Invasion of Privacy

worked on the latch for a good three minutes, breaking a sweat dining the last thirty seconds. Finally a combination of jab, shimmy, and yank did the job. I eased the door only a foot or so along its track, just enough to get me in and past the drapes.
    That’s when something hit me from the side, behind the left ear, and I went down like snow sliding off a pitched roof.

18

    T hey didn’t bother with a blindfold, but then again, I didn’t wake up until they were lifting me by the shoulders from the floor of a car’s backseat. It was full dark now, and all I saw except for the rear fender and black-walled tire was a panel of light-colored bricks rising off the macadam. Just before I was part carried, part dragged through a metal door, I did catch the sugary scent of baking ovens, a smell that made me want to gag.
    “Come on, asshole,” said a gruff voice to my left. I recognized the voice as the man behind it grunted, him and his partner to my right hauling me up the first of many steps. We were under a weak yellowish light, the kind used on fire stairs. After they pushed and pulled me the halfflight to a landing, I raised my throbbing head enough to see the faces of the two burly guys who’d worked me over behind my office building, the one fine-featured, the other coarse. Neither had his hair slicked back anymore, and they were wearing dark pants and crewneck sweaters now. The peculiar lighting probably helped, aging Coarse twentyor so years and bringing back why Chief Pete Braverman up in Vermont had seemed so familiar.
    After a second half-flight, Fine supported me while Coarse unlocked a door that led to a small, windowless room with another door on the opposite wall. There were three wooden chairs around a rectangular table big enough for a fourth. I was dumped into one of the chairs, Fine sitting catercomer from me, Coarse standing over and behind me. Rubbing my skull only made the throbbing worse, so I leaned back, my empty holster collapsing against my right hip.
    Fine said, “You didn’t take our advice so good, asshole.” From above, Coarse’s voice. “Bad fucking idea not to.” Fine started to say, “You know what happens”—when I interrupted him with, “Get Hendrix up here.”
    Fine stopped and shot a look over me, toward Coarse.
    I said, “When we were outside, I smelled the ovens from the bakery. We’re on the second floor of the mall building in Marshfield , just above Hendrix Management. Now bring him up here.”
    Coarse slapped the back of my head with the palm of his hand. “You’re in no position to—”
    “You guys are deputy U.S. Marshals, and, speaking as a taxpayer, I’m getting pretty sick of my federal employees playing rope-a-dope with me.”
    Fine worked his mouth, nothing coming out.
    I stared at him. “Capisce?”
    Over my shoulder, Fine said, “Keep him here,” and then went out through the door we hadn’t used.
    After it closed behind him, I said conversationally, “So, is Chief Braverman your father, your uncle, or what?”
    No response from Coarse.
    Twenty seconds later, the door Fine went through opened, and Hendrix came in alone, eyes blazing, voice no longer mellow. “Just who the hell do you think you are?” I said, “That was going to be my question. I’d like to see some identification.”
    Hendrix glared up behind me, then got madder when Coarse or Braverman or whatever his name was did nothing. “Look, Cuddy, we’ve got you for breaking and ent—”
    “Oh, please. You civil servants have fucked the duck on this from square one. And right now the only question is how badly you’re going to suffer for it.”
    Hendrix glared some more, but without the fire he’d had coming through the door. Sitting in Fine’s chair, he said, “What are you talking about?”
    “I’m talking about what you or your boss decided to do here. On Wednesday, I came around to the office downstairs, asking about your operation on behalf of another condo complex.”
    “Which was total bullshit.”
    “Doesn’t matter, Boyce. What matters is that you didn’t even try to close the sale when you should have. If anything, the message was, ‘Hey, we sell lemons, so try another car lot.’ ”
    “What difference does that make?”
    “It made me go down to Plymouth Willows with more questions than I’d have had already.”
    “Cuddy, just what is your stake in this?”
    “Let me finish. After I knock on some doors at the complex, one Andrew Dees, who I hadn’t