Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead by Steven Womack

O’Neal of the bricklaying set, I was going to be an insider here. I could feel it. I’d do a written report once Phil told me what he wanted to see in it, and I’d be available for court testimony if civil suit or prosecution arose; at my customary fee, of course.
    All in all, not a bad gig. I felt pretty good.
    A long line of beige-colored metal doors ran downthe hall to my right, past the middle-aged secretary whose fingers buzzed away on a word processor. One of the doors flew open and an imposing Phil Anderson stepped out. I’m about six feet tall and have a tough time maintaining one sixty. Phil’s got at least four inches and a hundred pounds on me, and he moves like a hyperactive kid who forgot his Ritalin.
    “Harry, you rascal, how are you?” he demanded in his booming voice. The secretary’d heard it before. She never broke rhythm on the keys.
    “Fine, Phil, good to see you.” I stuck out my hand and he jerked it like a pump handle. A long lock of shiny brown hair drooped down over his forehead, and great bags hung under his eyes. I realized then where I’d seen him before; he’s what Thomas Wolfe would have looked like if he’d lived into his late forties and spent too much time on the couch with a six-pack and a case of potato chips.
    “C’mon down here. We’ve got a VCR and a monitor in the conference room. A couple of the other guys want to see this tape, too.” He turned to the secretary. “Jane Ellen, call Rick and Steve and tell ’em Harry’s here.”
    The secretary’s left hand picked up the telephone handset while—I swear it’s true—her right hand kept typing, covering both sides of the keyboard with one hand. Never missed a beat. Talk about a focused woman.
    We walked down the carpeted hall into a large conference room with a rectangular table that would have seated about twenty people. At the other end, a big JVC monitor and tape player sat on a portable gray metal wheeled rack.
    I sat my briefcase down on the table and opened it. “I went ahead and got an invoice ready, Phil. I ran into some pretty sizable expenses, equipment rental, mileage. No hotel bill, though. I slept in a van.”
    “No problemo, amigo,” he said from the other end ofthe room as he turned on the monitor. “We’ll take care of it right after the meeting.”
    I took out the videotape and slid it down the length of polished tabletop. The door opened behind me and two other guys stepped in, both in suits, striped power ties, the whole corporate costume.
    “Harry, meet Rick Harvey and Steve White. They’re the field investigators who were assigned to this case.”
    Great, I thought, so they already hate me. I went out and did their job after they screwed up. May as well make the best of it.
    “Hi. Harry James Denton,” I said cordially, hand extended. “Glad to meet you.”
    We did the corporate introduction ritual and immediately afterward I forgot which was which. They were both midtwenties, clean, well-groomed, polished. Probably applied to the FBI Academy and didn’t get in.
    “How much did you say you got, Harry?”
    I settled into a seat and tried to relax. “Little over an hour’s worth of him actually out of the chair. I spent a week up there staking the guy out. It took a change in the weather to get him on his feet.”
    “Oh,” one of the investigator clones said, “so that explains why it was so easy.”
    “It wasn’t
that
easy,” I answered. “I’m still scratching the chigger bites from laying in the grass for so long.”
    “Yeah,” the other one said, his voice a caricature of a cop movie. “Stakeout’s a bitch, all right.”
    Right, I thought. Barney Pife in a suit and tie. Guy probably carries a bullet in his shirt pocket.
    Phil popped the tape in and started it. Immediately the backyard in Louisville jumped on the screen, with the bricklayer in the wheelchair off to the side watching the action. The other adult male and the teenage boy passed the ball around, shot a few.