Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

first course?”
    “I’ll let you know when.”
    “Very good.” He slipped away, still frowning.
    “You can’t fix everything,” said Joe. “Not completely. I know that. But at an absolute minimum, you need to give the pension back.”
    “Oh, go to hell.” Valiant’s patience had begun to wear.
    “It’s only six million dollars. Last year you boasted about earning, what, nine billion? You can afford it.”
    “It was all legal. There’s no obligation.”
    “Legal.” Joe sighed. “What you did — it was wrong.”
    He didn’t get anywhere. Valiant sat obstinate for another minute, disregarding him. When the waiter came back again, with the maître d’ for support, Joe stood up.
    “Thanks for the time, Mr. Valiant,” he said.
    “If I ever see you again, you’re going to jail.”
    “Beeker,” said Joe. “With three
e
’s. You need some time to think it over, that’s okay. Let’s say, by Wednesday? A public announcement. I’ll be waiting.”
    “Fuck you.”
    Joe nodded. “Wednesday,” he said again, and left.

    N OTHING HAPPENED , EXCEPT that Valiant hired some bodyguards. They were at his house — Joe followed the Gallardo one evening, an hour’s drive out of the city and into horse country, to see a blacked-out SUV waiting at the gate. In the morning the bodyguards arrived early at the office, and when Valiant went out for lunch, Joe saw at least one musclehead nearby the entire time.
    On the other hand, they didn’t actually drive with him. The sports car was a two-seater, hardly built for six-foot linebackers carrying automatic weapons. Joe thought about this, and he followed Valiant to and from his house for a few more days.
    At a distance — a great distance. He wasn’t going to be accused of stalking.
    Thursday afternoon, Joe stopped waiting for Valiant’s announcement and started thinking about plan B. He had to borrow a phone book from the desk guy at the motel — the room didn’t have one, and pay phones seemed to have disappeared from the city. He’d never find this particular kind of shop back home, but Manhattan didn’t disappoint: three choices in Midtown alone, and more in the boroughs.
    New Yorkers seemed to like spying on one another.

    “T HE LENS IS easy,” said the clerk. He gestured at a glass case alongside the counter, its shelves crammed with glinting electronics. “You need wireless?”
    “I don’t think so.” Joe remembered the combat radio he’d humped through Vietnam, twenty-three pounds of steel and plastic knobs. The equipment here would fit inside a pencil. “I can wear the recorder on my belt or something, connect it under my shirt.”
    “Sure. Pin-wire mike too — put it separate, different buttonhole or something, makes it harder to catch.”
    “You sure it can record everything someone says to me? Video too?”
    “So long as you’re facing them. The exact orientation doesn’t matter much. A lens like this” — he held up a tiny crystal bead, two thin leads trailing away — “has a seventy-degree field of view. Looks a bit like a fishbowl on playback, but you’ll see everything.”
    “Good.” Joe pulled out his wallet.
    As the clerk settled the components into a plastic bag, he said, “I ought to tell you, the courts don’t accept this sort of thing.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “If you’re planning to catch someone, go undercover? It’s not admissible. I’m just saying.”
    “Oh, that’s not what this is about.” Joe took the bag. “We’re way beyond a court of law.”

    O N F RIDAY HE started late, checking out of the Rest-a-Way at noon and eating a full lunch at a diner off 280. By three o’clock he was in Connecticut, the truck parked in Old Ridgefork’s municipal lot. The town was small and charming, with pottery shops and coffee boutiques on the renovated main street. Joe walked a few blocks north, to the edge of the town center, and sat on a park bench near a stoplight where Bluff Street crossed Main.
    Late sunlight slanted across trees and Victorians. Children’s shouts drifted from a playground a block away. Traffic was light but steady, a stream of cars headed mostly east. Old Ridgefork sat on one of the commuter arteries into Fairfield County, as Joe had determined from careful study of a state map.
    Valiant had driven this way all three times Joe had tailed him home.
    He sat for ninety-five minutes, and then he saw the Gallardo coming through town, a few blocks away.
    Joe stood and began to walk along the