Persuader

out."
    "What if it's dark?"
    "We'll be back before dark."
    "OK. Who's in the house?"
    "Beck's family. And the cook. They're noncombatants, but they won't leave."
    "What about Beck himself?"
    "He'll come back with the others. If he got away again in the confusion it wouldn't break my heart. But if he got hit in the confusion it wouldn't break my heart either."
    "OK."
    "They probably won't show up," I said. "They're busy. This all is just a precaution."
    "OK," he said again.
    "You keep the Cadillac," I said. "We'll take the Taurus." Villanueva got back in the Ford and reversed it out through the gate again. I walked out with Duffy and closed the gate from the outside and chained it and locked it and tossed the padlock key over to Eliot.
    "See you later," I said.
    He turned the Cadillac around and I watched him drive it down toward the house. Then I got in the Taurus with Duffy and Villanueva. She took the front seat. I took the back. I got her Glock and her spare magazines out of my pocket and passed them forward to her, like a little ceremony.
    "Thanks for the loan," I said.
    She put the Glock in her shoulder holster and the magazines in her purse.
    "You're very welcome," she said.
    "Teresa first," Villanueva said. "Quinn second. OK?"
    "Agreed," I said.
    He K-turned on the road and took off west.
    "So where do we look?" he said.
    "Choice of three locations," I said. "There's the warehouse, there's a city-center office, and there's a business park near the airport. Can't keep a prisoner in a city-center office building over the weekend. And the warehouse is too busy. They just had a big shipment.
    So my vote goes with the business park."
    "I-95 or Route One?"
    "Route One," I said.
    We drove in silence, fifteen miles inland, and turned north on Route One toward Portland.

CHAPTER 13
    It was early afternoon on a Saturday, so the business park was quiet. It was rinsed clean by rain and it looked fresh and new. The metal buildings glowed like dull pewter under the gray of the sky. We cruised through the network of streets at maybe twenty miles an hour. Saw nobody. Quinn's building looked locked up tight. I turned my head as we drove by and studied the sign again: Xavier eXport Company. The words were professionally etched on thick stainless steel, but the oversized X s looked like an amateur's idea of graphic design.
    "Why does it say export ?" Duffy asked. "He's importing stuff, surely."
    "How do we get in?" Villanueva asked.
    "We break in," I said. "Through the rear, I guess." The buildings were laid out back-to-back, with neat parking lots in front of each of them.
    Everything else in the park was either a road or new lawn bounded by neat poured- concrete curbs. There were no fences anywhere. The building directly behind Quinn's was labeled Paul Keast & Chris Maden Professional Catering Services. It was closed up and deserted. I could see past it all the way to Quinn's back door, which was a plain metal rectangle painted dull red.
    "Nobody around," Duffy said.
    There was a window on Quinn's back wall near the red door. It was made from pebbled glass. Probably a bathroom window. It had iron bars over it.
    "Security system?" Villanueva said.
    "On a new place like this?" I said. "Almost certainly."
    "Wired direct to the cops?"
    "I doubt it," I said. "That wouldn't be smart, for a guy like Quinn. He doesn't want the cops snooping around every time some kid busts his windows."
    "Private company?"
    "That's my guess. Or his own people."
    "So how do we do it?"
    "We do it real fast. Get in and out before anybody reacts. We can risk five or ten minutes, probably."
    "One at the front and two at the back?"
    "You got it," I said. "You take the front." I told him to pop the trunk and then Duffy and I slid out of the car. The air was cold and damp and the wind was blowing. I took the tire iron out from under the spare wheel and closed the trunk lid and watched the car drive away. Duffy and I walked down the side of the catering place and across the dividing lawn to Quinn's bathroom window. I put my ear against the cold metal siding and listened. Heard nothing. Then I looked at the window bars. They were made up from a shallow one-piece rectangular iron basket that was secured by eight machine screws, two on each of the four sides of the rectangle. The screws went through welded flanges the size of quarters. The screw heads themselves were the size of nickels. Duffy pulled the Glock out of her shoulder holster. I heard it scrape on the