Free Tonight I Said Goodbye (St. Martin's Minotaur Mystery) by Michael Koryta Page A

enough for me, but the warmest it had been in months. The winter was still clinging to us, refusing to give in to the spring. It had been a long, nasty one, with nearly a hundred inches of snowfall and consistently low temperatures that felt even colder with the frigid winds that whipped in off the lake. Around the first of March it had begun to wear at me. I was annoyed by the lingering traces of snow now, irate at each forecast of another storm, frustrated with the way the cold air squeezed my lungs on every run.
    "Next move?" Joe said, interrupting my thoughts. I took my eyes off the van in front of me briefly and glanced at him, not understanding.
    "You spacing out on me?" he said. "What do you think our next move should be?"
    I returned my eyes to the road and shrugged. "I don't know. We've got some possibilities now, but no facts, nothing close to hard evidence. Seems to me we need to shake something up a little, see what we can stir up."
    "That sounds about right," Joe said. "You've always favored the loose cannon approach in the past."
    I smiled. "When in doubt, shoot it out."
    "Brilliant slogan." He shook his head. "So, who are we going to shake up? You want to find the Russians, take a bat to their car?"
    "Have to save something for tomorrow," I said. "I figured we'd start with Jeremiah Hubbard."
    "Take a bat to his car?"
    "Only if he refuses to see us."
    Joe twisted in the seat, looking to see if I was serious. "You really want to talk to Hubbard today?"
    "Why not? He--or his associates, if we want to be anal about it--were paying Weston to do something recently. That's about the only thing close to a fact we have. Might as well take it and run with it."
    "You assume he'll be so awed by our deductive abilities that he'll confess ties to the Russian mob and let us make a citizen's arrest?"
    "It's hard to say what his reaction will be," I said. "But it's even harder to imagine someone
not
being awed by our deductive abilities."
    Joe ran his hand through his short gray hair and let it keep going until it was on the back of his neck. He sighed and kneaded the flesh as if trying to drive out a pain that had lodged there.
    "Shit," he said. "It's not like I've got any better ideas. Besides, I've always wanted to meet Hubbard."
    "You know where his office is?"
    He nodded. "Right downtown. Has a wide window that looks out from the Terminal Tower, or something like that."
    "Beautiful. I'm sure he'd be happy to show us the view."
    "Man that rich? He's got nothing but free time."
    A quick check in the phone book confirmed Joe's memory; Hubbard's offices were in the Terminal Tower downtown. It is unquestionably the city's most famous building. Once the tallest building in the city--and second tallest in the world--it is now dwarfed by the Key Building. The Terminal Tower has a presence the city's other skyscrapers lack, though, regardless of their size. Offices in the building went for exorbitant amounts, and I was sure Hubbard's suite would be among the priciest.
    Once downtown, I pulled into the Tower City garage and maneuvered the truck into a parking space that had obviously been designed for something more like a Geo Metro or a Honda Civic. Then weheaded into the building. We found a directory in the lobby and determined the offices of Jeremiah Hubbard Enterprises were located on the thirty-second floor of the fifty-two-story building.
    "Gosh," Joe said, "I guess we should just run the stairs, huh?"
    The elevator door opened with a chime, and I shrugged. "As long as the elevator's right here, we might as well take it."
    We rode the elevator up, then walked down the corridor until we located Hubbard's suite. I opened the outer door, and we stepped into an office with plush carpets, dark walnut furniture, and ornate brass lamps. A few paintings hung on the walls, and a small stone fountain bubbled softly to my left. The furniture and decor alone probably cost about what Joe and I would pay in ten years of rent. And it was