A Nasty Piece of Work by Robert Littell Page A

since I’d bought it, years before. I heard an owl in the branches of a tree hooting for its mate. I heard the occasional eighteen-wheeler on the interstate that skirted the mobile park, which meant the prevailing wind was coming in from the Painted Desert. In the absolute silence between the owl and the eighteen-wheelers, I caught the faint scruff of footfalls on my sand walkway. I’m not an Apache but I’d swear the footfalls were made by shoes, not bare feet.
    A man’s shoes.
    “Where you going?” France-Marie whispered.
    “To the john.”
    Feeling my way in the dark, I retrieved the Colt .38 Commando revolver—a favorite weapon of CIA field agents—from its hidey-hole in an old lace-up boot, pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and padded barefoot past the head to the small escape hatch across from the main door of the mobile home. Easing open the two dead bolts, which I made a point of keeping well oiled, I slipped outside and hunkered down into what my hand-to-hand instructors called a combat crouch. Tufts of cumulus clouds were defacing a sliver of a moon not bright enough to cast shadows. Moving stealthily, I made my way around the side of the Blue Moon and came up behind the figure of a man trying to peer into my mobile home through one of its windows. I jammed the business end of my Colt into his ear as if it were a Q-tip.
    The Peeping Tom turned out to be a balding Caucasian male in his fifties. He was wearing a varsity jacket with the number 23 on the back, khaki trousers with pouch pockets on the sides of the legs, sturdy shoes. He froze the way children do when they’re playing Red Light, Green Light. “I figured it was time for Muhammad to come to the mountain,” my nocturnal visitor said lazily. He laughed under his breath. “Name’s Coffin. Charlie Coffin. A little bird told me you’d been nosing around the FBI regional office looking for me.”
    Charlie Coffin had the street smarts of someone who had spent most of his working hours outside of an office. The business end of a Colt in his ear didn’t faze him—all in a day’s work, his body language seemed to say. Moving with the world-weariness of a snail crossing a leaf, he produced a laminated identity card with the letters FBI across the top and a mug shot of an agent on it. “That’s me eight, maybe ten years ago,” he said, gingerly easing the barrel of my Colt to one side with two fingers. “Had more hair on my head back then. You’re damn good, sneaking up on me like that,” Coffin said with grudging admiration. “I heard as how you’d picked up some field savvy in Afghanistan.”
    “Field savvy didn’t keep me from getting kicked out of the Company,” I said.
    Coffin grunted. “Lose some, lose some others.”
    I took a closer look at the mug shot, then studied the face of the intruder as he slowly turned toward me. The two matched up. “You armed?” I asked.
    He held up his palms. “Only with my hands,” he said. “I’m a black belt karate. Could have taken you down when you went and stuck the gun in my ear. You won’t take it amiss if I give you a friendly suggestion? When you get the drop on somebody, you need to keep back out of arm’s reach.”
    “Trying to take me down could be dangerous for someone’s health,” I said. “Hey, you didn’t come skulking around a mobile home park at night to test out my moves.”
    “Didn’t,” he agreed. “I heard tell you’d been asking ’bout Emilio Gava’s connection to the witness protection program. I thought as how we needed to have a conversation.”
    I thumbed the safety on the Colt forward and stuck the handgun in my waistband as I led my visitor around back and into the Once in a Blue Moon through the escape hatch. The front door was bolted closed on the inside and I didn’t want to rouse France-Marie from her beauty sleep. I turned up the air-conditioning and brought in two cold beers from the galley.
    “Okay, Gunn. I’ll begin at the beginning,”