. Help me collect our gear.”