We had other ways of making contact, set up for dealing with situations just like this one.

Priority was to ditch the Audi: an APB would have gone out and police cruisers from the outlying districts would now be searching for it. Under bogus details, I’d rented a covered garage a couple miles north of here. I drove there watching for a tail, and pulled in unobserved. From a hidden safe in the floor, I took out spare ammo, fake documents and a change of clothing: exchanging my shirt and trousers for the more anonymous baseball cap, hooded sweatshirt and jeans. Finished, I pulled down the shutters and snapped a lock in place, heading out in a Taurus I’d previously parked in the garage, searching for a public telephone booth.

Back in the day, Rink and I worked for a joint task force that pulled from various UN Special Forces teams. We utilized a network of safe numbers for communication among team members and between us and our controllers. I used one of those numbers now to send a coded message to my friend’s pager and I only had to wait a few minutes before Rink got back to me. In the meantime, our call would be shunted between satellites halfway around the world: untraceable.

“Tell me that you weren’t involved, Joe.”

“Whatever you’re being told, it wasn’t me.”

“I knew that,” Rink said. He had wanted to hear it from my lips.

“The police have already been at the office asking about me?”

“I gave them a bum steer, but they’re not idiots. They’ll be back soon enough.”

“Did they give a reason why they were looking for me?”

“They wouldn’t say, but I’ve heard word on the streets. It seems someone has fingered you for a murder in Ybor a couple days ago.” Rink held his breath for a moment. “Someone took a punk hostage, beat the living shit outa him to teach him a lesson.”

“Can see how they drew the conclusion,” I admitted.

“Didn’t end there, though, Joe. Whoever this guy was, he killed the guy’s daughter right in front of his eyes.”

A sliver of ice wormed its way through my guts. “And the cops think that was me?”

“They don’t know you the way I do.” Rink was apologizing for having raised the question earlier. “Apparently the punk survived long enough to describe his attacker. He even told the cops his attacker’s name.”

“My name?”

“Yup. The police don’t know that you’d never harm the woman. They’ll be coming for you.”