Free The Disposable Man by Archer Mayor

I’m to do this totally on faith, even though you won’t tell me anything because of national security?”
    He laid his hands flat on the table, his smile erased by the tone of my voice. “Well, apparently not.” He rose to his feet. “Lieutenant, I guess you’ll just have to do what you have to do, for whatever reasons. I was hoping for a little interagency cooperation, but maybe those days are gone. It’s becoming that kind of world—everybody covering his ass, and to hell with what’s good for the nation. Too bad.”
    He crossed the small room and pulled open the door. The same woman who’d escorted me here was standing in the hallway, apparently summoned by mysterious means.
    Snowden nodded to me as I passed him, but didn’t offer his hand, which was just as well. I might’ve been tempted to tear it off. “Sorry to have wasted your time, Lieutenant. Have a safe trip back.”
    · · ·
    It was dark. The rain outside hammered on the skylight over our bed with a comforting futility. I was lying face down on the bed, a large towel beneath me, and Gail was straddling my hips, alternately oiling and massaging my back, which was sore from hours of driving in lousy weather, not to mention the odd knife fight.
    “So what do you think you’ve stepped into?” she asked, bearing down.
    “No ghost of a notion. I ran it by Tony, but he’s as confused as I am. We can’t tell if they know everything and are being cute, or know almost nothing and want to know more. Snowden basically told me to lay off the investigation, but there again, that could’ve been just to fire me up. One thing is for sure—he lied about Boris Malik, or whatever his name is. Told me he’d been dumped here out of convenience—a foreigner killed by other foreigners now out of the country—and that finding any evidence, or linking the case to anyone or any place local would be impossible. We know that’s bullshit, since whoever did the dumping knew about the quarry and how to approach it.”
    Gail paused to apply more oil. “Which leaves you back where you started?”
    “Not quite,” I admitted reluctantly.
    She resumed her handiwork along the tender back of my neck, forcing me to reach back and stop her.
    “Ease up a bit. Something else happened down there,” I continued. “You probably would’ve heard about it soon anyhow, the way news travels. I was mugged by a guy with a knife. Nothing much happened,” I added quickly to her quiet intake of breath. “He came at me, I threw him off, and then he disappeared, right after he chopped me in the neck. But I’m having trouble believing it was as random as the cops’re claiming.”
    She stretched out next to me to look into my face. “You sure that was all of it? Just a near thing?”
    I kissed her forehead. “Promise. I kicked him in the balls, and he took off. The neck’s a little sore is all.”
    She laid her head on the towel and closed her eyes briefly, one hand still stroking my back. I understood her concern. I’d almost been killed by a knife a few years back, and when she’d been raped, her attacker had used a knife to torment her. Such symbols had become evil icons to her, as had sharp noises in the night, the need for locked doors, and a wariness of things implied but perhaps not meant. They represented a skittish undercurrent beneath an otherwise hard-driving, intelligent, utterly self-possessed exterior.
    I kissed her again. “Thanks for the back rub.”
    Her eyes reopened. “Want more?”
    “No. That did the trick.”
    There was a long pause before she asked, “So what made this not a random mugging?”
    “I don’t know. For one thing, it happened at the Korean War Memorial. If I were a mugger, I wouldn’t’ve been skulking around a totally empty area, probably famous for its police coverage. For another, I never heard him coming. I just happened to turn around to look at an airplane flying over. And finally, Snowden knew all about it early the next