Free Clawback by Mike Cooper

a shame not to eat it.”
    “Some of those restaurants in SoHo, you probably are.”
    The conversation drifted to business, which, like anywhere, mostly meant sharing invidious and poorly sourced gossip about people we worked with. White-collar enforcement is a small field, like I’ve said. It’s not the rackets, where mobsters are constantly gunning one another down and going to jail and disappearing into WitSec. Hell, even the rackets aren’t the rackets anymore, not unless you speak Fujianese or Lao.
    “I’m thinking of getting out,” Walter said.
    “You tell me that every three months.”
    He shrugged. “I might actually do it this time. I bought a nice condo down in the Keys, did I mention? A foreclosure. And the boat’s almost paid off. Who needs this shit?” He lifted a shoulder toward the river, the rain, and the oil-slick trash edging the shore.
    “Spend your days bonefishing? Sounds nice—for about a week. You’d go bananas.”
    “Business is a pain in the ass. And there’s new competition, too. Any punk with an iMac and a digital SLR thinks he can undersell me.”
    “If it’s that easy, maybe I should try it. A quiet life, for a change.”
    “Is that what you think?”
    “Nobody pulls an automatic rifle on the forger.”
    Walter laughed. “You’d be surprised.”
    “Maybe.” I realized my jacket sleeves had gone a wet, rusty brown where I’d been leaning on the iron rail. “I’ve got competition too, though—if the vigilantes have really started hunting down rogue financiers.”
    “Is that what you do?”
    “Not exactly. But they’re diminishing the client base.”
    The drizzle eased, but the sky was darker than ever.
    “Saw Zeke the other day,” said Walter. “He asked about you.”
    “Asked about me.” I thought about that for a moment. “In a good way? Or do I need to start carrying an M16 around?”
    “Just social.” Walter raised one hand, like, don’t worry about it. “You know. Wondering how you were.”
    “Wet.” I tried to rub the rust off one sleeve, and gave up. “But now that you mention it, maybe I should talk to him. Possible subcontracting. Where’s he been?”
    “The same as always. Volchak’s, behind about three empty pitchers.”
    “I’ll try early in the day, then.”
    Down the row one of the fisherman had managed to light up, under his Mets cap. Smoke drifted in the mist.
    “Got to go,” I said. “Nice catching up, Walter.”
    “Throw Hayden off the sled if you want,” he said. “Okay by me.”
    I guess he’d been paid already, too.

CHAPTER TEN
    C lara was in the phone book. Too easy.
    Not her cellphone, of course. But the
Event Risk
website had a fax number on its Contact page. Even modern, all-electronic journalism is still chained to its Pleistocene era. I looked up the number in a reverse directory online and
voilà
: an address for “C Dawson” on 90th, west of Second Avenue.
    No wonder Clara had bothered to find me in person that first day—she apparently lived right around the corner.
    It was early evening. Her home was five blocks away. Why not?
    Dusk, cool and damp. I wandered along 90th Street at little more than a meander, examining the buildings and cars and faces.
    Old brownstones, with a few tearouts mixed in: ugly aluminum and concrete flatfronts from the sixties, before the Planning Commission stepped up. A pizza deliveryman went by on a bicycle, passing a Chinese takeout guy just stepping from his double-parked hatchback. A light breeze drifted up from the river, three blocks east.
    Fifty yards away, just as I’d recognized Clara’s building from theStreet View image I’d checked earlier, the ace blogger herself emerged. She was dressed in a close-fitting T-shirt over running shorts, her hair pulled into a ponytail.
    “Yo, Clara!” I called out, but a truck was passing and she hopped off the steps and took off down the street without looking in my direction.
    I didn’t try to catch up. She was headed toward the