Ethan turned left onto North 72nd Court, jogging past a parade of shops before he reached a smallholding on the corner by a parking lot. The nondescript block held a single, security code protected door that led to the four small businesses within. He reached up and punched in his number as he entered the building and strode to the door of their office, pushing it open as he walked in and pulled off his earphones.
Filing cabinets lined one wall, and a series of pictures were tacked to another, each depicting a fugitive with a price on their head. Everything from minor two-bit felons up to hardened criminals with homicides under their belts. Two desks adorned the office; Ethan’s was tidy and organized with military efficiency. Nicola Lopez’s looked as though a tornado had gusted through it.
Lopez leaned back in her chair, her long black hair pinned up in a ponytail and her dark almond eyes shifting with impatience.
‘Just break into the goddamned house,’ she snapped. ‘Hundred thousand bucks bond sitting on his ass in there just waiting for us and you’re jogging-miss-daisy past his window every day.’
Ethan smiled as he tossed his microphone onto thick piles of paper on his desk.
‘There’s no point in one of us getting busted. The cops will only take Sedgewick into their own custody before cutting us loose. We gotta play it smart and let him come out to us.’
Lopez shook her head and gracefully twirled a pen through her fingers.
‘We gotta play it smart. I’ll be tapping those words onto your head in Morse Code with a baseball bat if the police bust Sedgewick before we do. Six weeks of work down the tubes.’
‘You win some…’ Ethan replied.
Lopez huffed and puffed for a few moments more but said nothing as she turned back to her computer.
Ethan could understand her frustration. As a kid Lopez had walked out of Guanajuato in Mexico twenty years before with her family and little else and somehow made it into the police department of Washington DC as a homicide detective. Diligent, obedient and full of idealistic enthusiasm, Lopez had seen her partner shot and killed by a corrupt senior officer, an event which had ultimately led her to resign her post on the force and join Ethan in the far less secure world of bail bondsmen and private investigations. Now she was spontaneous, impulsive and sometimes downright aggressive, traits that fit their chosen profession surprisingly well but also made her unpredictable. Her silence lasted for less than thirty seconds. She couldn’t let it go and looked up at him.
‘You know we’ve spent four thousand bucks hunting that asquerosa, and all the while he was hunkered down less than two hundred yards from where we’re sitting?’
‘He’s fooled the detectives on his case too,’ Ethan pointed out.
‘They’re on payroll. We’re not.’
‘What do you want me to say?’ Ethan asked as he flopped down into his chair. ‘You think that we should have just not bothered chasing him at all? You can’t win the prize if you don’t buy a ticket.’
‘Very poetic,’ Lopez replied, rolling her eyes. ‘But right now we’re just sitting here while Sedgewick stays holed up in his buddy’s mansion. As long as the house owner is holidaying in the Caribbean or whatever he told the police he was doing, they’ll believe the house to be empty. Maybe it is.’
‘It’s not,’ Ethan replied. ‘I’ve seen movement inside. Sure, no lights, television or movement of vehicles, but somebody’s tucked away in there.’
‘You sure you’re not losing your mojo?’ Lopez asked, her expression serious now.
‘Why?’
‘Y’know,’ she shrugged. ‘Because of what happened, what you saw on that video, Joanna.’
Ethan sighed heavily, and even as he did so he realized that maybe she was right. Every time he was reminded of what had happened he felt a tiny piece of his soul flutter away. He swallowed thickly.
‘I can still do my job.’
Lopez kept her gaze on him for what felt like an age. ‘Not saying that you can’t, just wondering if you can do it as well as you used to, is all.’
‘I can still do the job.’
Lopez shrugged but didn’t answer as she fixed her eyes back on her screen. Ethan watched as the glowing monitor reflected in her dark eyes, a strand of black hair falling down to frame one side of her face. Under different circumstances they might have become more intimately involved by now, but a series of remarkable events just months before had extinguished any spark of romance.
During a previous investigation for their biggest and most secretive client, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lopez had gotten too close to a client who had wound up dead. Mixing business with pleasure had resulted in tragedy for her, something that Ethan was not keen to check out himself. Soon after, like a ghost long forgotten, news of Joanna’s survival surfaced, news that had both elated and haunted him ever since.
Lopez was right. A year ago, he would have busted into that place and dragged Sedgewick’s cretinous bulk into custody. Now he was sitting on his ass hoping that fate would play into his hands. A lifetime’s experience to the contrary told him what he needed to do. Be bold. Carpe diem.
‘Maybe we can tease him out,’ he suggested.
‘Sure,’ Lopez replied, not taking her eyes off her monitor. ‘Every cop in the city looking for him, he’s being hunted by people he’s swindled out of millions of bucks and who’ll ice him at the first opportunity, but we’ll make him forget all about that and just walk right into our hands.’
Ethan pictured the big colonial house and ran the layout of the streets through his mind for a moment, and then made his decision.
‘It’s worth a shot.’
Lopez looked at him. ‘Great. What kind of candy you suppose he likes?’
Ethan grinned as he reached out and picked up one of a dozen cheap, untraceable cellphones stacked neatly on one side of his desk.
‘Latino.’
Ethan tapped a number into the cellphone as Lopez shot upright out of her chair, her flawless skin flushing.
‘What the hell are you going to do?’
Ethan leaned back in his chair as the line buzzed in his ear.
‘You said it yourself, we can’t just sit here doing nothing while Sedgewick stays holed up in his buddy’s mansion.’
‘Yeah, but—’
Ethan raised a finger to silence her as the line connected.
‘Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?’
Ethan responded in a shaky, nervous voice.
‘I’d like to report a break-in in progress. Can you send help please, right now?’
5
Lopez’s face plunged in disbelief as she vaulted across her desk toward him, scattering paperwork and old Styrofoam cups. Ethan kept the cellphone pinned to his ear as she fumed.
‘What’s the address, sir, and how many suspects can you see?’
‘1454 Jackson Avenue, ma’am,’ Ethan replied. ‘I can see four men, but there may be more.’
‘Units are on the way. Where are you calling from?’
‘I have to go and secure my front door right now!’
‘Stay on the line please, sir.’
‘The hell I will, they might try to break in here too!’
Ethan killed the line and then switched the phone off.
‘What the goddamned hell was that?’ Lopez raged. ‘You’re sending units to the same block? What the hell are you going to do if they see Sedgewick?’
Ethan slipped the plastic rear of the phone cover off, pulled out the SIM card, and snapped it in two as he looked up at Lopez.