Persuader

place is swarming with cops for no good reason?"
    "College cops," Duffy said. "You know, those rent-a-cop guys colleges have? They just happen to be there. I mean, where else would you find them?"
    "Excellent," I said. "They can start from right inside the campus. They can control the whole thing by radio from the rear."
    "How will you take them out?" Eliot asked me, like it was an issue.
    I nodded. I saw the problem. I would have fired six shots by then.
    "I can't reload," I said. "Not while I'm driving. Not with blanks. The kid might notice."
    "Can you ram them? Force them off the road?"
    "Not in a crummy old van. I'll have to have a second revolver. Preloaded, waiting inside the van. In the glove compartment, maybe."
    "You're running around with two six-shooters?" the old guy said. "That's a little odd, in Massachusetts." I nodded. "It's a weak point. We're going to have to risk a few."
    "So I should be in plain clothes," the old guy said. "Like a detective. Shooting at a uniformed cop is beyond reckless. That would be a weak point, too."
    "OK," I said. "Agreed. Excellent. You're a detective, and you pull out your badge, and I think it's a gun. That happens."
    "But how do we die?" the old guy asked. "We just clutch our stomachs and fall over, like an old Wild West show?"
    "That's not convincing," Eliot said. "This whole thing has got to look exactly right. For Richard Beck's sake."
    "We need Hollywood stuff," Duffy said. "Kevlar vests and condoms filled with fake blood that explode off of a radio signal."
    "Can we get it?"
    "From New York or Boston, maybe."
    "We're tight for time."
    "Tell me about it," Duffy said.
    That was the end of day nine. Duffy wanted me to move into the motel and offered to have somebody drive me back to my Boston hotel for my luggage. I told her I didn't have any luggage and she looked at me sideways but didn't say anything. I took a room next to the old guy. Somebody drove out and got pizza. Everybody was running around and making phone calls. They left me alone. I lay on my bed and thought the whole thing through again, beginning to end, from my point of view. I made a list in my head of all the things we hadn't considered. It was a long list. But there was one item bothering me above all. Not exactly on the list. Kind of parallel to it. I got off my bed and went to find Duffy. She was out in the lot, hurrying back to her room from her car.
    "Zachary Beck isn't the story here," I told her. "He can't be. If Quinn's involved, then Quinn's the boss. He wouldn't play second fiddle. Unless Beck is a worse guy than Quinn, and I don't even want to think about that."
    "Maybe Quinn changed," she said. "He was shot twice in the head. Maybe that kind of rewired his brains. Diminished him, somehow." I said nothing. She hurried away. I went back to my room.
    Day ten started with the arrival of the vehicles. The old guy got a seven-year-old Chevy Caprice to act as his police unmarked. It was the one with the Corvette motor in it, from the final model year before General Motors stopped making them. It looked just right.
    The pickup was a big thing painted faded red. It had a bull bar on the front. I saw the younger guys talking about how they would use it. My ride was a plain brown panel van.
    It was the most anonymous truck I had ever seen. It had no side windows and two small rear windows. I checked inside for a glove compartment. It had one.
    "OK?" Eliot asked me.
    I slapped its side like van people do and it boomed faintly in response.
    "Perfect," I said. "I want the revolvers to be big .44 Magnums. I want three heavy soft- nosed bullets and nine blanks. Make the blanks as loud as you can get."
    "OK," he said. "Why soft-nose?"
    "I'm worried about ricochets," I said. "I don't want to hurt anybody by accident. Soft- nose slugs will deform and stick to what they hit. I'm going to fire one into the radiator and two at the tires. I want you to pump the tires way high so they'll explode when I hit them. We've got to make it spectacular." Eliot hurried away and Duffy came up to me.
    "You'll need these," she said. She had a coat and a pair of gloves for me. "You'll look more realistic if you're wearing them. It'll be cold. And the coat will hide the gun." I took them from her and tried on the coat. It fit pretty well. She was clearly a good judge of sizes.
    "The psychology will be tricky," she said. "You're going to have to be flexible. The kid might be catatonic. You might need to coax some reaction out