Shadow Woman by Thomas Perry Page B

thing Salateri had ever said to him that
could have been a compliment.
    “How did he lose your
people?” asked Foley. “Maybe that’s the place to
start.”
    “He met a woman at the
Inside Straight for the midnight lounge show. The Miraculous Miranda
picked him out of the audience, made him disappear a couple of times,
and brought him back. The last time, she didn’t. He probably
slipped out the stage door. My men got suckered. They followed the
woman and a decoy out of the show, then lost the decoy too. The woman
was a pro. She got them to watch her for an hour, then split them up
and cornered one of them in the elevator. She left him with a broken
leg, a broken nose, and some damage to his eye.”
    “A professional what?”
asked Salateri. “Boxer?”
    “I don’t know what
term she uses on her business cards,” said Seaver. “But I
don’t think Hatcher could have set this up for himself. I don’t
know what part in this Miranda played – maybe just picking him
out of the crowd was enough, and magicians will sometimes do that as
a favor if you send a waiter backstage and ask. Maybe – ”
    “It doesn’t matter,”
interrupted Buckley. “I’m not about to start grilling
Miranda, and I hope you’re not.”
    “Only if you asked me to,”
said Seaver. “If she knows anything, there’s no reason
for her to tell me, and no way I can make her. If the woman is a pro,
then Miranda probably doesn’t know much.”
    Salateri shrugged and made a
face of distaste. “I’ll see if I can talk to Vincent.”
He sat quietly for a moment, then noticed the others staring at him.
“Why not? You think if Vincent Bogliarese wanted to do us harm
he’d do it this way – have his girlfriend sneak the guy
off in a puff of smoke? Get real. He’d send eight hundred guys
in shiny suits to pull our guts out and set fire to them.” He
added, to no one in particular, “I say that, of course, with
the greatest respect, and in confidence. The man is a friend of mine.
I’m not saying he’ll find out anything for us, but it
won’t hurt to ask.”
    Max Foley looked at Seaver. “It
looks to me as though we really have to handle this ourselves, Cal.
This screw-up is yours, but the underlying problem isn’t. It’s
ours, the three of us. We picked out Hatcher, we misjudged him, and
we trusted him with a lot of things we shouldn’t have.”
    “That’s right,”
said Buckley.
    Salateri nodded sadly. “He
was smart, easy to be around, he behaved like a man. Now we’re
in trouble, and we don’t even know what kind.”
    “We can guess,” said
Foley. “No matter what he thinks he’s going to do now, at
some point he’s going to end up in the hands of the F.B.I.”
He added, “Unless he doesn’t.”
    Buckley leaned back in his big
chair. “Do we have anybody on our payroll who can take care of
this kind of problem?”
    “No,” said Seaver.
“We’ve been very careful not to hire anyone like that
full-time. They’re not the sort of people you want to have
around year in and year out. Other employees figure out what they’re
there for, and so on.”
    The three men sat in a row and
looked at him. “You’ve been in the security business for
a long time,” said Foley.
    “And a cop before that,”
added Salateri.
    Foley continued. “Yes. You
must know someone who would be able to do it. I mean a full-service
specialist, who can find him and handle the rest.”
    “There’s someone I
can probably get,” said Seaver. This was going to be the
delicate part. He wasn’t sure they knew what this involved.
“I’ll need a lot of cash. Maybe a hundred thousand to
start, and more later.”
    “Cash?” said
Buckley. “Well, hell, Cal. Cash is what we do. Go downstairs
and give this to Eddie.” He rapidly scribbled a note and handed
it to Seaver, who glanced at it: “Give Seaver whatever he
wants. P.B.” Buckley folded his hands across his belly. “Who
is this guy?”
    “It’s a
Mickey-and-Minnie team. I’ll talk to