Cerulean Sins - Laurell K. Hamilton [131]
Claudia kept her gun against his window. I think because she hadn’t been told to move away. Frankly, I liked her there, close enough to fire if he went for whatever was in his lap.
I made the universal sign for roll the window down, rolling my hand in the air. They were in an old enough car that they actually had to crank it down. The blond unwound the window, slowly, carefully, and kept his other hand glued to the steering wheel. He was a cautious man. I liked that.
He rolled the window down, put his hands back on the steering wheel, and said nothing. He didn’t try to plead innocence, or confess guilt. He just sat there. Fine.
I was short enough that with a little stooping I could see into the other man’s lap. It was empty, which meant whatever he’d been cradling was on the floorboard. He’d dropped it so we wouldn’t see it. What the hell was it?
I raised my voice a little. “You in the cap, put your hands slowly on the dashboard, flat, and if they move from there, you will be shot. Is that clear?”
He wouldn’t look at me.
“Is that clear?”
He began to move his hands towards the dashboard. “It’s clear.”
“Why were you following me?” I asked, mostly to the blond, because I was beginning to realize the other man wasn’t going to volunteer much.
“I do not know what you are talking about.” He had a faint German accent, and I had too many relatives with the same accent not to recognize it. Of course, they were all over sixty, and hadn’t seen the old country for a few decades. I was betting blondie was a more recent import.
“Where’d the pretty blue Jeep go?” I asked.
His face went very still.
“I told you,” the bill-cap said.
“Yeah, we spotted you,” I said. “It wasn’t all that hard.”
“You would not have seen us if you had not been swerving all over the road,” Blondie said.
“Sorry about that, but we had some technical difficulties.”
“Yeah, like one of you turned furry,” the guy in the cap said. He definitely was middle American, middle of nowhere, no accent.
“So you wondered what was wrong, and got close enough to see,” I said.
Neither of them said anything to that.
“You are both going to get, very slowly, out of this car. If either of you goes for a weapon, you may both die. I only need one of you for questioning, the other is just gravy. I’ll do my best to see that one of you lives, but I won’t break a sweat to save you both, because I don’t need you both. Is that clear?”
The blond said, “yes,” the other one said, “Crystal fucking clear.” Oh, yeah, he was American, only we have that poetic turn of phrase.
Then I heard the sirens. They were close, very close, like in front of the building close. I’d have liked to think they were just passing through, but when you’re holding this many guns out in the open, you can’t count on that.
“Never a cop when you need one,” Bobby Lee said, “try to do anything illegal, and they’re all over ya.”
The billed-cap man said, “If you put all your guns away before the cops get in sight, we’ll just pretend this didn’t happen.” He was smiling as he leaned across, so I’d be sure and see the smug expression.
I smiled back, and his smile wilted because I looked too damned pleased. I wasn’t smooth at digging my badge out of my pocket yet, not one-handed anyway, but I managed. I flashed the metallic star in its little case. “Federal marshal, asshole. Keep your hands where we can see them until the nice policemen arrive.”
“What are you arresting us for?” the blond asked in his German accent. “We have done nothing.”
“Oh, I don’t know. We’ll start with carrying concealed weapons without a permit, then suspicion of grand theft auto.” I patted the side of the Impala. “This ain’t your car, and whatever your friend over there dropped on the floorboard is going to be illegal. Just call it a hunch.”
“Bobby Lee, we don’t need this big a crowd.”
He grasped my meaning and barked another order in that odd guttural almost-German.
The wererats melted away in that too-quick-to-follow-with-the-eye blur of