Free Forty Thieves by Thomas Perry Page B

country would let us do that.”
    “I see,” said Hebert. “But I guess it’s safe to assume we can count on you to cooperate with the official investigation of the shooting.”
    “We always do,” Sid said. “At the moment we haven’t got much to share. We’ve just started to look at the Ballantine case.”
    “That case belongs to somebody in North Hollywood homicide. I’d be satisfied to get the person who shot out your windshield. That’s my case. What’s your theory?”
    Ronnie said, “We put out ads online and in print offering twenty-five thousand dollars for the Ballantine case. We were followed, so we decided maybe we should go after the other car and see who was following us. We got too close, and they fired.”
    “You’re sure that it wasn’t because you found the place where they’d put the body?”
    “We don’t think we’d found anything,” said Ronnie. “We were there because one of the streets was at the stage of construction when a storm drain might still have been open,not paved over, and we wanted to see what it looked like. When Ballantine was murdered, that street was probably still empty field. The street where it could have happened would be one or two streets west of there.”
    “You’re pretty sure that your going out there was what caused the shooting?”
    Ronnie said, “Has anybody else been shot at out there?”
    “Not that we know of,” said Hebert. “We’ll have to look into it. Any other thoughts on what happened out there last night?”
    “Not right now,” said Sid. “We hope to later.”
    “Well, then, thanks for coming,” said Hebert. He stood and held out his hand. “It’s been interesting. Don’t hesitate to get in touch.”
    “Thank you,” Sid said. He shook Hebert’s hand.
    Sid walked out of the small room. As they moved down the hallway toward the foyer, they heard the door open and close again. When they reached the front of the building and were out in the open air again, Ronnie said quietly, “I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to share anything.”
    “I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to have anything.”
    Sid Abel walked up the sidewalk toward the Figueroa Club at eleven o’clock that evening. There were the usual three men watching the door from outside the club. One looked like a valet parking attendant standing behind a black podium of the sort that contained a pegboard with car keys on it. Sid knew that this pegboard held a lot of car keys that didn’t goto any car, and that the board was on hinges, just the door to a hidden cabinet containing a steel plate to make the podium bulletproof and a short-barreled semiautomatic shotgun. The attendant switched off about once an hour with one or the other of the two men sitting in a car along the curb. They were there to pull ahead at high speed and make any unfriendly intruders unhappy in proportion to their sins.
    The setup had not changed in at least three decades, since about the time when the club had moved here from Figueroa Street. This was a bad neighborhood, and the club was one of the principal things that made it that way.
    “Hi,” Sid said to the attendant. “Is Jimmy Pascal around tonight?”
    “I can ask,” said the attendant. “Who can I say wants him?”
    “Sid Abel.”
    “You look like a cop.”
    “I’m not. You look like a parking attendant.”
    “I’m not.”
    Sid took out a fifty-dollar bill and handed it to the attendant.
    The attendant pocketed it. “This isn’t much money.”
    “Jimmy’s not much of a guy.” He stepped past the attendant. “Sit tight. I’ll go find him myself.”
    The Figueroa was a private club, founded many years ago by a group of people who had shared a belief in after-hours drinking, and free enterprise that often included the exchange of goods and services that were not supposed to be for sale. It had retained that character long after many of those activities had gone out of style and been replaced by