Angel Eyes by Loren D. Estleman

tool, one hand resting casually in his pocket. He was watching me too.
    “This isn’t a public floor,” the security man informed me. His eyes were pinpoints of light in sharp, weathered creases. “You got an appointment with Mr. Montana?”
    I ignored him, focusing my attention on the tall man. “You must be the personal secretary.”
    He spent some time trying to stare me down. He had tan hair clipped short at the ears and neck and combed in crisp waves. His face was the same shade of tan as his hair and suit, as were his eyes, and between them they showed enough expression to fill an ant’s eye cup. A gray thread worked its way upward from the end of his cigarette to a ventilator hidden in the ceiling, describing a square, twisting pattern that reminded me of the image on the screen of an oscilloscope.
    There was something familiar about him. The something flashed in my memory but was gone before I could grasp it.
    “That settles that,” he said finally, in the cool, self-assured voice I recognized from the telephone. “Now who are you, and like the man said, do you have an appointment with Mr. Montana?”
    “I might have if you had let me speak to him earlier.”
    It took him a moment to place me, but then he had and rage came to his eyes like a face to a window. I looked past him, through the glass beyond the half wall that separated the reception area from the rest of the offices. Outside, the sky was darkening, not with night but with sudden overcast, washing the streets and buildings in middle-register gray, pierced here and there with spots of yellow light like holes in a bedcurtain. On Woodward an opportunistic neon sign squirted now red, now green, while cars crawled past, towed by beams of light the width of toothpicks. Even in the rarefied air of the RenCen I could feel the pressure building. A storm was on its way.
    “We must have had a bad connection,” said the secretary. “I told you the man is too busy to speak to you.” His voice held a cutting edge.
    “That was over the telephone. In person he’ll have both hands free and can go on working while we talk. I won’t mind.”
    “Get him out of here.”
    The two men who had been sitting on the couches rose silently. In their nice suits and James Dean haircuts they might have been college proctors but for their height. One of them wore horn-rimmed glasses. They took up positions on either side of me, with Size Fourteens spread slightly and spade-like hands folded in front of them, looking resigned and patient, like tanks in a motor pool.
    I slid my hand inside my overcoat pocket and the world stopped turning.
    The secretary’s eyes flicked to the pocket and his lips parted, showing a row of caps as alike as cars on an assembly line. I felt rather than saw the Terrible Twins place their hands inside their pockets.
    “I’m going after a box,” I said. “Just a box.”
    There was another long pause. Even the smoke leaking from the forgotten cigarette seemed to stand still, forming a question mark in the motionless air. Beyond the glass the city had sunk into a crouch beneath the lowering sky, awaiting the first flash and bang. Then the secretary nodded. A nearly indiscernible gesture, involving only his chin. But there on the thirty-eighth floor it carried the force of an explosion.
    “Slowly,” he warned.
    I eased the box into the open and held it out to him. The two giants returned to parade rest. The man in uniform behind the desk relaxed visibly. He was just window dressing, like the sharp suits and the fancy office.
    The secretary read my card, rolled off the rubber band, lifted the lid, and spent some time reading its contents carefully. There was nothing written inside, just the ring. I used the time to wonder where I knew him from. He was young, nearly ten years my junior. The others weren’t much older, except for the guard. They wouldn’t remember, any more than I would, the sit-down strikes of the thirties or machine gun