Joe stared at him. “No,” he said, “you were babbling.” Then he walked around the counter and opened the door.

I looked at the outraged man and shrugged. “He’s not a morning person,” I said. “But, then again, not so much of an afternoon or evening person, either.”

I followed Joe into the office. It was a small, square room, occupied by an old metal desk and one filing cabinet. A tiny television sat on the filing cabinet, tuned to a morning talk show. The room smelled of beer and body odor. A large, ruddy man with fat cheeks and small, sunken eyes sat behind the desk. He wore a plaid shirt, with the first few buttons undone, revealing a thin gold chain amid a cluster of gray chest hair.

“You here about the dryer?” he asked.

Joe shook his head. “No.”

The man sighed. “Figures. Those sons of bitches have been promising to come out here for days, and they still haven’t showed. Meanwhile I got only four dryers that work. Sucks.” Joe looked at him blankly and didn’t say anything. The man said, “So what do you want?”

“You Dan Beckley?”

“That’s right. Who wants to know?”

I looked at Joe. Who wants to know? There are some things that sound cool when said by Robert DeNiro that sound ridiculous when said by anyone else. Joe gave Beckley our business card, and he looked at it and then dropped it on his desk.

“I figured this day was going to suck,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

“No problem,” Joe said. “We just wanted to talk to you.”

“About?”

“About Jeremiah Hubbard.”

Beckley screwed up his face like he’d tasted something foul. “I got nothing to say about Hubbard.”

“You sold a fair amount of property to him not too long ago,” I said. “Originally, you told him you weren’t interested. Then you reconsidered, and from what we’ve heard, you didn’t make out too well on the deal. What happened?”

“What happened? Nothing happened.” He crossed his arms over his ample stomach. “I decided to sell, that’s all.”

I nodded. “I see. You ever hear of a guy named Wayne Weston?”

He frowned. “No.”

“He’s an associate of Hubbard’s,” I said. “An investigator, like us. He was murdered about a week ago.”

Something changed in Beckley’s face-not when I mentioned the murder, but a split second earlier when I told him Weston was an investigator.

“I don’t watch the news shows much,” he said. “I don’t care to hear about murders and drug wars and the rest of that crap. And I never heard of this Weston guy, either.” He tilted his chin up at us, defiant.

“Why’d you reconsider on the property deal?” Joe asked. “There has to be some reason. A guy like Hubbard has plenty of money. You probably could have taken him for a lot more than you did.”

“I made out fine on that deal,” he said. “Just fine, thank you. I got what I wanted to get, and I moved on. I don’t see why it’s any concern of yours.”

Sometimes you just feel it. Call it a hunch, a gut reaction, intuition, an instinct-sometimes you can feel the truth in a way that’s hard to explain, a deep, subconscious tug that tells you when something doesn’t feel right. As I stood in Beckley’s office and watched him glaring at us, with his arms folded over his stomach and his shoulders pulled back in a defensive posture, I had that tug.

“What’d Hubbard have on you?” I asked softly.

He jerked his head back as if I’d given him a jab on the chin. “What did you say?”

“What’d he have on you?” I repeated. It was his reaction to my description of Weston as an investigator that had given me the tug. Somehow, that had made something click in his mind; it had explained something he’d wondered about in the past.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Joe took a half step backward, an almost unnoticeable movement, but he was clearing out of the way, realizing that I was operating on a feeling he didn’t share.

“Dan,” I said, “do us both a favor and don’t bullshit me.”

“I’d like you to leave. Now.” He pointed at the door.

“We’re not leaving, Dan,” I said, my voice still soft. “You didn’t sell out so low to Hubbard just because you felt like it. You’re too smart for that. You’d look at Hubbard, think about how deep his pockets are, and you’d bleed every cent you could out of him. Every last cent. Now why didn’t you?”

“Go to hell.”

I ignored him and leaned forward, placing my palms on his desk and lowering my face toward his.

“Listen to me, Dan. There are two ways of handling this. You can either tell me what Hubbard had on you, or you can let me find it out on my own. One way or the other, I’m going to get the information. And I don’t like being lied to. You’re lying to me now, and until I find out what you’re lying about, I’m going to make you my life’s work. You’re going to be my obsession, Dan. I’m not going away.”

He looked up at me, and the defiant chin quivered slightly. He breathed heavily out of his nose and clenched his hands together. Angry. Then he pulled open one of the desk drawers, removed an envelope, and threw it at me. It hit me in the chest and fell to the floor.

“Go on,” he said, his lip curling up in a snarl, spitting the words at me. “Go on and take a look.”

I retrieved the envelope from the floor and opened it. There were photographs inside. I went through them slowly while Joe looked over my shoulder. In the first picture, Dan Beckley was in a car, talking to a woman on the sidewalk who wore stiletto heels and a short red skirt with black fishnet stockings. In the next, he was passing her money, and then she was in the car, her head buried in his lap. In the final photograph, she was out of the car again, walking away, while Beckley sat in the driver’s seat.

I slipped the photographs back into the envelope. “So that’s how it went,” I said. “Hubbard sent you photographs of you with the hooker, and you made the deal?”

He shook his head. “Can’t prove it was him. All I got were the photographs and a little Post-it note with the price he’d offered me written on it. The message was pretty clear, though.” He looked down at the desk. “I got a wife and a son. I didn’t want them seeing that shit.”

“Did you call Hubbard on it,” Joe asked, “or did you just agree to the deal?”

“I didn’t call him out, but we both knew what was going on.”

I dropped the envelope back on his desk. “Thanks for your time, Dan. And don’t worry, this isn’t going to leave the room.”

He flipped me off and kept his eyes on the desk. Joe and I left. The Chinese man was still yammering at the clerk, who looked ready to strangle him. He shut up when Joe brushed against him, but he was back at it when we reached the door.

We sat in the truck, and I started the engine but didn’t shift out of park.

“So that’s what Weston was doing for him,” I said. “No wonder the guy has such good luck with business deals.”

“Explains why Weston didn’t appear to be a legitimate investigator,” Joe said. “He was just a well-paid extortionist. Hubbard probably gave him plenty of business.”

“If Weston had been doing this for a while, it would add to the list of people who’d have liked to kill him.”

“What about the Russians?” Joe said.

I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. “Yes. What about the Russians?”

We sat there for a while, and then I said, “We could go back to Hubbard, confront him with it, and see what he gives us.”

Joe shook his head. “I don’t like that. Not yet, at least.”

“All right. So what now?”

“Back to the office. Let’s take another look at those faxes from Amy and see who else Hubbard might have been putting the squeeze on. Then we’ll give Agent Cody a call.”

I pulled out of the lot and started to drive, then realized Joe was looking at me.

“What?” I asked.

“Just thinking about you pushing Beckley back there,” he said. “You’ve got some kind of instincts, LP.”