"Where'd you drop her off?"
"At her townhouse."
"You want to make this easy, Kurtz? And come down to the station to make a statement?"
"I don't have any statement to make," said Kurtz. He met the cop's glare watt for watt.
"Paul," said Rigby. It was a very weak syllable. She'd just opened one eye.
Kemper slid his dock back into its holster. "Yeah, babe."
"Leave Joe alone. He didn't do anything."
"You sure of that, Rig?"
"He didn't do anything." She closed her eye. "Paul, can you get the nurse. My leg really hurts."
"Yeah, babe," said Kemper. He motioned Kurtz out of
the room ahead of him.
Outside the glass wall, Kemper told the nurse on duty at the central station that Detective King needed her eight A.M. pain medication. The nurse said she'd get to it soon. Kemper grabbed Kurtz by the shoulder and pulled him into the short hallway to the lavatories. "I'm going to find out what happened Sunday, Kurtz. You can count on it."
"Good," said Kurtz. "Let me know when you do."
"Oh, yeah," said Kemper. "You can count on that, too."
Kurtz let him have the last word. He turned and walked slowly and stiffly to the elevator.
The goddamned Pinto wouldn't start. Kurtz tried four timesdidn't get as much as a clickand then got out of the car and flipped the hood up. It was a simple little engine and a simple little battery, but after checking the leads to the battery and trying the starter again to no avail, Kurtz had used up his complete stock of automotive know-how.
He looked around. The Medical Center parking lot was busy this time of the morning, but no one was paying attention to his little problem. Kurtz fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone, but remembered that he'd left it at Gail DeMarco's place.
"Need some help?"
Kurtz turned and blinked. A huge, orange, and strangely familiar SUV bad stopped. Kurtz didn't recognize the driver or the man in the front passenger seat, nor the one in the far rear seat, but the smiling man leaning out the near window was familiar enough. Brian Kennedy. Peg O'Toole's handsome fiancée. The security service man got out of the what had he called the armored SUV? Lalapalooza? Laforza and so did the well-dressed young man in the back with him. Kurtz looked at the two fine suits and realized that he'd have to sell his grandmother to the Arabs to afford clothes like that and he didn't even have a grandmother.
"Get in," said Brian Kennedy. "Turn it over again, old sport Tom here will fiddle with it."
Tom fiddled, obviously trying to keep his white, starched cuffs from getting greasy. Kurtz turned the key. Nothing happened. Both Kennedy and Tom fiddled some more. People walked by briskly, hardly glancing at the men in the three-thousand-dollar suits fiddling with a clapped-out Pinto.
"There," said Kennedy, brushing off his hands the way manly men did after fixing something.
Kurtz tried again. It didn't even click.
He got out of the car. "To hell with it. I'll go in the hospital and call someone to come get me."
"Can we give you a lift, Mr. Kurtz?" said Brian Kennedy.
"No, that's okay. I'll call."
"At least use my phone to call, old sport," said Kennedy, handing Kurtz a phone so modern that it looked like it could beam a person up to the Enterprise if you wanted it to. "I came to see Peg. Is that why you're here?"
"No," said Kurtz. He flipped the phone open and tried to decide who to call. Arlene, he guessed. He always called Arlene.
"Oh," said Brian Kennedy. "Tom here has a tool that might help."
Kurtz looked at Tom just as the big man smiled, pulled something metallic from his suit pocket, and stuck the ten thousand-volt taser against Kurtz's chest and pressed the button.
Kurtz's last sight was Kennedy catching his expensive cell phone as Kurtz fell backwards into blackness.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I should call Dr. Singh at the hospital and tell him about this new therapy for concussion .
"Ah, Mr. Kurtz, I see you're joining us," said Brian Kennedy. "A brief nap for you, old sport, but a restful one, I trust."
Kurtz opened his eyes. He was in the backseat of the Laforza, wedged between Kennedy and the bodyguard who'd tasered him. His hands were handcuffed behind himreal, honest-to-God metal handcuffs this timeand the bodyguard had a semiautomatic pistol wedged in Kurtz's left ribs. One glance told him that they were on the Skyway, Highway 5, headed south past the Tifft Farm Preserve.
"Pierce Brosnan," managed Kurtz.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You look like that James Bond actorBrosnan," said Kurtz. "I haven't been able to think of his name until now." The headache was
gone .
Brian Kennedy showed his wry, curled little smile. "I hear that a lot."
"And you said you were Sean Michael O'Toole's younger brother, too," said Kurtz. "You were only, what? Twenty years old when you sprung him?"
"Just turned twenty-one, actually," said Kennedy with that artificial British accent of his.
"And who did you douse with gasoline and leave behind?"
"No one of any importance, old sport," said Kennedy. "Why don't you rest, Mr. Kurtz? We'll be at our destination in a few minutes. You can chat then if you like."