70

After Duke Pellafino's shift ended, his subordinate, Andy Taylor, took over the hotel's morning security operations, which included finding the vagrant who had invaded the hotel and spray-painted some hallway cameras and then apparently squirreled himself away somewhere.

Alone in his basement office, before leaving for the day, Duke picked up the phone and called Phil Esterhaus, chief of the Suavidad Beach Police Department. Phil was a current cop whose nickname was "Clint" because he resembled Eastwood from the Dirty Harry films, and Duke was a former cop. They both liked dogs, baseball, and jazz, so their friendship had been pretty much inevitable. Phil rose early to go for a long run shortly after first light every morning, and Duke often joined him.

"I just tied on my running shoes," Phil said. "Meet you on the beach?"

"Not this morning, amigo. I've got a tough question for you that maybe you can't answer."

"Hey, I'm so good at tough questions I could win a fortune on Jeopardy. Hit me with it."

"The thing is, maybe you can't answer it for jurisdictional reasons or maybe an unofficial gag order."

"Try me anyway."

"There's a fed in town named John Falkirk."

"That egg-sucking snake."

"So you're not enjoined from talking about him."

"I wouldn't care if I was, that arrogant piece of shit."

"Listen, I don't want to get you in trouble."

"What're they going to do to me—undercut me when the president nominates me for attorney general? Hell, I'm a small-town cop, all I want to be is a small-town cop, and I'll be reelected until I'm senile because the people here love me."

"And why shouldn't they?"

"Exactly. I'm adorable."

Duke said, "Falkirk is in town with a team."

"Twenty other domestic black-op assholes with a collective IQ of eighty, National Security Agency credentials, but if they're the best the NSA has to offer, even Belgium could take us in like a one-week war. Twenty! Plus choppers and drones and military ordnance out the ass."

"They're after a guy named Harkenbach."

"What—are these goons staying at your hotel and bragging at the bar each night?"

"I have my sources. I'll tell you later. I don't want to hold you up from your Chariots of Fire moment on the beach."

"This Harkenbach guy is some kind of rogue scientist."

"There can be such a thing as a rogue scientist?" Duke asked.

"Falkirk says Harkenbach sold national security secrets to a foreign power. But that sleazeball lies even when he doesn't say anything."

"You think Harkenbach is really in town?"

"Maybe not now. But seems he was hiding out, doing a hobo thing at the deep end of Shadow Canyon. Falkirk and his clown posse are running some kind of operation up there—we don't know what. We're told to stay out, so we stay out, because after all we're just one step up from mall cops and we have great respect for our brothers and sisters in all the fabulous bureaus of federal law enforcement."

"You are damn confident of reelection."

"Ellen and I are grooming Phil Junior to run for mayor on the illustrious Esterhaus name like thirty years from now. So tell me, why're you interested in Falkirk and Harkenbach?"

"I have some friends who've gotten caught up in this through no fault of their own. They live on Shadow Canyon Lane, and Falkirk has some stupid idea that they befriended this Harkenbach."

"Is there something I can do?"

"Maybe, maybe not, I'm thinking about it. Listen, let's you, Ellen, and me have dinner tomorrow night. We'll discuss it then."

"Who's paying?"

"Do you ever pay?"

"Neither do you when it's at the hotel."

"Every job has its perks. You get to wear that cool trooper hat," Duke said, and he hung up.