“I wouldn’t care if I was, that arrogant piece of shit.”
“Listen, I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“What’re they going to do to me—undercut me when the president nominates me for attorney general? Hell, I’m a small-town cop, all I want to be is a small-town cop, and I’ll be reelected until I’m senile because the people here love me.”
“And why shouldn’t they?”
“Exactly. I’m adorable.”
Duke said, “Falkirk is in town with a team.”
“Twenty other domestic black-op assholes with a collective IQ of eighty, National Security Agency credentials, but if they’re the best the NSA has to offer, even Belgium could take us in like a one-week war. Twenty! Plus choppers and drones and military ordnance out the ass.”
“They’re after a guy named Harkenbach.”
“What—are these goons staying at your hotel and bragging at the bar each night?”
“I have my sources. I’ll tell you later. I don’t want to hold you up from your Chariots of Fire moment on the beach.”
“This Harkenbach guy is some kind of rogue scientist.”
“There can be such a thing as a rogue scientist?” Duke asked.
“Falkirk says Harkenbach sold national security secrets to a foreign power. But that sleazeball lies even when he doesn’t say anything.”
“You think Harkenbach is really in town?”
“Maybe not now. But seems he was hiding out, doing a hobo thing at the deep end of Shadow Canyon. Falkirk and his clown posse are running some kind of operation up there—we don’t know what. We’re told to stay out, so we stay out, because after all we’re just one step up from mall cops and we have great respect for our brothers and sisters in all the fabulous bureaus of federal law enforcement.”
“You are damn confident of reelection.”
“Ellen and I are grooming Phil Junior to run for mayor on the illustrious Esterhaus name like thirty years from now. So tell me, why’re you interested in Falkirk and Harkenbach?”
“I have some friends who’ve gotten caught up in this through no fault of their own. They live on Shadow Canyon Lane, and Falkirk has some stupid idea that they befriended this Harkenbach.”
“Is there something I can do?”
“Maybe, maybe not, I’m thinking about it. Listen, let’s you, Ellen, and me have dinner tomorrow night. We’ll discuss it then.”
“Who’s paying?”
“Do you ever pay?”
“Neither do you when it’s at the hotel.”
“Every job has its perks. You get to wear that cool trooper hat,” Duke said, and he hung up.
71
At Ed’s direction, Michelle quickly hacked off his glorious white mane with scissors and shaved the stubble with her electric razor until his noggin was as smooth as her legs. Strangely, his bald head seemed half again as large as when he’d had hair, so he resembled a 1950s sci-fi movie’s idea of what an evolved human being of immense intelligence would look like if he traveled back in time from ten thousand years in the future.
He took off his bow tie and adjusted his shirt collar. “There. My own mother wouldn’t recognize me.”
“Well, I guess if she was blind,” Michelle said.
“Trust me, during my time as a fugitive, I’ve learned that the best disguises require not an entire makeover but merely one or two strategic changes.”
Ed oversaw Michelle’s makeover by having her tie her hair in a ponytail and wear a baseball cap. He also insisted that she change out of her pullover sweater into a baggier blue sweatshirt that had belonged to Jeffy. She’d saved it all these years because she had given it to him as a birthday gift and he’d especially liked the words imprinted on the chest—Frodo Lives! The sleeves extended past her fingertips, and even after she rolled them up, she looked like a lost waif searching for her mom, rather than a woman in search of her lost daughter.