No Immunity

the Weasel.
    So what? What was it left him with Tchernak who was coming up with zip. And it forced him to search out the Weasel.

    “Yeah?” Cecil McGuire, the Weasel, yelled over the rattle of the washers and dryers on the other side of the “all. That was the trouble with having your office next to |he washroom; it was fine till you wanted to be heard, or to near. McGuire pressed the phone harder against his ear as if he could create a suction cup of silence there. When the speaker didn’t continue, McGuire answered what he figured the question had been. He’d got good at guessing in e years he’d been in this basement. “Yeah, this is the McGuire Investigative Agency.” He could have asked “Who’s calling?” but his clients weren’t the type who took well to that kind of question. He wrote down the number he saw on the Caller I.D. display. “What can I do for you?”
    “You good enough to find a man for me, Weasel?”
    The guy gave no reference; it made McGuire nervous. He didn’t like strangers. His clients didn’t pay enough to get him out of the basement here, but they knew better than to hassle him. Strangers were amateurs, unreasonable, they screwed up, and they’d turn you in without blinking an eye. But they did pay. And if they were hell-bent on hiding their identities, they could end up paying a lot more than they planned. “Finding’s my thing. He alone?”
    “Unless he’s hooked up with someone.”
    “Someone?”
    How’d you even find me, he wanted to ask. It wasn’t like he had an ad in the Yellow Pages: McGuire’s Discreet Investigations, special attention to tracking down runaway hookers. Pimps welcome. His clients knew him, because he was into them too deep to say no, knew they had him because no one else would. He didn’t have to spend the extra green he didn’t have on the Yellow Pages. So how did this person know enough about him to call him the Weasel?
    “What’s your going rate, McGuire?”
    “A—Two hundred a day, plus ex.” Like he’d ever see« more than fifty a shot.
    He was holding his breath until the voice said, “This is a flat-fee job. Find my guy. Five thou. You can set aside the time for this?”
    He opened the reverse directory and began checking for the number he’d written down. If Mr. Important knew anything about him, he’d’ve known time was no problem; he wasn’t ass-over-armpit in clients, and what clients he did have weren’t asking for a lot of cerebral work. His type of work, pretty much he had his days free. His type of work he wasn’t getting any five thou for. “What’s the backside to this? You don’t pay a fortune for a simple trace. He make off with drugs?”
    “I’m offering you this ‘fortune’ so you don’t ask questions.”
    No questions asked he did know about. “My life’s worth more’n five thou that’ll go to my estate.” He almost laughed at that last word. My estate. He rolled his chair over the patch of indoor-outdoor carpet till he could see out the window. His portion of the Biggest Little City: sun setting behind the trash cans for the whole eight units. “Look, I’m not nosin’ into your business, but I gotta know enough to do mine. Cops involved?”
    “No.”
    “Drugs?”
    “No.”
    “Hits?”
    “No one’s been touched. This is a missing person.”
    “Hookers, pimps, the Company?”
    “Not if you work fast.”
    “He crazy?”
    “Not any more so than the average.”
    The Weasel rolled back from the window, no longer concerned with his view. He had bigger things to worry about. The guy had started making impatient little tapping poises on the phone. He knew McGuire wasn’t going to ,et five thou go. The tug-of-war wasn’t about if he’d do the )oh, just about how much he’d have to lay on the line.
    “You have accidents on those investigations of yours, McGuire?”
    “Yeah, I get hurt.”
    “I don’t mean you.”
    So that was it. It fit with the no-reference and no-name shit. This was just what he hated about these damn amateurs. They needed the mud shoveled out of their way, but they wanted their own hands clean. When they slapped those scrubbed and manicured palms together and trotted up the aisle to take the sacrament, they didn’t want to be tripping over corpses. “Yeah, but it’ll run you more’n five.”
    “I’m looking for Grady Hummacher, a geologist just back from the Panama/Colombia line. He may have two deaf kids from Panama with him. If you can’t get him back