He looked bad.

There were tubes running in and out of him, monitors beside and above him, and I didn’t understand what any of it meant. But you didn’t have that much hardware hooked up to you unless it was pretty damn serious.

“Hey, man,” I said.

His eyes were closed, his head back on the pillow. Letitia moved in close to him. “Larry,” she whispered. “He’s here. The man you were asking for. Zack. Zack is here.”

One eye half fluttered open, went closed again.

“It’s okay,” I said. “We should just let him rest.”

“No,” Letitia said to me. “It sounded important, what he wanted to tell you.”

Now I leaned in a bit closer. “Lawrence, it’s Zack. Your sister says you wanted to give me some sort of a message. So, like, I’m here. But you take your time.”

The one eye fluttered open again, landed on me, tried to focus. Now the other eye struggled to open.

“Ohhhhh,” he said quietly.

“Yeah, you must be hurtin’,” I said.

He grimaced, rolled his head back and forth on the pillow. “Zack,” he said, barely more than a whisper.

“Yeah, I’m here. You kind of made a mess of my feature, you know? Getting yourself hurt this way, it kind of changed the angle. You shouldn’t have gone and done that on me.”

“Watch,” he said.

“Huh? What did you say, Lawrence?”

“He said ‘watch,’ ” Letitia said.

“Watch?” I shrugged. “What do you mean, Lawrence? What watch? Somebody’s watch?”

“Out,” he said, his eyes closing for a second.

“Watch out?” I said. “Is that what you’re trying to say? Watch out?” I glanced at Letitia.

Lawrence tried to swallow. Letitia held a straw that led down into a glass of water up to his mouth. A sip of water went down and he took a couple of breaths.

“After,” he said, looking at me now. “You.”

“What are you saying, Lawrence?

He closed his eyes again, exhausted.

“I think what he’s saying,” Letitia said, “is watch out, they’re after you, too.”

That was kind of the way I’d read it, too.

22

“MY BEST GUESS,” said Otto, “is the battery cells.”

I’d grabbed another cab from the hospital back to the auto repair shop and was standing with Otto out in the parking lot next to the Virtue, which had spent quite a bit of time inside the shop during the day, but was now back outside.

“I tried and tried to get it to do what you said it did,” Otto said. “There was only one time it wouldn’t start, wouldn’t do a damn thing. So I checked all the wiring to the cells, saw one I thought looked like it was loose, and fixed it. Couldn’t get it to act up after that, so that may have done the trick, but shit, you should probably take this thing to a Virtue dealer where they got a better handle on this car than I got.”

“I’ll consider that.”

Otto smiled, shoved a cigarette between his lips. “I did a search on the net, too, where people talk about the cars they got? One guy, has one of these, had the same problem, and he’d jiggle the transmission shifter thing, like there might be a short in there, and sometimes that worked. I don’t know. Try it out, if it doesn’t start again, bring it back.”

“How will I bring it back if it doesn’t start?” I asked Otto.

His eyes went to slits. “That one of those chicken-and-egg questions?”

I got in the car, found the key in the ignition. The engine started on the first turn. “That’s a hopeful sign,” I said.

“I got your bill inside,” Otto reminded me, before I pulled away.

Driving back to the paper, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Lawrence Jones had tried to tell me with the help of his sister. His suggestion, that I needed to watch out because “they” were after me, too, was more than a tad unnerving.

Who would be after me?

I could imagine someone going after Lawrence. He was in a line of work where you encountered the odd bad guy. He’d been following those guys in the Annihilator. He’d probably pissed off a lot of people when he was a cop. Maybe somewhere along the line, as a private detective, he’d made life tough for some philandering husband he’d caught in the act.

But what did anyone have against me? Who would also have it in for Lawrence?

And I thought back to those guys in the black SUV. What if they’d figured out Lawrence and I had been the ones following them that night? That those shots fired at their SUV had come from us?

Even if they’d had some way to trace the license plate on the Buick, Lawrence had told me he’d put bogus plates on the car, just to keep that kind of thing from happening. So how would they even have found him?

I thought of the specific words that Lawrence, lying in his hospital bed, hooked up to umpteen wires, had said.

Watch. Out. After. You.

When I got up to my desk in the Metropolitan newsroom, I found Steve Trimble’s card in my wallet and called his office phone. When I got his voicemail, I hung up and tried the cell number that was listed.

“Trimble.”

“Detective Trimble, Zack Walker here.”

“Yeah. What can I do for you?” His offer didn’t sound particularly sincere.

“I’m doing a story on all this for tomorrow and wanted to make a last-minute check with you to see whether there’s been any progress in the investigation, to find out who tried to kill Lawrence. You’re in charge of the investigation, right?”

“Yeah.” Man of few words.

“So, has there been any progress in the investigation?”

“We’re following up on a variety of leads at this time.” Strictly by the book, this guy was.

“Do you have any actual suspects?”

“Like I said, we’re following up on a variety of leads at this time.”

“Does it look to you like this was the work of more than one person, or a single individual?”

Trimble paused. “At this point I’d have to say there’s nothing that specifically indicates more than one person, but there’s nothing that specifically rules it out, either. What makes you ask?”

“Just asking,” I said.

“Look,” said Trimble, his tone softening a bit, “I’m willing to work a two-way street here. You were there, you know Lawrence. If there’s something you know that you think might be relevant, you share it with me, and anything I get, I give it to you first. We make an arrest, I call you.”

“Even before Dick Colby?”

Trimble actually laughed. “Even before Dick Colby. I’ve given him lots of stuff in the past. Preferably over the phone, if you get my drift.”

“I do,” I said, feeling that maybe I’d broken the ice a bit with Trimble. If he was willing to make fun of Colby, he couldn’t be all bad. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to check in with you once a day, see if you’ve got anything. And if I’ve got something, I’ll call you.”

“Anytime,” Trimble said. There was a pause. He added, “Night or day.”

“Deal,” I said.

I’d barely replaced the receiver when the phone rang.

“Hey,” said Sarah. “We’re on a break here. This guy from the newspaper association is telling us how to listen to our reporters’ concerns, to imagine how they must feel when their copy is chopped to ribbons, as a way of making a newsroom more harmonious. I want to feed this guy into a paper shredder. How’s Lawrence doing?”

“Holding his own, I think. Not great, but not getting worse.”

“Have you seen him?”

“I went there this afternoon, a couple of hours ago.”

“How’d he look?”

“Bad.”

“Y’able to talk to him at all?”

I paused. “Only a little. I did most of the talking. He’s hooked up to a lot of machines and shit. Looks like a Borg.”

“Huh?” Sarah, not a Star Trek fan, missed the reference. “I’m outa here tomorrow, after the morning session. Should be back home late afternoon, unless I decide to pop into the office first.”

“Don’t bother. Just come home. We miss you.”