Free A Cool Breeze on the Underground by Don Winslow Page B

tailing an amateur, it doesn’t matter, Neal. Save your energy and just stay out of sight. But a pro, it’s like it’s a habit with him, to mix up his walk slow and fast and slow again…. He’s going to play Simon Says: Take one giant step, one baby step.” They went at it again. A solid month of tailing. After the first week, Graham knew that Neal was the most talented prospect he had ever seen—fast, canny, and the lucky owner of a set of looks that was quite literally unremarkable. Graham worked him hard, leading him on chases down the shopper’s paradise of Fifth Avenue, where every store window offered a reflection, onto subway trains, into coffee shops, movie theaters, and men’s rooms, through the parks and the alleys. At first, the kid was always easy to detect or to shake, but after a short time, Graham found himself working hard to lose the little bastard, and then hard even to see him.
    “Find the blind spot,” Graham told the kid, “and stay in it for as long as you can.”
    “What’s the blind spot?”
    “The blind spot … the alley … the slipstream; a spot behind the guy where he just doesn’t see you. Usually, it’s behind him, slightly to his left side, about fifteen feet back. But it depends, you know, on his height and build. That’s why it’s good you’re a little shit, because it gives you a bigger blind spot to stay in.”
    “Yeah, I know what you mean. Like when you’re following somebody, and you get into the rhythm, and then you feel like you’re invisible, like the guy can’t see you.”
    So they practiced finding that spot, picking a stranger at random out of a crowd and following him. Neal got good at it, real good, and Graham marveled at the kid’s ability to fade back into a crowd, to disappear momentarily, and then reappear instantly back on the track. And a shadow made more noise than Neal Carey.
    “Use the crowd,” Graham lectured. “Horizontal, too, not just vertical, because you can get beside your guy if you use the crowd right. Like try to find a woman with real big ones, and get beside her. Then when your guy turns around, he’s not even going to see you, he’s too busy checking out her Daisy Maes.”
    Soon neal graduated to trickier stuff.
    “Today,” Graham announced one time, “you’re going to follow me from the front.”
    “That doesn’t make any sense.”
    “That’s why it’s so beautiful. No one is going to be looking for a tail in front of him.” Graham showed him, crossing the street and then crossing back in front of a guy they picked at random. Graham used store windows and the mirrors of parked cars to follow his man, not missing a beat when the man turned into a bookstore off Fifty-seventh.
    Neal tried and failed miserably, losing his mark after five minutes.
    “Because you didn’t listen, Neal. Remember what I told you: Every step is different. Do the soles of his shoes slap the sidewalk? Do they click? If it’s a woman wearing high heels, that’s a different sound. Maybe the mark’s wearing sneakers.”
    Back at it. Until “Front Following” became automatic. Then they moved on to “The East Side—West Side,” where the tail stays on the opposite side of the street. (“Why does the chicken cross the road?” Graham asked. “So the chicken he’s following doesn’t make him.”)
    Then they went to the two-man stuff: relays, pass-offs, front and back doors, peekaboos (“Peekaboo. I see you. You see me. But you don’t see him.”), and the ever-tricky “Fake Burn,” in which you let the mark give you his best move and “lose” you, while your unseen partner stays on the mark’s relaxed ass.
    Neal loved the “Fake Burn,” loved it with an intensity that inspired him to create his own variation: “The Solo Fake Burn,” known in the Carey household as “Neal’s Very Own Special Fake Burn.”
    “You can’t have a one-man Fake Burn,’ ” Graham replied with disgust when Neal announced his invention. “The whole