Afraid of the Dark - James Grippando [30]
Good God, I really am forty.
“Let me out here,” said Jack.
“Dude, all right already. I’ll put on some jazz.”
“It’s not the music. The caller said to come alone. Just park.”
The only option was valet, and Theo steered toward the curb. Reaching into his wallet, Jack did some quick math and figured that the hourly parking rate added up to $18,000 a month. He was suddenly thinking of his old friend Scholl again—mystery solved as to how he’d built a world-class art collection and a wine-making empire.
“Wait here for two minutes,” said Jack, “then find a place on the mall to hang out where you can watch me. If the guy turns out to be some kind of nut job, I want you close by.”
“Got it, chief.”
“And wish me luck,” said Jack as he started away.
“Dude,” said Theo.
Jack stopped and looked back.
“That client of yours—Jamal what’s-his-name.”
“What about him?”
“He probably dreams about strapping on a vest and blowing up Lincoln Road Mall.”
Jack paused. For a time, the one person who had seemed to shrug off Jack’s representation of a Gitmo detainee was Theo. But when push came to shove, even the kid from Liberty City—an innocent man pulled from the electric chair—had the same reservations as everyone else.
Jack had them, too.
“That’s the buzzkill,” Jack said. “But my money still says he didn’t kill McKenna Mays.”
Jack headed up the sidewalk toward the mall, leaving Theo behind in the crowd.
From a wooden bench near the illuminated public fountain, a man wearing a stylish Italian suit and hiding behind sunglasses watched with the intensity of a trained professional. It was a cool night, but he was sweating profusely. His eyes were tiring, and forcing himself to stay so focused was giving him a headache. Jet lag, he figured. Flying from Europe to the States was easier than going the other way, but with the plane change in Paris, it was still a fourteen-hour flight from Prague.
Lincoln Road Mall is an outdoor collection of shops, cafés, and restaurants that stretch for several blocks of pedestrian traffic only. The Lincoln Theatre, home to the New World Symphony, is a historic art deco–style building at the east end of the mall. It’s a curvy restored jewel, right down to the original cinema marquee and floral relief on its coral pink facade. That night, against a dark purple sky and in the glow of soft evening light, it looked like the postcards commemorating one of the many movie premieres that defined the theater’s early years.
The mall was buzzing with activity, and the man in the dark Italian suit was well aware that his target could have chosen any number of nearby cafés to sit and wait. Designer shades were stylish even after dark, but his were no fashion statement. His eyes revealed nothing as he watched Jack Swyteck take a table beside a potted palm directly across from the theater.
Sweat gathered on his brow. His heart was racing. This wasn’t normal. He wasn’t even nervous. He removed his jacket and laid it on the bench beside him. He was still roasting. He hoped he wasn’t catching the flu.
Damn airplanes are like a germ factory.
The crowd flowed in both directions, two endless streams that checked each other out and occasionally swirled away into little eddies of conversation. Some were dressed to kill. Others were barely dressed. They were all under his surveillance, his eyes and mind working together and processing each passing image like the superfast, superpowered face-recognition software that never seemed to work for him the way it worked on television dramas. Reject after reject, his eyes darted left to right, east to west, and back again. Hundreds and hundreds of passersby without a match.
His throat tightened. His left foot was starting to tingle. More like his entire left side. The foot—no, the leg all the way up to the knee—was actually numb. This was no mere adrenaline