“Sit on your hands. Anyone makes a move without my say-so and he gets shot. Are we clear?” The men sat on their hands, looking back at me as though nonplussed by the situation. I had expected fear, anger and argument. It made me reappraise them. They weren’t the amateurs I’d surmised: this was definitely planned. “So what’s the deal?”

The older man gave me a weary smile while the other just sat there. I nodded at the older one.

“We’re not your enemies, Hunter,” he said.

“I’ll decide that after you tell me why you were following me.”

“We’re under orders to follow you.”

“You weren’t doing a very good job.”

“We weren’t hiding.” He smiled at me again. “In fact, back there at the lights, I leaned out of the car so you could see me.”

We could have gone on like that all day. It was a beautiful day, none of it to be wasted.

“Let’s get to the point.”

“I’m Castle, my friend’s named Soames. We’re cops,” he said, as if that should explain everything. “Homicide.”

I gave him a slow blink. Maybe that revelation was supposed to make me put my gun away. I’m not the type to be intimidated by the presence of cops, though.

“I already guessed that.”

“So why the gun and the games?”

“Not all cops have my best interests at heart.”

“Not now.” Soames looked at me with hard eyes, challenging me. I could see how he’d probably earned the broken nose.

Taking his words as a result of my treatment of them, I ignored him and asked Castle, “What do you want from me?”

“If you’d let me get off my ass, that’d be a start.”

“Not yet.”

“Can I show you my badge so you know we’re real cops?”

Studying their clothing, I said, “That’s already a given. Keep your hands where they are.”

“We don’t want trouble with you, Hunter.”

“What do you want?”

“We need you to come in with us and answer a few questions.”

It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been invited to the local precinct house on Franklin, but the manner this time was a first.

“So why didn’t you just approach me instead of following me like this?”

Castle raised his eyebrows at the barrel of my SIG. “It was either us, nice and easy like this, or it would’ve been a SWAT team. Knowing the way Joe Hunter is rumored to work, our guess was there’d be less blood spilled this way.”

A worm of unease clawed its way through my guts. SWAT team?

“You’re saying that I’m under arrest?”

“Prefer it if you came in under your own steam,” Castle said. “But if you’d rather I Mirandize you and do everything by the book, that’s okay by me too.”