Hard as Nails

Book 3: The Kurtz Series

by Dan Simmons

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

If you’re going to shoot Joe Kurtz, you’d better shoot to kill.

Ex-private investigator Joe Kurtz’s survival is on the line when an ambush leaves him badly wounded and his parole officer, Peg O’Toole, clinging to life. Their respective professions have ensured that neither suffers from a shortage of enemies, so narrowing down the suspects isn’t easy. But Kurtz knows who’s at the head of his list: Angelina Farino Ferrara, the lethal beauty who leads the Farino crime family, and her mob rival, Toma Gonzaga.

The odd thing is, each would rather hire Joe Kurtz than fire at him. Someone’s causing trouble beneath the gray skies of western New York, and it’s drawn the notice of the mobs and the cops. Kurtz is caught in the middle along with the rest of them, and no one knows who’s tightening the vise.

Release date: August 25, 2015

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 416

Sample

Chapter One

ON THE DAY he was shot in the head, things were going strangely well for Joe Kurtz. In fact, things had been going strangely well for weeks. Later, he told himself that he should have known that the universe was getting ready to readjust its balance of pain at his expense.

And at much greater expense to the woman who was standing next to him when the shots were fired.

He had a two P.M. appointment with his parole officer and he was there at the Civic Center on time. Because curb parking around the courthouse was almost impossible at that time of day, Kurtz used the parking garage under the combined civic, justice, and family court complex. The best thing about his parole officer was that she validated.

Actually, Kurtz realized, that wasn’t the best thing about her at all. Probation Officer Margaret “Peg” O’Toole, formerly of the Buffalo P.D. narcotics and vice squad, had treated him decently, knew and liked his secretary—Arlene DeMarco—and had once helped Kurtz out of a deep hole when an overzealous detective had tried to send him back to County lock-up on a trumped-up weapons charge. Joe Kurtz had made more than a few enemies during his eleven and a half years serving time for manslaughter in Attica, and odds were poor that he’d last long in general population, even in County. In addition to validating his parking stubs, Peg O’Toole had probably saved his life.

She was waiting for him when he knocked on the door and entered her second-floor office. Come to think of it, O’Toole had never kept him waiting. While many parole officers worked out of cubicles, O’Toole had earned herself a real office with windows overlooking the Erie County Holding Center on Church Street. Kurtz figured that on a clear day she could watch the winos being dragged into the drunk tank.

“Mr. Kurtz.” She gestured him to his usual chair.

“Agent O’Toole.” He took his usual chair.

“We have an important date coming up, Mr. Kurtz,” said O’Toole, looking at him and then down at his folder.

Kurtz nodded. In a few weeks it would be one year since he left Attica and reported to his parole officer. Since there had been no real problems—or at least none she or the cops had heard about—he should be visiting her once a month soon, rather than weekly. Now she asked her usual questions and Kurtz gave his usual answers.

Peg O’Toole was an attractive woman in her late thirties—overweight by current standards of perfection but all the more attractive in Kurtz’s eyes for that, with long, auburn hair, green eyes, a taste for expensive but conservative clothing, and a Sig Pro nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol in her purse. Kurtz knew the make because he’d seen the weapon.

He liked O’Toole—and not just for helping him out of the frame-up a year ago this coming November—but also because she was as no-nonsense and non-condescending as a parole officer can be with a “client.” He’d never had an erotic thought about her, but that wasn’t her fault. There was just something about the act of imagining an ex-police officer with her clothes off that worked on Kurtz like a 1,000-cc dose of anti-Viagra.

“Are you still working with Mrs. DeMarco on the Sweetheart Search dot com business?” asked O’Toole. As a felon, Kurtz couldn’t be licensed by the state of New York for his former job—P.I.—but he could operate this business of finding old high school flames, first via the Internet—that was his secretary Arlene’s part of it—then by a bit of elementary skip-tracing. That was Kurtz’s part of it.

“I tracked down a former high school football captain this morning in North Tonawanda,” said Kurtz, “to hand him a handwritten letter from his former cheerleader girlfriend.”

O’Toole looked up from her notes and removed her tortoise-shell glasses. “Did the football hero still look like a football hero?” she asked, showing only the faintest trace of a smile.

“They were both from Kenmore West’s Class of ’61,” said Kurtz. “The guy was fat, bald, and lived in a trailer that’s seen better days. It had a Confederate flag hung on the side of it and a clapped-out ’72 Camaro parked outside.”

O’Toole winced. “How about the cheerleader?”

Kurtz shrugged. “If there was a photo, it was in the sealed letter. But I can guess.”

“Let’s not,” said O’Toole. She put her glasses back on and glanced back at her form. “How is the WeddingBells-dot-com business going?”

“Slowly,” said Kurtz. “Arlene has the whole Internet thing set up—all the contacts and contracts with dressmakers, cardmakers, cakemakers, musicians, churches and reception halls set in place—and money’s coming in, but I’m not sure how much. I really don’t have much to do with that side of the business.”

“But you’re an investor and co-owner?” said the parole officer. There was no hint of sarcasm in her voice.

“Sort of,” said Kurtz. He knew that O’Toole had seen the articles of incorporation during a visit the parole officer had made to their new office in June. “I roll over some of my income from SweetheartSearch back into WeddingBells and get a cut in return.” Kurtz paused. He wondered how the felons and shankmeisters and Aryan Brotherhood boys in the exercise yard at Attica would react if they heard him say that. The D-Block Mosque guys would probably drop the price on his head from $15,000 to $10,000 out of sheer contempt.

O’Toole took off her glasses again. “I’ve been thinking of using Mrs. DeMarco’s services.”

Kurtz had to blink at that. “For WeddingBells? To set up all the details of a wedding online?”

“Yes.”

“Ten percent discount to personal acquaintances,” said Kurtz. “I mean, you’ve met Arlene.”

“I know what you meant, Mr. Kurtz.” O’Toole put her glasses back on. “You still have a room at…what is the hotel’s name? Harbor Inn?”

“Yes.” Kurtz’s old flophouse hotel, the Royal Delaware Arms near downtown, had been shut down in July by the city inspectors. Only the bar of the huge old building remained open and the word was that the only customers there were the rats. Kurtz needed an address for the parole board, and the Harbor Inn served as one. He hadn’t gotten around to telling O’Toole that the little hotel on the south side was actually boarded up and abandoned or that he’d leased the entire building for less than the price of his room at the old Delaware Arms.

“It’s at the intersection of Ohio and Chicago Streets?”

“Right.”

“I’d like to drop by and just look at it next week if you don’t mind,” said the parole officer. “Just to verify your address.”

Shit, he thought. “Sure,” he said.

O’Toole sat back and Kurtz thought that the short interview was over. The meetings had been getting more and more pro forma in recent months. He wondered if Officer O’Toole was becoming more laid back after the hot summer just past and with the pleasant autumn just winding down—the leaves on the only tree visible outside her window were a brilliant orange but ready to blow off.

“You seem to have recovered completely from your automobile accident last winter,” said the parole officer. “I haven’t seen even a hint of a limp the last few visits.”

“Yeah, pretty much full recovery,” said Kurtz. His “automobile accident” the previous February had included being knifed, thrown out of a third story window, and crashing through a plaster portico at the old Buffalo train station, but he hadn’t seen any pressing need for the probation office to know the details. The cover story had been a pain for Kurtz, since he’d had to sell his perfectly good twelve-year-old Volvo—he could hardly be seen driving around in the car he was supposed to have wracked up on a lonely stretch of winter highway—and now he was driving a much older red Pinto. He missed the Volvo.

“You grew up around Buffalo, didn’t you, Mr. Kurtz?”

He didn’t react, but he felt the skin tighten on his face. O’Toole knew his personal history from the dossier on her desktop, and she’d never ventured into his pre-Attica history before. What’d I do?

He nodded.

“I’m not asking professionally,” said Peg O’Toole. “I just have a minor mystery—very minor—that I need solved, and I think I need someone who grew up here.”

“You didn’t grow up here?” asked Kurtz. Most people who still lived in Buffalo had.

“I was born here, but we moved away when I was three,” she said, opening the bottom right drawer of her desk and moving some things aside. “I moved back eleven years ago when I joined the Buffalo P.D.” She brought out a white envelope. “Now I need the advice of a native and a private investigator.”

Kurtz stared flatly at her. “I’m not a private investigator,” he said, his voice flatter than his gaze.

“Not licensed,” agreed O’Toole, evidently not intimidated by his cold stare or tone. “Not after serving time for manslaughter. But everything I’ve read or been told suggests you were an excellent P.I.”

Kurtz almost reacted to this. What the hell is she after?

She removed three photographs from the envelope and slid them across the desk. “I wondered if you might know where this is—or was?”

Kurtz looked at the photos. They were color, standard snapshot size, no borders, no date on the back, so they’d been taken sometime in the last couple of decades. The first photograph showed a broken and battered Ferris wheel, some cars missing, rising above bare trees on a wooded hilltop. Beyond the abandoned Ferris wheel was a distant valley and the hint of what might be a river. The sky was low and gray. The second photo showed a dilapidated bumper-car pavilion in an overgrown meadow. The pavilion’s roof had partially collapsed and there were overturned and rusted bumper cars on the pavilion floor and scattered outside among the brittle winter or late-autumn weeds. One of the cars—Number 9 emblazoned on its side in fading gold script—lay upside down in an icy puddle. The final photograph was a close-up of a merry-go-round or carousel horse’s head, paint faded, its muzzle and mouth smashed away and showing rotted wood.

Kurtz looked at each of the photographs again and said, “No idea.”

O’Toole nodded as if she expected that answer. “Did you used to go to any amusement parks around here when you were a kid?”

Kurtz had to smile at that. His childhood hadn’t included any amusement park visits.

O’Toole actually blushed. “I mean, where did people go to amusement parks in Western New York in those days, Mr. Kurtz? I know that Six Flags at Darien Lake wasn’t here then.”

“How do you know this place is from way back then?” asked Kurtz. “It could have been abandoned a year ago. Vandals work fast.”

O’Toole nodded. “But the rust and…it just seems old. From the seventies at least. Maybe the sixties.”

Kurtz shrugged and handed the photos back. “People used to go up to Crystal Beach, on the Canadian side.”

O’Toole nodded again. “But that was right on the lake, right? No hills, no woods?”

“Right,” said Kurtz. “And it wasn’t abandoned like that. When the time came, they tore it down and sold the rides and concessions.”

The parole officer took off her glasses and stood. “Thank you, Mr. Kurtz. I appreciate your help.” She held out her hand as she always did. It had startled Kurtz the first time she’d done it. They shook hands as they always did at the end of their weekly interviews. She had a good, strong grip. Then she validated his parking ticket. That was the other half of the weekly ritual.

He was opening the door to leave when she said, “And I may really give Mrs. DeMarco a call about the other thing.”

Kurtz assumed that “the other thing” was the parole officer’s wedding. “Yeah,” he said. “You’ve got our office number and website address.”

  

Later, he would think that if he hadn’t stopped to take a leak in the first-floor restroom, everything would have been different. But what the hell—he had to take a leak, so he did. It didn’t take reading Marcus Aurelius to know that everything you did made everything different, and if you dwelt on it, you’d go nuts.

He came down the stairway into the parking garage corridor and there was Peg O’Toole, green dress, high heels, purse and all, just out of the elevator and opening the heavy door to the garage. She paused when she saw Kurtz. He paused. There was no way that a probation officer wanted to walk into an underground parking garage with one of her clients, and Kurtz wasn’t keen on the idea either. But there was also no way out of it unless he went back up the stairs or—even more absurdly—stepped into the elevator. Damn.

O’Toole broke the frozen minute by smiling and holding the door open for him.

Kurtz nodded and walked past her into the cool semi-darkness. She could let him get a dozen paces in front of her if she wanted. He wouldn’t look back. Hell, he’d been in for manslaughter, not rape.

She didn’t wait long. He heard the clack of her heels a few paces behind him, heading to his right.

“Wait!” cried Kurtz, turning toward her and raising his right hand.

O’Toole froze, looked startled, and lifted her purse where, he knew, she usually carried the Sig Pro.

The goddamned lights had been broken. When he’d come in less than half an hour earlier, there had been fluorescent lights every twenty-five feet or so, but half of those were out. The pools of darkness between the remaining lights were wide and black.

“Back!” shouted Kurtz, pointing toward the door from which they’d just emerged.

Looking at him as if he were crazy, but not visibly afraid, Peg O’Toole put her hand in her purse and started to pull the Sig Pro.

The shooting started.

Chapter Two

WHEN KURTZ AWOKE in the hospital, he knew at once that he’d been shot, but he couldn’t remember when or where it happened, or who did it. He had the feeling that someone had been with him but he couldn’t bring back any details and any attempt to do so hammered barbed spikes through his brain.

Kurtz knew the varieties and vintages of pain the way some men knew wines, but this pain in his head was already beyond the judging stage and well into the realm where screaming was the only sane response. But he didn’t scream. It would hurt too much.

The hospital room was mostly dark but even the dim light from the bedside table hurt his eyes. Everything had a nimbus around it and when he attempted to focus his eyes, nausea rose up through the pain like a shark fin cutting through oily water. He solved that by closing his eyes. Now there were only the inevitable, ambient hospital sounds from beyond the closed door—intercom announcements, the squeak of rubber soles on tile, inaudible conversation in that muffled tone heard only in hospitals and betting parlors—but each and every one of these sounds, including the rasp of his own breathing, was too loud for Joe Kurtz.

He started to raise his hand to rub the right side of his head—the epicenter of this universe of pain—but his hand jarred to a halt next to the metal bedrail.

It took Kurtz two more tries and several groggy seconds of mental effort and the pain of opening his eyes again before he realized why his right arm wouldn’t work; he was handcuffed to the metal frame of the hospital bed.

It took him another minute or two before he realized that his left hand and arm were free. Slowly, laboriously, Kurtz reached that hand across his face—eyes squinted to keep the nausea at bay—and touched the right side of his head, just above his ear, where the pain was broadcasting like the concentric radio-wave ripples in the beginning of one of those old RKO films.

He could feel that the right side of his head was a mass of bandages and taps. But when he saw that there were only two IVs visible punched into his body and only one monitoring machine beeping a few feet away, and no doctors or nurses huddled around with their resuscitation crash cart, he figured he wasn’t on the verge of checking out yet. Either that, or they’d already given up on him, issued a Do Not Resuscitate order, and gone off for coffee to leave him to die here in the dark.

“Fuck it,” said Kurtz and winced as the pain went from 7.8 to 8.6 on his own private Agony Richter Scale. He was used to pain, but this was…silly.

He dropped his hand on his chest, closed his eyes, and allowed himself to float out of the line of fire.

  

“Mr. Kurtz? Mr. Kurtz?”

Kurtz awoke with the same blurred vision, same nausea, but different pain. It was worse. Some fool was pulling his eyelids back and shining a light in his eyes.

“Mr. Kurtz?” The face making the sound was brown, male, middle-aged and mild-looking behind black-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a white coat. “I’m Dr. Singh, Mr. Kurtz. I dealt with your injuries in the ER and just came from surgery on your friend.”

Kurtz got the face into focus. He wanted to say “What friend?” but it wasn’t worth trying to speak yet. Not yet.

“You were struck in the right side of your head by a bullet, Mr. Kurtz, but it did not penetrate your skull,” said Singh in his mild, sing-song voice that sounded like three chainsaws roaring to Kurtz.

Superman, thought Kurtz. Fucking bullets bounce right off.

“Why?” he said.

“What, Mr. Kurtz?”

Kurtz had to close his eyes at the thought of speaking again. Forcing himself to articulate, he said, “Why…didn’t…bullet…penetrate?”

Singh nodded his understanding. “It was a small caliber bullet, Mr. Kurtz. A twenty-two. Before it struck you, it had passed through the upper arm of…of the person with you…and ricocheted off the concrete pillar behind you. It was considerably flattened and much of its kinetic energy had been expended. Still, if you had been turning your head to the right rather than to the left when it struck you, we would be extracting it from your brain as we speak—probably during an autopsy.”

All in all, thought Kurtz, more information than he had needed at the moment.

“As it is,” continued Singh, the soft sing-song voice sawing away through Kurtz’s skull, “you have a moderate-to-severe concussion and a subcranial hematoma that does not require trepanning at this time, your left eye will not dilate, blood has drained down beneath your eyes and the whites of your eyes are very bloodshot—but that is not important. We’ll assess motor skills and secondary effects in the morning.”

“Who…” began Kurtz. He wasn’t even sure what he was going to ask. Who shot me? Who was with me? Who’s going to pay for this?

“The police are here, Mr. Kurtz,” interrupted Dr. Singh. “It’s the reason we haven’t administered any painkiller since you regained consciousness. They need to talk to you.”

Kurtz didn’t turn his head to look, but when the doctor moved aside he could see the two detectives, plainclothes, one male, one female, one black, one white. Kurtz didn’t know the black male. He had once been in love with the white female.

The black detective, dressed nattily in tweed, vest, and school tie, stepped closer. “Joseph Kurtz, I’m Detective Paul Kemper. My partner and I are investigating the shooting of you and Parole Officer Margaret O’Toole…” began the man in an almost avuncular resonant voice.

Oh, shit, thought Kurtz. He closed his eyes and remembered O’Toole opening a door for him.

“…can be used against you in a court of law,” the man was saying. “If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand your rights as I’ve just explained them to you?”

Kurtz said something through the pain.

“What?” said Detective Kemper. Kurtz changed his mind. The man’s voice wasn’t nearly as friendly or avuncular-sounding now.

“Didn’t shoot her,” repeated Kurtz.

“Did you understand your rights as I explained them to you?”

“Yeah.”

“And do you wish an attorney at this time?”

I wish some Darvocet or morphine at this time, thought Kurtz. “Yeah…I mean, no. No attorney.”

“You’ll talk to us now?”

How many fucking times are you going to ask me? thought Kurtz. He realized that he’d spoken this aloud only when the male detective got a stern don’t-fuck-with-me cop look on his face and the female detective still standing against the far wall chuckled. Kurtz knew that chuckle.

“Why were you in the garage with Officer O’Toole?” asked Kemper. The detective’s voice sounded totally un-avuncular this time.

“Coincidence.” Kurtz had never noticed how many syllables were in that word before today. All four of them hit him like hot spikes behind the eyes. He needed shorter words.

“Did you fire her weapon?”

“I don’t remember,” said Kurtz, sounding like every perp he’d ever questioned.

Kemper sighed and shot a glance at his partner. Kurtz also looked at her and watched her look back at him. She obviously recognized him. She must have recognized his name before they started this interview. Is that why she wasn’t speaking? She was, Kurtz was startled to realize through the pain in his head, as beautiful as ever. More Beautiful.

“Did you see the assailant or assailants?” asked Kemper.

“I don’t remember.”

“Did you enter the garage as part of a conspiracy to shoot and kill Office O’ Toole?”

Kurtz just looked at him. He knew that he was stupid with pain and concussion at the moment, but nobody was that stupid.

Dr. Singh filled the silence. “Detectives, a concussion of this severity is often accompanied by memory loss of the accident that created it.”

“Uh-huh,” said Kemper, closing his notebook. “This was no accident, Doctor. And this guy remembers everything he wants to remember.”

“Paul,” said the female detective, “leave him alone. We have the tapes. Let Kurtz get some painkiller and sleep and we’ll talk to him in the morning.”

“He’ll be all lawyered up in the morning,” said Kemper.

The woman shook her head. “No he won’t.”

It’d been twenty years since Kurtz had last seen Rigby King—what was her married name? Something Arabic, he thought—but she still looked like the Rigby he’d known at Father Baker’s and again in Thailand. Brown eyes, full figure, short dark hair, and a smile as quick and radiant as the gymnast she’d been named for.

Kemper left the room and Rigby came to the side of the bed and raised a hand as if she was going to squeeze Kurtz’s shoulder. Instead she gripped the metal railing of the hospital bed and shook it slightly, making Kurtz’s handcuffed wrist and arm sway.

“Get some sleep, Joe.”

“Yeah.”

When they were both gone, Singh called in a nurse and they injected something into the IV port.

“Something for the pain and a mild sedative,” said the doctor. “We’ve kept you semi-conscious and under observation long enough to let you sleep now without worrying unduly about the concussion’s effects.”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz.

As soon as the two left, Kurtz reached down, ripped away gauze and tape, and pulled the IV out of his left arm.

Joe Kurtz had seen what could happen to a man doped up and helpless in a hospital bed. Besides, he had a lot of thinking to do through the pain before morning came.

Chapter Three

THE TWO MEN came in the night, entering his room sometime after three A.M.

Kurtz had nothing to defend himself with—he would have stolen a knife and hidden it under his pillows if the hospital had provided him with a dinner, but they hadn’t fed him so he was still handcuffed and defenseless. He readied himself the only way he could think of—sliding the long intravenous needle on its flexible tube down into his left hand and focusing his energy to swing it into an attacker’s eye if he got close enough. But if one or both of these men pulled a gun, Kurtz’s only hope was to throw himself to his left and try to tip the entire hospital bed onto himself while screaming bloody murder.

Squinting through his headache pain at the two shadows in the doorway, Kurtz wasn’t sure he’d have the strength to tip the bed over. Besides, mattresses, even hospital mattresses, were notoriously poor armor against bullets.

There was a nurse-call button clipped to his pillow above Kurtz’s head, but his right hand couldn’t reach it because of the handcuffs and he wasn’t about to release or reveal the IV needle in his left hand.

Kurtz could see the two men silhouetted in the doorway in the minute before they entered the room, and then the dim glow from medical monitors illuminated them. One man was tall, very thin, and Asian; his black hair was combed straight back and he was wearing an expensive dark suit. His hands were empty. The closer man was in a wheelchair, wheeling himself toward Kurtz’s bed with thrusts of his powerful arms.

Kurtz didn’t pretend he was asleep. He watched the man in the wheelchair come on. Any hopes that it was an errant hospital patient out of his bed at three A.M. disappeared as Kurtz saw that this man was also wearing a suit and tie. He was old—Kurtz saw the thinning gray hair cut in a buzz cut and the lines and scars on the man’s tanned face, but his eyebrows were jet black, his chin strong, and his expression fierce. The old man’s upper body looked large and powerful, his hands huge, but even in the dim light, Kurtz could see that his trousers were covering wasted sticks.

The Asian man’s expression was neutral and he stayed two feet behind the big man in the chair.

The wheels of the chair squeaked on tile until the wasted legs bumped into Kurtz’s bed. Working to focus, Kurtz stared past his own handcuffed wrist and into the old man’s cold, blue eyes. All Kurtz could do now was hope that the visit was a friendly one.

“You miserable low-life useless scumbag piece of shit,” hissed the old man. “It should’ve been you who got the bullet in the brain.”

So much for the friendly visit theory.

The big man in the wheelchair raised his huge hand and slapped Kurtz in the side of the head, right where the bandages and tape were massed above the wound.

Riding the pain for the next few seconds was probably a lot like riding the old rollercoaster at Crystal Beach while standing up. Kurtz wanted to throw up and pass out, in that order, but he forced himself to do neither. He opened his eyes and slipped the long IV needle between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand the way he’d learned how to grip a handleless shank-blade in Attica.

“You worthless fuck,” said the man in the chair, his voice loud now. “If she dies, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.” He slapped Kurtz again, a powerful, open-handed smash across the mouth, but this wasn’t nearly so painful. Kurtz turned his head back and watched the old man’s eyes and the Asian’s hands.

“Major,” the Asian said softly. The tall man gently put his hands on the grips of the wheelchair and pulled the old man three feet back. “We have to go.”

The Major’s mad, blue-eyed stare never left Kurtz’s face. Kurtz didn’t mind this. He’d been hate-stared at by experts. But he had to admit that this old man was a finalist in that contest.

“Major,” whispered the tall man and the man in the chair finally broke the gaze, but not before lifting his huge, blunt forefinger and shaking it at Kurtz as if to make a promise. Kurtz saw that the finger was bloody a second before he felt the blood flowing down his right temple.

The Asian wheeled the old man around and pushed him out the door into the dimly lighted hallway. Neither man looked back.

  

Kurtz didn’t think he’d go to sleep after that—or, rather, lose consciousness, since real sleep wasn’t an option above this baseline of pain—but he must have, because he woke up with James Bond looking down at him in the early morning light.

This wasn’t the real James Bond—Sean Connery—but that newest guy: dark hair blowdried and combed back, sardonic smile, impeccable suit from Savile Row or somewhere—Kurtz had no idea what a Savile Row suit looked like—plus a gleaming white shirt with spread collar, tasteful paisley tie sporting a Windsor knot, pocket square ruffled perfectly and not so gauche as to match the tie, tasteful Rolex just visible beneath the perfectly shot starched cuff.

“Mr. Kurtz?” said James Bond. “My name is Kennedy. Brian Kennedy.”

Kurtz thought that he did also look a bit like that Kennedy scion who’d flown his plane and passenger upside-down into the sea.

Brian Kennedy started to offer Kurtz a heavy cream business card, noticed the handcuffs, and without interrupting his motion, set the card on the bedside table.

“How are you feeling, Mr. Kurtz?” asked Kennedy.

“Who are you?” managed Kurtz. He thought he must be feeling better. These three syllables had made his vision dance with pain, but hadn’t made him want to puke.

The handsome man touched his card. “I own and run Empire State Security and Executive Protection. Our Buffalo branch provided security cameras for the parking garage in which yesterday’s shooting took place.”

Every other light had been knocked out when we came into the garage, thought Kurtz. That tipped me. The memory of the shooting was seeping back into his bruised brain like sludge under a closed door.

He said nothing to Kennedy-Bond. Was the man here because of some lawsuit potential to his company? Kurtz was having trouble working this out through the pain so he stared and let Kennedy keep talking.

“We’ve gi