Flashpoint by Ed Gorman Page B

I’d share it with you. I want to catch up with the bastard as badly as you do.’
    He kept his elbow on the table until the waitress brought his coffee. The longer I watched, the more I saw a professor under the investigator. He was judicious in his words, almost ruminative. ‘I can’t tell you much about why we want him but I can say that it involves extortion.’
    â€˜I’m surprised that it took till now to catch him at it. He’s made a lot of money and I always assumed he was shaking people down. But I still don’t know why you’d think I’d know where he is.’
    â€˜As you say, Mr Conrad, you work a different side of the street. You may hear something I wouldn’t be privy to. So I’d appreciate you sharing anything you have with me.’
    â€˜Of course. I want him caught.’
    â€˜Then we’re on the same team.’
    Our food arrived at the same time. Occasionally I glanced out the window at the men and women battling the invisible force of the wind, nearly getting knocked on their dressed-up asses for doing so.
    The dialogue got rote – a little politics, a little sports and a little rote remorse about how pols so often went bad these days though, as I had to point out, we were living in a second Gilded Age and the first one had become the textbook the current plutocrats still used. In the 1880s and 1890s senators were so openly crooked some newspapers didn’t identify them by state; instead, they said, ‘The Senator from Oil’ and ‘The Senator from Railroads.’ These days we had public relations agencies working for senators to make them more palatable to the public.
    Yes, Senator Gleason did indeed drunkenly run over an eighty-six-year-old woman in the crosswalk, but he was on his way to a cancer fundraiser.
What a guy.
    Toward the end of our conversation, he said, ‘I try to stay as apolitical as I can in my job. You know the US Attorneys took a hit a while back when they fired some lawyers for political reasons. I don’t want politics to get in the way.’
    The Bush administration had fired a number of sitting US Attorneys because they wouldn’t carry out his political schemes. They had mostly been replaced by young graduates of Holy Shit University who came on with not only a political agenda but a religious one as well. They pretty much destroyed the integrity of the whole operation. I wasn’t the only one who was still skeptical. I wondered how many of them had actually been driven out.
    â€˜I appreciate that, Mr Hawkins.’
    He nodded as he wiped his mouth with the paper napkin. The way he set the napkin down signaled that our meeting was over. He put a long hand across the table and we shook the way two guys do in used-car commercials where the sucker grins his pleasure at now owning a car that had been driven off a cliff six months earlier.
    He picked up the tab and left a handsome tip for the waitress, and we walked back to the lobby together. He nodded to all the reporters who had divided up into small groups. Two or three of the better-looking female reporters were surrounded by eager collections of horny boozed-up admirers and seemed to be enjoying it.
    â€˜I would appreciate having your cell number, Mr Conrad. I’d be happy to give you mine.’
    When we finished punching the numbers into our respective phones, he said, ‘Good luck to both of us.’

TEN
    I n my room I dumped my clothes so I could sit in my shorts and T-shirt with a Blue Moon beer next to my laptop and get to work. The first thing I did was log on to the US Attorneys website and make sure Hawkins was legit.
    It took a few minutes but finally there he was. He was so gaunt in his official photo he resembled one of those early New Englanders who enjoyed burning witches. DePaul University graduate, Cincinnati homicide detective five years and five years at Global, a giant security company that was as insular and