The man shook his head. “No,” he said, too fast. “No. Sorry. I don’t recognize him.” He had a thick accent that sounded eastern European to me.

“Take another look,” I said. “Mitch Talley? Usually hangs out with this guy named Denny. Any of it ringing a bell? We could use your help.”

He looked a little longer and ran a hand absently over his salt-and-pepper beard, which was matted halfway to dreadlocks.

“No,” he said again, without ever looking up. “I’m sorry. I do not know him.”

I didn’t push it. “All right,” I said. “I’ll be around for a while if you think of anything.”

As soon as I stepped away, he went right back to the mumbling, and on a hunch, I kept an eye on him.

Sure enough, I’d barely started talking to the next person before the mumbler got up to leave. When I looked over, his tray was still there — along with most of his dinner.

“Excuse me, sir?” I called out loudly enough that a few people around him turned their heads.

But not him. He just kept going.

“Sir?”

I was moving now, and that caught Sampson’s attention. The mumbling guy was clearly making a beeline for the exit. When he finally did look back, realizing we were coming after him, he broke into a run. He shot straight out the double doors and onto Second Street ahead of us.

Chapter 85

OUR RUNNER WAS HALFWAY to the corner by the time Sampson and I got outside. He’d looked maybe early fifties to me, but he was moving pretty well.

“Damnit, damnit, damnit —”

Foot pursuit sucks. It just does. Never mind all the variables — it’s nothing you want to be doing at the end of a long day. But here Sampson and I were, tearing ass down Second Street after a crazy man.

I shouted a few times for him to stop, but that obviously wasn’t in his game plan.

The rush-hour traffic on D had bunched up enough that he made it across the street fairly easily.

I cut right behind him between a taxi and an EMCOR truck, while a couple of guys on lawn chairs outside the shelter shouted after us.

“Go, buddy! Go!”

“Dig, dig, dig, dig, dig!”

I was guessing they weren’t talking to me.

He ran straight on, into the little park by the Labor Department. It cut a diagonal between the high-rise buildings toward Indiana Avenue, but he never got that far.

The ground was terraced here, and when he lurched up and over the first retaining wall, it slowed him down just enough. I got one foot on the wall and both my hands on his shoulders, and we came down hard in a patch of ground cover. At least we weren’t on the sidewalk anymore.