Page 67 of The Grave Artist (Sanchez & Heron #2)

Curious seeing your nemesis before you.

Surprising how much smaller they seem in real life.

But then baby copperheads can be more dangerous than their parents.

Jake was observing the groggy Tristan Kane gasping and moving slowly. Had he been completely still, Kane might be taken for dead, given his ashen pallor.

Wincing, breathing hard, gazing around the room, then looking back to Jake, who leaned against the battered desk in the battered room, whose key card lock had taken him half a second to defeat. The man could only stare at his captor, awash with confusion.

How Heron found this nest was an easy win. If Kane were the partner, as they speculated, he would be handling Garr’s security. And that meant the instant he saw a takedown in Garr’s house he would send signals to Garr’s electronics to wipe the data.

Signals that Jake had quickly traced to the source.

Which was why he had told a confused Carmen that he supported Reynolds’s plan to raid Garr’s house.

As soon as that happened and Kane sent the wiping command, Heron sourced the signal’s origin: this modest bed-and-breakfast near Garr’s. And armed with a stun gun equipped to fire darts, he’d come to visit.

Jake had never told Sanchez about the device he’d cobbled together using batteries, a step-up transformer, an oscillator, wires, a couple of barbs and other odds and ends. He wasn’t violating any laws by building a homemade stun gun. Using it, however, probably crossed a legal line.

Which was why he didn’t plan to mention it. Or the stop he’d made in the HSI facility cafeteria for another piece of vital equipment.

Jake guessed that Kane had already figured out the why—and how Jake had traced him.

But there was surprise in his face still, and the reason for the reaction, Heron felt sure, was that the two men were alone. Kane was not in handcuffs, nor was he being read his rights.

What was that about? Where were the real Feds? DHS, HSI, FBI?

The answer was simple. They weren’t invited to the party.

This was between Jake and Kane alone.

Kane blinked again and looked around the cramped room. Then at his restraints. He sat in the desk chair. No official cuffs, but his wrists were firmly zip-tied to the upholstered arms in front of him.

Jake got straight to the most critical matter. “Now, Tristan, you and I could have quite the conversation, and we will, but now? We need to know where Garr and Selina are. And, yes, I know he has her. And that you know where. So. Tell me.”

Kane looked him over with a half smile on his thin, pale lips. “Say, Jake, you working on that guilt about murdering those people in Chicago? You dream about body parts? It was quite the bomb, you know.”

Jake was tempted to wipe the smirk off Kane’s face by bantering in return, but he avoided that game. What’s the point of one-upping the banteree? And if the lines were clunkers, the banterer himself ended up embarrassed.

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do. This whole project works only if you and Garr are in regular contact. I looked at your phones and saw they’re on self-wipe. It’ll take me a day to get into them.”

“I doubt that.”

“You’re right,” Jake said, pretending to misconstrue him. “I could crack them in four or five hours.” Which probably was a form of banter, but he couldn’t help himself, and the dent in Tristan Kane’s smugness made him glad to have done it. “But even that’s too long. I’m feeling impatient today.”

“I’m not saying a word.”

“Where?”

Kane merely shook his head.

Jake gave it a moment, pushed away from the counter and paced slowly. He said in a cheerful voice, “UID.”

Kane frowned. “User interface device. Mouses, trackballs, keyboards. What about them?”

“You hear the latest? Implanting wires in your brain, so you can think the cursor around the screen.”

“I ... I have. Yes. They don’t work that well.”

“Not yet, no. And then there’s the system where your eyes control the cursor and the keys.”

A slow nod. Kane looked around again, apparently growing more and more troubled about what Jake was up to, given there wasn’t a single police officer present, and his nemesis was discussing computer science rather than reading him his rights.

“But the best way to talk to machines is the keyboard, don’t you think? Good old Qwerty .”

Referring to the first six letter keys in the alphabet lines of a keyboard.

Still keeping him off-balance, Jake asked, “How fast do you type?”

“Where’s this going, Heron?”

“I myself am a solid hundred twenty words a minute, error rate of two words per hundred. And that’s usually just a transposed letter or two.

I’m not being modest, but when you keyboard twelve hours a day, your skill level does creep up, right?

Come on, Kane. You’ve been doing this as long as I have. How fast?”

“Same, I guess, why?”

“Because I can’t imagine how difficult it would be for someone to relearn how to keyboard after losing fingers.”

And he lifted from his inside jacket the carving knife he’d borrowed from HSI’s cafeteria.

“You fucking wouldn’t.”

“That was a waste of breath, Kane,” Jake said.

“Nobody knows I traced your signals here. Even Carmen Sanchez. I’ve zip-tied your arms so you can’t move your hands more than a millimeter in either direction.

I’m holding a knife that will cut through your fingertips with relatively little effort on my part.

Something I will thoroughly enjoy doing.

So in answer to your comment, yeah, I fucking would. ”

Kane scoffed. “They’ll arrest you. You’ll spend years in jail. Assault with a deadly weapon.”

“Oh, forgot something.” He looked around the room, noting a wrought iron desk lamp. He picked it up and, as Kane blinked in shock, flung it through the sliding-glass door opening onto a deck. Shards flew.

“What a terrible accident,” Jake said, shaking his head. “I had a lead to you. I found you. But you fled and, tragically, tripped and fell into the door, shattering it. You lost two fingers. Or depending on your lack of cooperation with me, maybe three or four.”

“Nobody’s gonna believe that.”

“There’ll be so much blood, it’ll seem credible enough. And besides, with your record, when it comes to whining about fairness in legal proceedings, not a soul in the world is going to care one bit about what you have to say, Kane.”

He stepped closer, thumbing the razor-sharp blade.

“No ...” Kane’s eyes grew wide.

“Thumb, index, middle finger,” Heron whispered. “Oh, and I have some trivia for you. Guess what part of the human body has the most pain-sensing receptor cells.” He paused to allow time for Kane to process the implications. “You guessed it. Fingers.”

Saying these words, Jake supposed, placed him firmly in banter territory. But as he gripped Tristan Kane’s right wrist with his left hand and stroked his right index finger with the blade, Jake decided he didn’t give a righteous shit.