Blood Hunt by Ian Rankin

they’d chosen him for Operation Stalwart.
    “Okay?” he asked the driver.
    “Is your money, friend,” the driver said.
    “Is my money,” Reeve agreed.
    So they took the route Reeve had planned for them. The driver went too slowly at first—suspiciously slow—so Reeve had him speed up just a little. As they crossed the intersection he took a good look at Killin’s street. There were a couple of cars parked on the street itself, even though most of the bungalows had garages or parking spaces attached. He saw one freshly painted fence, the color Cantona had said it would be. There was a car half a block down and on the opposite side of the road. Reeve thought he saw someone in it, and that there was a sign on the door of the car.
    They drove around the block and came back through an-other intersection, behind the parked car this time. He still couldn’t make out what the sign said. But there was definitely someone in the driver’s seat.
    “So what now?” the driver said. “You want we should go down the street or not?”
    “Pull over,” Reeve ordered. The driver pulled the car over to the curb. Reeve got out and adjusted the mirror on the passenger side. He got back into the backseat and looked at the mirror, then got out and adjusted it again.
    “What’s going on?” the driver asked.
    “Don’t worry,” said Reeve. He made another very slight adjustment, then got back in. “Now,” he said, “we drive down the street, just the way we talked about. Okay?”
    “Is your money.”
    As they neared the parked car with the man in it, approaching it from the front, Reeve kept his eyes on the wing mirror. He was just a passenger, a bored passenger staring at nothing while his driver figured out an address.
    But he had a perfect view of the car as they passed it. He saw the driver study them, and seem to dismiss them. Nobody was expecting anyone to turn up in a cab. But the man was watchful. And he didn’t look to Reeve like a policeman.
    “Where now?” the driver asked.
    “That car we passed, did you see what was written on the side?”
    “Yeah, man, it was some cable company. You know, cable TV. They’re always trying to get you to sign up, sign all your money away in exchange for fifty channels showing nothing but reruns of Lucy and shitty soaps. They been to my house three, four times already; my woman’s keen. They can smell when someone’s keen. Not me. So, where now?”
    “Turn right, go a block or two, and stop again.” The driver did so. “You better fix your wing mirror,” Reeve said, so the driver got out to change it back. Reeve had a couple of options. One was to confront the man in the car, give him a hard time. Ask him a few questions while he pressed the life out of him. He knew interrogation techniques; he hadn’t used them in a long time, but he reckoned they’d come back to him like riding a bicycle. Just like the map-folding had come back. Instinct.
    But if the man was a pro, and the man had looked like a pro—not like a cop, but like a pro—then he wouldn’t talk; and Reeve would have blown whatever cover he still possessed. Be-sides, he knew what he had come to find out. There was still a watch on Dr. Killin’s house. Someone still wanted to know whenever anyone went there. And it looked like there was nobody home.
    His driver was waiting for instructions.
    “Back to where you picked me up,” Reeve told him.
    He paid the driver, tipped him a ten, and walked back the way he’d come. Back into Old Town State Park. He was in a gift shop, buying a postcard and a stamp and a kite that Allan would probably never use—too low-tech—when he saw the cop from the street corner watching him. The guy looked relieved; he’d probably gone back to his partner and then gotten jumpy, decided to look around. The park was full of tourists who had decamped from some trolley tour; it must’ve been a hard time for him. But now he had his reward.
    Reeve left the shop and sauntered back to