Two cars pulled up at the curb outside just as the trio exited the Longworth Building. The follow-car was a gray Buick with a black vinyl roof, but the vehicle its lights illuminated was a bright green Volvo sedan. The Volvo’s driver got out quickly, leaving his door open, and trotted around to the curb side.
Elaine muttered a curse at the weather and hunched herself in her linen jacket. Doug strode forward as if there were no rain, the attache case in his left hand swinging as if it weighed no more than a normal leather satchel.
“Sorry ’bout that,” Kelly said as he and the woman hesitated under the roof overhang. “Shouldn’t let my temper go when I’m around innocent bystanders. Not for silly shit, especially.”
“Let’s go,” the woman said, darting across the wide sidewalk as a gust of wind lashed raindrops curving like a snake track across the pools already on the concrete.
The driver had opened both curbside doors for them. The veteran paused deliberately to see whether or not Elaine would get in before he did. She slid quickly into the back seat, showing a length of thigh that amused Kelly because it really did affect him. There were people who thought that sex was something physical. Damn fools.
“You can sit anywhere you please, Mr. Kelly,” the woman called from the car with a trace of exasperation. “All the doors work normally.”
The front seats were buckets, so they really hadn’t planned to sandwich him between the two of them – or more likely, between the former driver and Doug, -who was now behind the wheel of the Volvo adjusting the angle of the backrest. “Right,” said Kelly, feeling a little foolish as he got into the front for the sake of the legroom. The man who had brought the Volvo to them closed both doors and scurried back to the follow-car.
Doug did not wait for the former driver to be picked up before goosing the Volvo’s throttle hard enough to spin the drive wheels on the wet pavement. The right rear tire scraped the edge of the curb before the sedan angled abruptly into the traffic lane and off through the night.
“If these’re the radials I’d guess they were,” said Kelly, angling sideways in the pocket of the seat, “then that’s a pretty good way to spend twenty minutes in the rain, changing the tire with a ripped sidewall.”
Doug glanced at his passenger, but then merely grunted and switched the headlights to bright. Raindrops appeared to curve toward them as the car accelerated.
Doug’s face had a greenish cast from the instrument lights. Kelly glimpsed the woman between the hollow headrests, her features illuminated in long pulses by the oncoming cars. The black frame of Elaine’s hair made her face a distinct oval even during intervals of darkness.
You couldn’t really see into a head like that, thought Kelly as the hammer of tires on bad pavement buzzed him into a sort of drifting reverie. Not in good light, not under stress. Sometimes you could predict the words the mind within would offer its audience; but you’d never know for sure the process by which the words were chosen, the switches and reconsiderations at levels of perceived side-effects which a man like Kelly never wanted to reach.
The veteran straightened so that his shoulder blade was no longer against the window ledge. He was physically tired, and the meeting in Bianci’s office had been as stressful and disorienting as a firefight. If he didn’t watch it, he’d put himself into a state more suggestible than anything an interrogation team could achieve with hypnotic drugs. Even the thought of that made Kelly’s skin crawl in a hot, prickling wave which spread downward from the peak of his skull.
“Which of you’s in charge?” he asked. The hostility implicit in the question was another goad to keep him alert.
“You’ll meet some of the people in charge tonight, if you care to,” the woman said, her face as expressionless in the lights of an oncoming truck as it was a moment later when backlit by the follow-car.
“No,” Kelly said. “I mean which of you two has the rank. When it comes down to cases, who says ‘jump’ and who says ‘how high?’ “