Cover of Night by Linda Howard Page B

the phone, and looked for a piece of paper. The polished expanse was clear. He lifted his eyebrows at Bandini, and without expression, the other man opened a drawer and drew out a legal pad, which he pushed across to Yuell.
    Yuell tore off a sheet of paper and pushed the pad back across to Bandini. On the single sheet Yuell wrote: Has the room been swept for bugs?
    He hadn’t yet said a word, hadn’t been identified by name, but caution was a good thing. The FBI had to have at least tried to get a wire in here, as well as tap the phones. Someone might be camped in a room across the street with a supersensitive parabolic microphone aimed at the window. The lengths to which the Feds would have gone depended on how large Bandini loomed on their radar. If they’d heard even half of what was said on the street, then Bandini was the size of an aircraft carrier.
    “This morning,” Bandini said, looking grimly amused. “By myself.”
    Which meant that even though Bandini had any number of people in his employ who could have done the chore, he didn’t trust any of them not to betray him.
    Smart man.
    Yuell returned the pen to its slot, folded the sheet of paper, and slipped it into his coat pocket, then sat down.
    “You’re a cautious man,” Bandini observed, his gaze like chips of frozen mud. “Don’t you trust me?”
    That had to be a joke, Yuell thought. “I don’t even trust myself. Why would I trust you?”
    Bandini laughed, a humorless grating sound. “I think I like you.”
    That was supposed to make his day? Yuell sat quietly, waiting for Bandini to look him over and get to the point.
    No one looking at Yuell would have taken him for the janitor he was. He cleaned up messes, left things looking pristine. And he was very, very good at his job.
    He was aided by his looks. He was very average: average height, average weight, unremarkable face, brown hair, brown eyes, indeterminate age. No one noticed him as he came and went, and even if someone did notice him, he or she would be hard put to give more than a vague description that would match millions of other men. Nothing about his appearance was threatening, so it was easy for him to get close to someone without ever being tagged.
    He was, ostensibly, a private investigator—a very expensive one. The know-how came in handy when he was tracking someone. He even took regular PI jobs, which usually consisted of getting the goods on a cheating spouse, and which made him good with the IRS. He reported every penny of income that was paid by check. Luckily for him, the majority of the jobs he took were ones no one wanted a paper trail on, so he received cash. It took a bit of fancy laundry work to make the income usable, but the majority of it was stashed offshore in a healthy retirement account.
    Yuell had five carefully chosen men working for him. Each one could think on his feet, wasn’t given to mistakes, and wasn’t hotheaded. He didn’t want any cowboys fucking up the operation he’d spent years building. He’d hired the wrong type once, and had been forced to bury his mistake. Only a fool made the same mistake twice.
    “I have need of your services,” Bandini finally said, opening a desk drawer again and extracting a snapshot, which he slid across the glossy expanse toward Yuell.
    Yuell looked at the photograph without picking it up. The subject was dark-haired, eye color not discernible, possibly late-thirties. He was dressed in a conservative gray suit, getting into a gray late-model Camry. A briefcase was in his hand. The background was suburban: brick house, lawn, trees.
    “He took something from me. I want it back.”
    Yuell pulled at his ear and glanced at the window. Bandini grinned, showing eyeteeth as sharp as a wolf’s. “We’re safe. The windows are acoustic. No sound gets in or out. Walls are the same.”
    Come to think of it, there was no street noise. The only sound was that of their voices. No air-conditioning hum, no water rushing