Free Antenna Syndrome by Alan Annand Page A

bigger and more hostile. Kid in
Harlem got bitten last summer and died because no one sought
medical attention in time. You probably saved Myers’s life.”
    “So he’s alive?”
    “They brought him around just long enough to answer
a few questions,” Boyle said. “Once he confirmed your story, they
let him go back to sleep.”
    “Now fade, snooper,” said Mundt, “and fade fast. I
don’t ever want to see you again.”
    I could have told him the feeling was mutual but I
thought I’d used up my share of luck for the day. I faded faster
than a pair of cheap denims in a bucket of bleach.

Chapter 14
     
    Boyle took me downstairs and left me and my
paperwork with the desk sergeant. No charges filed, free to go.
They gave me back my tote bag, wallet, weapons and other personal
effects. I counted my money. A thousand dollars was missing. I
checked the inventory form they’d filled out when they’d booked me.
In the money section, a digit was missing. But what’s a digit, give
or take? I decided not to make a federal case of it. Given the
financial incentives for cops to fast-track felons into private
prisons, I was lucky to be free again.
    I called Lutz as soon as I hit the street. As it
turns out, he was already en route and just a few blocks away. I
stood on the curb as he arrived in a current-model Cadillac
Stratus. It looked like a shark on wheels, blue-grey with a slim
dorsal fin on the roof, engine side vents, transition glass
windows. The power door on the passenger side opened before I even
touched the handle. I slid into the soft leather seat and the door
swung shut with a reassuring thunk .
    “Have you eaten?” Lutz said.
    “Not since yesterday’s lunch.”
    “Turn your goggles off.”
    I powered off and put my iFocals in my tote bag. I
felt naked and ineffectual, admittedly my natural state, but I
still didn’t like it.
    He took me to a West Street joint owned by one of
his clients where he ate free, like a high-end soup kitchen for
lawyers. It was on the second floor and we got a window table
looking out across the Hudson. Lighted by the morning sun, Jersey
never looked better.
    A waitress in a lizard-skin outfit with high heels
enquired after our breakfast appetites, although her uniform
implied there might be more on the menu if only we knew what to ask
for. Lutz ordered for both of us – scrambled eggs, lox, bagels,
coffee and grapefruit mimosas.
    The beverages came immediately. I drained my mimosa
so fast that Lutz gave me his and ordered another for himself. He
watched the waitress as she headed back to the bar. “That’s one
cute little lizard. I’d love to introduce her to my trouser
snake.”
    Lutz wasn’t attractive, and no one but his mother
would call him lovable. He was short, maybe five-foot-six, with a
runty physique. He’d lost most of his hair on top, leaving him with
side panels that he’d let grow, and he had eyebrows like
caterpillars that had joined hands above his hatchet nose. From a
distance, it looked like some raggedy-ass laurel wreath the Roman
emperors used to wear.
    After a moment he remembered I was sitting across
the table. He gestured with both hands open, fingers waggling to
bring it on. “So, what the fuck’s your story?”
    For some reason, Lutz liked me. Maybe it had
something to do with the fact that I’d got in the way of a knife
one night in a Brooklyn bar, taking one in the ribs intended for
him. Or that I’d kicked an ounce of coke under the table and into
the next booth just as four undercover cops showed up to arrest the
dealer sitting with us, and the dealer had assumed Lutz had turned
from customer to rat.
    Maybe it had something to do with knowing each other
since high school when we’d been chess buddies, studying games by
Fischer and Spassky, attending tournaments in Manhattan where we
always got eliminated in the first round.
    After high school we’d parted ways, him attending
law school in Chicago, and I didn’t see him for a decade. Then