Outside, there was a popping noise. One lone shot in the night, followed by silence. Not enough to make anyone go to their phone and put in a call to the cops. You hear one shot, you listen for another, to confirm your suspicions that something’s amiss. When you don’t hear it, you go back to sleep. Just like car alarms.

Angie heard it, and she looked at me. There wasn’t much hope in her eyes.

“I mean it,” I said. “We walk out of here, you never hear from us again.” Desperate for any way to sweeten the offer, I said, “You can even keep the car.”

I guess that struck Bullock as pretty funny, because he started to laugh.

“I’m serious. You can probably sell it for what I paid for it. I’ll sign it over to you.”

“Oh, that’s too much,” Bullock said, and laughed again.

As I’d seen so often before, the laughter sent him into a coughing fit. There was one loud, hoarse cough, and when he inhaled to catch his breath, it set off another. He began to make some awful hacking noises in his throat, like maybe he was going to cough up a hairball or something.

Bullock went to grab for the water bottle, then remembered that he’d finished it and tossed the empty into the trash. He glanced around, then peered into the cardboard box still sitting on his desk, the one Blondie had brought in from the garage, containing everything he’d found in my car.

I remembered that my cell phone was in there, but something else had caught Bullock’s eye.

He reached in and came out with a full bottle of Snapple apple juice. And I wondered, just for a moment, where that had come from. I hadn’t bought any bottle of apple juice.

And then I realized it was the bottle I’d picked out of my own recycling basket, the one I’d taken with me when I went out for my first surveillance job to track Angie’s stalker, Trevor.

What a trivial problem he seemed now.

And I remembered how, once I’d filled that bottle myself, I’d tucked it into the pouch behind the passenger seat to keep it from rolling around.

And I remembered that it was, of course, not apple juice.

Bullock uncapped the bottle and moved it toward his mouth.

I thought back to that discussion Lawrence had had with me, about the robbery he’d interrupted, the guy with the ragweed allergy. How Lawrence had said you had to wait for your moment when you were in a tense situation, and that when it had arrived, you’d know it.

I had a feeling, that if there was ever going to be a moment, this was going to be it.

Chapter 36

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