As did former bosses. “Thought you said I couldn’t call you anymore.”

“Your fingers didn’t do the walking this time, did they.”

“And to think you wasted all that effort just to find out what I was doing.”

There was a pause. “The license plate number. Why do you need to run it and why do you care about the vehicle’s owner.”

Ah, so that was the why of the call. “None of your business.”

“We don’t condone freelancing. On any level. You pull shit like that and you’re not just off active duty, you’re going to be retired.”

Which meant there was a pine box, not a gold watch, in his future: His bosses didn’t send you off into the sunset with a Rolex. You just woke up dead one morning.

“Whatever, Matthias, I know the drill, and if you called just to double-check on that, you wasted—”

“So what’s the plate number?”

Jim paused, and thought, Guess the debt was still owed.

As he recited Marie-Terese’s tag number and detailed what little he knew about the woman, he was confident the search wouldn’t get flagged as inappropriate, even though it was going through government channels. Matthias was smooth, for one thing. For another, there was only one other guy with more power than he had.

And that SOB worked out of an oval office.

Yup, there were times when it didn’t hurt to have the big dog owe you his life.

“I’ll be in touch,” Matthias said.

When the phone went dead, Jim looked down at his knife. Matthias had gotten one at the same time Jim had, and the guy had been damn good with it—but he’d also been excellent at “office” politics, whereas Jim, with all of his antisocial tendencies, had stayed in the field. One path took Matthias to the top; the other had landed Jim…in a studio over a garage.

With a new set of bosses.

Jim shook his head as he compared those four aristocratic nancies with their croquet balls and their wolfhound and their castle to Matthias and his ilk: It was like putting a bunch of ballet slippers up against hiking boots outfitted with ice spurs. No contest—at least on the surface. Jim had the distinct impression, however, that those boys on the other side had shit in their back pockets that would make all the conventional and nuclear weapons at Matthias’s disposal look like toys.

He went back over and sat down on the cheapy chair next to Dog, except this time he took his cell with him. As he resumed carving, he thought about his new line of work.