“How did the client meeting go?” Melissa asked, her words on Rep’s cell phone muffled by the roar of traffic on I-43 South.
“I won ugly. The new general counsel and I didn’t click, but he figures he won’t get fired for listening to Gael Cunningham-Stewart. The engagement letter will go out first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Honey, that’s wonderful. Congratulations.”
“Thanks. How was your day?”
“Outstanding, actually,” Melissa said. “I had a student this afternoon who not only had tumbled to the fact that Napoleon Bonaparte lived at the same time as Jane Austen but wondered whether that curious fact might have had some impact on her writing.”
“Curiosity awakened. A pedagogical triumph.”
“Of the first order,” Melissa said, adding casually, “I did have a chat with Detective Washington. They’re talking to a judge about a warrant.”
“Just in case Walt was putting the wrong spin on things.”
“That’s one way to put it. Upset?”
“Nope. I married a clever girl and I knew what I was getting into. I should still make it by six, even with a stop at the office. I just crossed the Milwaukee County line.”
“’Til then, beloved.”
Rep disconnected and put the phone in the cup-holder. He sighed with contented relief. Pros are on the job. God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world. Practicing law was a lot more fun than playing cops-and-robbers with Kuchinski, and he suspected it was a lot healthier as well.
That’s when his phone beeped.
“Reppert,” MacKenzie Stewart’s voice said after Rep answered, “I feel like a perfect ninny.”
“Where are you?”
“At a strip mall coffee shop about a quarter-mile from the east gate to Timmerman Field. I had to caffeinate myself and walk off some frustration before my head exploded.”
“What happened?”
“My hideously expensive airplane got temperamental on the return trip from Door County, to start with,” Stewart said. “I decided not to risk flying all the way back to Indianapolis, so I had the pilot land here to look things over. We seem to have thrown a rod.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s quite bad, and it gets worse. My pilot thought he had a line on a replacement part somewhere in a place called Waukesha. He just called to say it’s the wrong part. My Gulfstream will be stuck here for a couple of days.”
“So you’ll be flying commercial back to Indianapolis?”
“I will if I can get to Milwaukee’s main airport within the next hour or so. Unfortunately, Veterans Taxi has promised me a cab within ten minutes three times in the last half-hour and hasn’t delivered. I’m losing confidence in it.”
“Tell you what, I’ll bet I can get there in fifteen minutes,” Rep said. “And if I don’t get too mixed up on the freeways, I should be able to get you to General Mitchell Field with a few minutes to spare.”
“I hate to ask, but I would deeply appreciate it.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s the least I can do.”
“If you sense on your way over here that anything funny is going on, by the way,” Stewart said, “don’t take any chances. Just give me a call on my cell phone and I’ll make other arrangements. Staying overnight in Milwaukee wouldn’t be any tragedy, if it came to that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I hate to sound melodramatic, but the Gulfstream is too reliable to just throw a rod all of a sudden. We both know that Vance Hayes wasn’t any boy scout. Coming on top of the adventures that have befallen you and your lovely wife, I can’t help wondering whether he was mixed up with bad people who are afraid that we’re somehow about to kick over the wrong rock.”
“Well, I, for one, have stopped kicking,” Rep said. “But between now and the time I drop you at Billy Mitchell Field, I expect cops with radar guns will be a greater threat to me than thugs from Vance Hayes’ past.”
Milwaukee’s rush hour lasts about twenty minutes. At least on the west side, it’s easy even for a newcomer to find his way around. Rep didn’t have any trouble getting back to Timmerman Field and thence to the strip mall Stewart had described. He saw Stewart standing on the parking lot next to a FedEx drop box. He was speaking into what Rep assumed was a Dictaphone in his right hand while he waved his left arm at Rep. At his feet was a trial bag—not a subtly elegant briefcase like IP lawyers carry, but one of those massive, boxy, trial lawyer things that look like anvil salesmen’s sample cases.
The parking lot would have been about the right size if everyone in America drove Mini Coopers. As it was, Rep pulled his Sable as close to the storefronts as he could to make sure he cleared PVC pipes that jutted from the bed of a Dakota pickup truck angle-parked on the street side of the lot.
“You made good time,” Stewart said as he approached.
“No bad guys on the way,” Rep said. He turned the engine off and got out so that he could open the trunk for Stewart’s trial bag.
Out of the corner of his eye, as he turned toward the back of the car, Rep glimpsed Stewart’s smile twist suddenly into a shocked grimace.
“Reppert, look out!” Stewart shouted, dropping his trial bag and pointing emphatically with his right arm.
Before Rep could jerk his head very far in that direction, his surroundings pinwheeled kaleidoscopically around him as Stewart’s body thudded into his and slammed him into unforgiving concrete.
“What the hell?” he demanded, in eloquent incoherence.
“Stay down!” Stewart ordered. “We just got shot at!”
Stewart, sprawled on top of Rep, rolled onto the parking lot, shifted his weight to his hips, and hoisted his torso for a cautious look around.
“I don’t see him,” he said. “He must have driven off.” Stewart climbed laboriously to his feet and began brushing off his Marks and Spencer tweeds.
“What happened?”
“I saw a muzzle flash from a reddish sedan speeding by.”
“That’s incredible,” Rep said, abrasions smarting under his clothes as he stood up. He remembered Kuchinski thinking that a maroon sedan had followed him and Melissa on their escape from Dreyfus’ studio.
“Believe it,” Stewart said. He pointed to the driver’s side front window on the Sable, now starred with spidery cracks radiating from an ugly impact point near the middle. “I have a feeling I’m not going to make my flight.”
“I guess the next thing to do is call the police.” Rep reached for the Sable’s door handle so that he could retrieve his cell phone.
“You might want to use the pay phone around the corner, so you don’t disturb the car before the police look it over.”
“Right, absolutely right,” Rep muttered distractedly.
It took fifteen seconds to get through to someone on nine-one-one, and forty more for the dispatcher to satisfy herself that no one was bleeding or suffocating, which put this call low on her priority list. Rep needed another three minutes to find fifty cents in his pocket, dial Melissa’s number, and tell her not to worry but he probably wouldn’t be there by six after all and she might want to take a cab home. When he got back to the car Stewart was striding back from the direction of the FedEx drop-box.
“Hell of a note,” Stewart said, smiling mordantly. “To quote Justice Holmes, ‘What a loss to American jurisprudence if it had gotten us both.’”
A squad car got there nine minutes later, and a second three minutes after that. By the time the second arrived the first cop had verified that Rep and Stewart weren’t hurt and was getting their account of what had happened.
“Forgive the cliché,” Stewart said, “but it happened so fast. We were getting ready to stow my trial bag and get in the car, and all of sudden I saw a bright flash from the window of a car going by about two hundred feet away. We hit the deck, and by the time we got up the car was nowhere in sight.”
“Car,” the cop said. “Make, model, color, license?”
“Reddish,” Stewart said. “I think it was Japanese, but I couldn’t pin it down any farther than that. I don’t have a clue about the license plate.”
“How about you?” the cop asked, turning toward Rep.
“I didn’t see a thing,” Rep said, shaking his head. “It completely blindsided me.”
The second cop had been examining Rep’s Sable. Now he came over, cradling a lump of dark metal in the palm of his hand.
“What do you think of this?” he asked his colleague.
“Thirty-eight,” the first cop said without hesitation.
“Three fifty-seven maybe?” the second cop asked.
“Nah, too big. Even from two hundred feet off, a three fifty-seven with any powder grain count at all would have blown the whole window out.” He looked back at Stewart. “You sure that was a muzzle flash you saw?”
“I saw plenty of muzzle flashes in Vietnam,” Stewart said. “I know what muzzle flashes look like, and that was a muzzle flash.”
“Hey, this thing came out of a gun all right,” the second cop said. “You can see the striations just with the naked eye.”
“Oh, well, we’ll just skip ballistics then,” the first cop said. Smiling at Rep and Stewart, he cocked his head toward his colleague. “Polish cowboy.” He turned back to the other cop. “I know it came out of a gun. How else would it have gotten here? What I was thinking was maybe it came from a gun a lot farther off. We have drive-bys now and then in Milwaukee, but usually on the near north side, not way out here—and these two don’t look like guys in the middle of a turf war to me. I’m wondering if some Nimrod was out there plinking and really blew one.”
“I’ll leave that to you,” Stewart said. “Anything else from us?”
“Guess not,” the first cop said. “We’ll do a standard area check. You two can be on your way and wait for a call from the guys with gold shields.”
“Great,” Rep said numbly. “Oh, you might want to let Detective Latrobe Washington know about this right away. He’ll be interested.”
As understatements go, this one turned out to be world-class.