Collar Robber by Hillary Bell Locke Page B

him again until tomorrow at the earliest.
    Regards,
Jakubek
    Every statement in those three sentences was literally true. That took some work. I got Shifcos’ reply three minutes later:
    Done at $168.5k gross, $153.5k net of $15k already paid. Other terms of your draft accepted. Pls confirm, complete, and email duplicate original w/electronic signature. Pick-up 10:00 a.m. local time Monday. Your office or Pitt MCM? Pls advise. Send wire transfer instructions for your trust account. Payment to be completed within thirty minutes after verification document is in hand.
PVS
    I responded that we’d deliver the document at my office and gave her my trust account wiring instructions. Then I sat back in my chair to bask for a minute or so in a warm, tingly feeling. Negotiations are like those baseball games for eight-year-olds where no one keeps score. You know whether you’ve accomplished your objective, but you don’t know whether you’ve left money on the table. In pure competitive terms, you don’t know whether you’ve won.
    Except when you do. I’d won. I’d kicked her butt.

Chapter Twenty-two
    Cynthia Jakubek
    I was still in full bask at seven-thirty the next morning when Amber called. Not the sunny, ditzy Amber I was used to but a guarded, pouty Amber whose petulantly disappointed tone asked why people just couldn’t be nice . Her words had an ominous thickness to them. First thing I wondered was whether Willy had gotten home cranky and slapped her around. I really hoped not, because I liked Willy and I didn’t want to stop liking him.
    â€œOkay,” she said, “this is like a strange question. But Willy told me to ask you.”
    â€œShoot.”
    â€œHe said you’d told him a few months ago that he was legal owning a certain thing. He wants to know if you’re for sure about that.”
    And he thinks his line might be tapped. And he might be right . I knew exactly what she was talking about.
    â€œThe answer is yes. I’m for sure about that.”
    â€œGood. Thanks.” Click.
    Okay.

Chapter Twenty-three
    Cynthia Jakubek
    The fifteen-hundred bucks a month I pay to the Law Offices of Luis Gonzales to sublease nine hundred square feet of space includes a receptionist/rent-a-cop at a raised, square desk in the sixth-floor lobby outside the much more impressive quarters where Luis G and the seventeen people who work for him do their stuff. At nine-fifty-eight on Monday the receptionist buzzed me to say that “some gentlemen” were there to see me.
    I strode out expecting Davidovich and Rand. Half right. I saw Davidovich and Barry Akin, a Pittsburgh cop I’d last encountered the week before on the stand in municipal court. Davidovich looked like he’d just gotten back from deer camp, sporting what I took to be a high-end zippered hunting vest from the yuppie edition of an Eddie Bauer catalogue. Akin, in a blue blazer over an open-necked dress shirt, came a little closer to urban office-building standards.
    In his left hand Davidovich toted a brushed-steel attaché case with recessed locks that must have weighed a ton and looked like it could shrug off a point-blank shot from anything short of a .357 magnum. Under the left armpit of his blazer, Akin was packing heat without being shy about it. So whatever happened in Vienna had made someone classify this morning’s pick-up as hazardous duty. That probably explained why Rand hadn’t joined the party. Frankly, I saw his point.
    â€œHey, Barry, how’s it going?” I shook hands with both of them.
    â€œHolding aces and eights with my back to the door, what else?”
    â€œWell, we’re about two thousand miles from Deadwood so you should be okay.” Cops don’t like lawyers, as a rule, but you can make it onto their not-a-total-asshole list if you understand cracks about the hand Wild Bill Hickock was holding when he got shot in the back during the last poker