The Detachment

harmless Japanese persona and prepared to just walk on by in the shadows.
    But a few meters away, he called out, “Hey.” Larison, I realized, and that damn danger aura he put out. The cop must have keyed on it, consciously or unconsciously.
    I gave him a small, unsteady wave and moved to go around, but he stopped and put up his hand to indicate we should do the same. Shit.
    The cop said, “Wo gehen Sie so Spät noch hin?” I shook my head. Even if I’d understood his words, and I didn’t, I would have pretended not to. The less basis we had for engagement, the more likely he would be to give up in frustration, or otherwise to lose interest and move on.
    “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” he said, and this I did understand. Do you speak German?
    Larison answered in slurred Spanish: “Solamente espanol, y un poco de ingles.” Only Spanish, and a little English—close enough to the Portuguese I spoke from my time in Brazil to be easily comprehensible.
    The cop looked at me. I said, “Mit Schlag?”
    I was hoping he would smile at that and move on, but he didn’t. He said, in English now, “You are at hotel? Here?”
    This was going south fast. Our cover was solid and we hadn’t committed any crimes, but I didn’t want a cop taking a close look at any of us. And if he detained us much longer, we wouldn’t be in position in time to intercept Finch at the hotel.
    “Hotel?” he said again. “Here?”
    I shook my head and said in Japanese-accented English, “The Sacher Vien.” It was a famous hotel in the center of the city, though not, of course, one where any of us was actually staying.
    Larison said, “Voy a vomitar.” I’m going to vomit.
    I glanced over at him to see where he was going with this. He clamped a hand over his mouth as though trying to dam a rising tide of puke.
    No, I thought. Don’t take out the cop. If we do, we can’t do Finch…
    Larison groaned through his fingers. The cop said, “Was zum Teufel?”
    Larison’s body convulsed, his head shooting forward, his ass jerking back. Vomit spewed from his mouth all over his shoes.
    The cop jumped back and cried out, “Verdammt nochmal!”
    Larison straightened, gasping, his cheeks puffing, his hands massaging his stomach. A perfect pantomime of a drunken man about to blow for the second time in as many seconds.
    “Hotel!” the cop said, pointing in the direction we’d been walking. “Go to hotel. Jetzt! Now!”
    “Yes,” I said, thinking, thank God. “Hotel.”
    Larison groaned again. The cop stepped to the side and again gestured angrily in the direction we’d been walking. I took Larison’s arm and led him past. From behind us, I heard the cop muttering something disgustedly. I imagined it was along the lines of asshole was lucky he didn’t puke on my shoes.
    “Nice going,” I said, when we had turned the corner. “What did you do, finger in your throat?”
    “Yeah. While I was clutching my face.” He coughed and spat.
    “For a minute there, I thought you were gearing up to drop him. Which would have been a mistake.”
    “No, I just wanted to dare him to pull me into his cruiser with puke all over my shoes. I had a feeling he’d realize he had more important things to do.”
    “Where did you learn your Spanish?”
    “Ops. Latin America.” It was a sufficiently vague description to make clear he didn’t want to talk about it more. Not that we had time.
    “We still have a few minutes,” I said. “Quick, knock the puke off your shoes. We don’t want to track anything into the hotel.”
    He whacked his feet against the side of a building a few times, then stamped and scraped his soles along the ground. Between that and the two hundred meters we still had to walk, we’d be fine.
    Treven buzzed my mobile just as we arrived at the hotel entrance. ETA one minute. Cutting it a little close, but still manageable. Larison stayed outside, hunkering down between two parked cars just a few meters from the doorway, as I pulled on my gloves and went in. The corridor was still satisfyingly quiet. I quickly slipped into one of the coveralls that had been left on the tarp. They were a little large, but not excessively so. I grabbed a can of paint and a paintbrush and the length of plastic sheeting I’d cut, put the paint can on the floor next to the interior hotel entranceway, and started running the brush up and down the wall like a painter on the midnight shift. The whole thing was sufficiently incongruous to give Finch pause