17

 

 

Thad Richards gave me his business card and promised to answer any other questions I might have, though he admitted he didn’t think he could be of much more help. I assured him he’d already helped a lot, and thanked him.

I rode the elevator down to the lobby, replaying my conversation with Richards in my head. In the end, the only thing of significance that came out of it was the five million dollar policy. I wondered why the police hadn’t put that in the affidavit. Then I wondered if they knew about it at all.

I was pretty sure they did. Katie MacLeod had been a stellar patrol cop when I knew her. Since I left the job, she’d been involved in several high profile incidents in which she conducted herself admirably. There was every reason to believe she was every bit as good at being a detective.

The lobby was mostly empty, and I walked through it, deep in thought. I stepped out of the front door of the building and onto the sidewalk, still thinking about what to do next. A few steps later, I collided with what felt like a brick wall. I staggered backward, unintentionally putting too much weight on my left knee, and crumpled to the ground.

“Oh, hey, sorry about that,” came a voice from above. “You should really watch where you’re going.”

For a crazy moment when I first heard the voice, I thought it was the guy I’d gotten into a fight with at the bar. Anger coiled in my stomach and my fists clenched. But when I looked up, I saw a stranger who was only a little taller than me but might have been half again as wide. His dark brown hair was cut into a military style flat top and his face was peppered with acne. He looked about twenty-five.

It definitely wasn’t the same guy.

“I didn’t see you,” I said.

He grinned but there wasn’t any real humor in it. “I’m kinda hard to miss.”

I shifted my weight to my right leg and stood up. “Well, sorry.”

“No worries,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Because you look like you were favoring that knee.”

“Old injury,” I said, and walked past him.

I tried not to limp, but that turned out to be impossible. Once I was around the corner and out of his sight, I forced myself to continue for another block or so. But when I came upon a concrete bench, I had to sit. My knee intermittently throbbed and screeched, and I knew I’d be popping some ibuprofen when I got home.

Rubbing the knee never helped much, but I always ended up trying it anyway. Touching the asymmetrical contours and missing pieces brought me back to that hot August night over a decade ago, when two gangsters emptied their magazines at me. At the time, the bullet that pierced my shoulder from behind, just under the vest, had been the worst of the two injuries. And while my strength and flexibility on that side is noticeably less than my right, it’s the knee injury that seems to plague me more often.

Nothing like having a constant reminder of where you’ve been.

I rubbed on the knee for a few minutes, then gave up and limped slowly back to my car.