Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare by James Church Read Free Book Online Page B

to the hotel, walked straight to the car, and got in. The car pulled away in a hurry.
    “I don’t suppose you’re interested in that, either.” Li watched the car disappear.
    “Should I be?”
    “The lady didn’t catch your eye? Very fashionable, don’t you think? Quite a looker.”
    “Fashion was never my style. Expensive shoes, expensive coat, expensive scarf, that’s what it looked like from here. Everything looks expensive on a body like that.”
    “So, who do you think wears expensive clothes these days?”
    “Could be someone with money.” I got out of the car.
    “What’s your hurry, Inspector? No way he’s going to let you go home. Incidentally, I hope you locked the front door on your mountain retreat. They took the guard off the road this morning.”
    I got back in the car. “All right, you win. Who is Kim? I’m interested, after all. And you seem to know something you’re dying to tell me.”
    “Wrong. I’m not dying for anyone, not anymore. That’s done with.”
    “Who is Kim?”
    “I’m not sure about everything, even though I’m in and out of his office. They don’t want us to know too much. He appeared about six months ago. After that, there were a lot of meetings up top, cars racing around, aircraft coming in at odd hours, street closings for high-speed convoys. I got pulled off my normal assignment and put into his group, or at least the group that sits up whenever he calls. We do a lot of bowing and scraping.”
    “He’s a major. Since when do we cringe at majors?”
    “Funny, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah, funny. He acts like he owns the place. This morning I met him in an office I never knew existed. You must know what it was before he got there. It wasn’t a Ministry building; we don’t have that many chairs.” I opened my window. “The air smells different in autumn, don’t you think?”
    “I hadn’t noticed. I just breathe the stuff. And I intend to keep breathing.” He gave me a sharp look.
    “Noble goal,” I said. The conversation was over. If he knew anything else, he was going to wait to tell me. Maybe it was actually everything he knew, though I had a feeling he had something he was saving. Everyone was saving something. The lady in the market, the bellboy, maybe even the ferret. “What about the lady?” I said.
    “Which one?”
    “The one with the nice shoes we were talking about.”
    “Forget you saw her; forget you saw her come out of that restaurant and get into that car.”
    “What car? I think you need to have your medication adjusted.”
    He laughed. “You think I’m edgy, you should see the people in the Minister’s office.” He laughed again, only this time it came out more like dead leaves in the wind. Dead tree limbs, dead leaves—laughs weren’t what they used to be. We used to laugh a lot in the office. It helped sometimes.
    “Give me a call,” I said, though I don’t think he heard me. His eyes were on the rearview mirror, watching a black car creep into the parking lot. As soon as I closed the door, he gunned the motor and was gone. The black car didn’t follow, though I was pretty sure the driver said something to the person in the back before he got out and looked at me. He was missing most of his left ear.
    Strange, I thought. Nice-looking woman like that. It seems a shame to pretend she was never there.
    When I went back into the hotel, the man with the vacant look was leaning against one of the pillars. He had on a red-checked shirt, but it didn’t make any difference. As he shifted his gaze to me, everything around him turned gray; foghorns sounded in the distance; seabirds lost their way and plunged into the ocean. I nodded at him, and it appeared that he blinked, like the lamp in a lighthouse that swings around every minute to keep ships off the rocks.
2
     
    Things seemed jumpy, but not in the normal way. People had always looked over their shoulders, and no one thought twice about it. That’s why your neck swivels, we used