Paw and Order by Spencer Quinn Read Free Book Online

raisin eyes on me. “This your dog?”
    â€œA friend’s, actually.”
    â€œLooks like a K-9 type.”
    I was! I was the K-9 type! Was Lieutenant Soares on Slim Jim duty? Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. He turned back to Suzie, seemed to be waiting for her to speak. When she did not, he said, “How about you take me through it?”
    â€œThrough what?” Suzie said.
    â€œYour relationship to the deceased, for starters.”
    â€œHe’s—he was an acquaintance.”
    â€œAnd the purpose of your visit?”
    â€œEben was a consultant. I was consulting him.”
    â€œWhat did he consult about?”
    â€œInternational politico-economics.”
    â€œIs that what you do?” Lieutenant Soares said. “International politico-economics?”
    â€œIn a sense,” Suzie said. “I’m a reporter for the Washington Post .”
    â€œAh,” said Lieutenant Soares. His eyes shifted one way, then the other. That’s a sign of thoughts getting batted around in the human mind. Lieutenant Soares opened his mouth and looked on the point of saying something—I’d have bet anything it was about Slim Jims!—but at that moment the elevator opened down the hall and a man stepped out. He came toward us, a quick-walking dude in a dark suit. Lots of dark-suited dudes in this city; I thought about making what Bernie calls a mental note, but nothing came next and I dropped the whole shebang.
    Hey! The quick-stepping dude turned out to be the intense-type of human who pushes a sort of energy wave in front of him, a wave I could feel in a hard-to-explain way. Hadn’t run into one of those since Pepperpot McGint, a tiny booze-truck hijacker who’d put up the best fight of anyone I’d ever seen one-on-one with Bernie and now was breaking rocks in the hot sun, probably lots of them and real fast.
    This new energy-pushing dude—he had a big bony nose, something I always like to see in a human—stopped in front of Lieutenant Soares. “You in charge?” he said, flashing some kind of ID.
    Lieutenant Soares squinted at the ID in an unfriendly way and then said, “Yeah,” also in an unfriendly way.
    â€œI’ll be taking over now.”
    â€œDidn’t catch your name.”
    â€œBut you just saw it.” They stared at each other. “Ferretti,” said the new guy. “Double R’s, double T’s, Victor D.” He pushed past us and entered Eben’s office. Lieutenant Soares muttered something that didn’t sound nice and followed. We did, too. By that time, Ferretti was already in the inner office.
    â€œWhoa,” said one of the cops, holding up his hand in the stop sign.
    â€œIt’s all right,” said Lieutenant Soares.
    Ferretti ducked under a strip of crime tape in one easy motion and stood over Eben. He gazed down at him for a long time. Everyone else stopped what they were doing and gazed at Ferretti. He turned slowly away from Eben and then paused, his eyes on a potted plant in the far corner of the room.
    â€œWhat have we here?” he said, ducking back under the yellow tape and walking over to the plant. Something lay half-buried in the blackish earth. Ferretti snapped on plastic gloves, reached into the pot, and pulled out a gun. He blew off the dirt in two puffs and held it up, a real small gun with a pink handle.
    â€œTwenty-two?” said Lieutenant Soares.
    Ferretti nodded.
    One of the cops raised the shell casing. “Twenty-two,” she said.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    When we got back to Suzie’s place, the red-haired woman—Lizette the landlady, had I gotten that right?—was outside the main house, watering flowers with a hose. Spray me! That was my first and only thought.
    â€œHi, Suzie,” she said.
    â€œHi, Lizette.”
    â€œIs something wrong?” Lizette said. “You look . . . not yourself.”
    â€œTerribly