I felt Jen twitching next to me. She was dying to get out of the cop shop, back to her new job as an Innovator who solves crimes.
"Now, you did find her phone, which you are sure is hers…" (I nodded like a puppy)"… but that's not really a sign of foul play. Until she's been missing for twenty-four hours, it's just a lost phone. At which point you should have her roommate or a relative or some other adult call me if she's still missing. I'll keep your information on file."
I could tell from his tone it was useless arguing. "Oh. Thanks."
"So, do you want to turn in this phone as lost property, or would you like to save your friend some paperwork when she reappears and hold on to it?" He held out the phone, making it clear who was being saved from paperwork.
"Sure," Jen said eagerly. "We can give it to her. No trouble."
Detective Machal Johnson nodded slowly, ceremoniously handing the phone back to me.
"Your public-spiritedness is appreciated, I assure you."
Chapter 11
OUTSIDE THE COP SHOP:
"What now?"
"There's only one place to go. Back."
"Crap."
We approached the abandoned building cautiously, coming up Lispenard, urban commandos dodging from cover to cover—mounds of trash bags buzzing with midday flies, the half concealment of a phone booth, crouching behind doorways and stoops.
Actually, it was fun.
Until we spotted them.
The plywood doors were wide open, the padlock swinging on its chain. A rental truck sat blocking half the street, its elevator ascending with a whine, stacked high with boxes of the shoes.
"They're moving," Jen said.
We were hidden behind a steel-clad loading dock that thrust into the street, hot under our fingertips from the noon sun. We spoke in short bursts, as if on radios.
"Bald guy, by the door," I said.
"I count two more."
"Roger that."
"Roger what?"
"What?"
SoHo tourists walked by, casting puzzled looks in our directions. Hadn't they ever seen a stakeout before?
Our bald friend watched the work with a foreman's lazy disinterest while a woman stacked boxes on the curb. She was arrayed in a style commonly known as Future Sarcastic: a T-shirt emblazoned with a big-eyed alien, flight-suit trousers with dozens of gadget-shaped pockets, silver hair shining in the sun. Everything but the jet pack.
The guy riding the truck's elevator was muscular and lean, very dark. He was wearing a trucker cap and cowboy boots, jeans and a mesh shirt that showed off his muscles. In a friendlier context I would have pegged him as a gay bodybuilder doing an ironic take on NASCAR fandom. But alongside the other two, he looked more like one of many hopefuls sent down by central casting to try out for the part of Thug #3 in a hip new thriller.
Of which we were the unlikely heroes, I reminded myself.
"What do we do?" I asked, trying not to catch the eye of a curious young mother pushing a double-wide stroller past our position.
Jen pulled out her cell phone, starting thumbing. "Well, I'm inputting the license number of that truck."
"It's a rental."
"And rental places keep records."
"Oh, yeah." Maybe if I'd read more books about shoe consultants who solved crimes, I would've figured that out myself.
"And you should be taking pictures."
"Good idea. I mean, roger that."
I pulled out Mandy's phone and started to shoot. Between the five-millimeter lens and lack of zoom, they'd be pretty useless pictures, I was sure. But it was better than just standing there and being gawked at by passersby.
"Excuse me, is Broadway and Ninety-eighth Street around here?"
I looked up from my crouch at the two girls in their Jersey glitter shirts and floppy shoes, white capri pants tied at the calf with drawstrings, so last summer. I had to take pity on them—plus they were giving away our position.
"Yeah, it's about two blocks east" — hooking my thumb over my shoulder—"and about a hundred and ten blocks north."
"A hundred and ten blocks? That's far, right?"
I told them where to catch the 1 train.
"Your public-spiritedness is appreciated, I assure you," Jen drawled after the two had left, uncertainly repeating my directions to each other as they passed out of earshot.
"After when are you not supposed to wear white pants?" I asked.
"Roughly 1979."
I pointed. "They're leaving."
The truck was loaded, the bald guy scraping shut the building's doors. The shoes were going away. I thought of rising and dashing after the truck, jumping on just as it exceeded running speed, concealing myself behind boxes until I reached their evil lair, sneaking out and stealing a henchman's uniform, and, after a few captures and escapes, pulling the levers that made the whole place explode. And I realized why no crimes were ever solved by amateurs.
"There's nothing we can do, right?"
"Nope," said Jen as the truck pulled away.
The ground floor was empty.
"This sucks," I said.
We’d squeezed our way in through the wooden doors, which the bald guy hadn't bothered to chain together very tightly. There was no point. Every last box was gone.
I checked Mandy's phone for the time. It was coming up on two o'clock, only two and a half hours since we'd been here.
Jen surveyed the empty cavern of the building, her eyes scanning the floor inch by inch, finding nothing but spotless concrete.
"We should have come back earlier," Jen said quietly. "The shoes were right here."
"Did you forget the running-for-our-lives thing?"
"Overrated." Jen sighed. "There must be something we missed before."
She wandered off again, leaving me in the shaft of light by the doors, where I silently listed the reasons amateurs didn't solve crimes in the real world. Professional detectives would have sealed off the building with yellow tape from the start, dusting for fingerprints, searching for records of ownership and work permits. Actual police would have arrested the big guy in black and intimidated him into talking. Real cops wouldn't have run to the nearest coffee shop and then their friend's house to make expert use of wax paper. (Okay, maybe a coffee shop would have come into play, but they would have sent the rookie for doughnuts, leaving plenty of manpower for stretching out the yellow tape.) Non-amateurs might have the first clue how to take the license number of a rental truck and turn it into an address. I sure didn't.
And most importantly, a genuine crime solver wouldn't be terrified by the idea that the bad guys had his cell phone and were trying to find him. Real police were machines for turning coffee into solved crimes. I was a machine for turning coffee into jangled nerves.
"Hunter?" Jen's voice came out of the gloom, jangling my nerves.
"What?"
"Looks like someone left you a message."
She emerged, squinting and holding an envelope. A gray square of duct tape curled from it, the envelope glowing white in the gloom, carrying the letters H-U-N-T-E-R in red marker.
Her green eyes were wide, pupils huge in the dim light. "This was taped to the wall back there. Right where the shoes were."