Read Online The Catch by Archer Mayor - Free Book Online

name.”
    Instead of answering, Dave merely patted the long-lens camera on the counter beside him.
    “Yeah,” Cathy added, “except that Didry has a beard as big as it is phony. I’d be amazed if his own mother could pick him out of a lineup.”
    Delaney gazed thoughtfully out the window and mused, half to himself, “What the hell is going on in there?”
    Alan Budney was also at a window, peering out discreetly—in an vacated, second-floor office of the same run-down mall in Calais where the MDEA team was running surveillance from the parking lot.
    “That them?” Budney asked. “The white van with the tinted windows?”
    Eugene Didry, whose real name was Georges Tatien, rose from his chair and crossed the room nonchalantly.
    “Oui
—that is them,” he said in a thick Gallic accent.
    “Who are they? DEA?”
    Tatien shook his head.
“Non.
I do not think so. DEA is almost invisible in your state. That is MDEA, I think. Very good, but too thin with the personnel.”
    Tatien eyed his American counterpart from up close. He’d been waiting for Budney for well over an hour, sitting patiently in his chair. Timing was routinely approximate in this line of work, so he hadn’t expected a precise arrival. But he also hadn’t expected the kind of person now before him. Drug dealers weren’t all the losers and idiots that cops liked to portray, nor were they the smooth, well-tailored sophisticates of the movies. But they did tend to fit an overall style—a little reckless, a little careless, often addicted to the product they peddled.
    Budney seemed the exception. When he’d entered the room, without apology, he’d asked, “You Didry?” After Tatien had admitted as much, Budney had followed with, “I’m assuming you were followed; did you make the same assumption?”
    It had been a deceptively elegant opener, especially to a traditional philosophe like Tatien, who shared the French fondness for oblique and indirect allusions. With one seemingly simple inquiry, Budney had questioned Tatien’s intelligence, ability, poise, and observational abilities—not to mention his trustworthiness. It had been economical and intuitive, reflective of a possibly intriguing brain. A satisfying beginning.
    Unless, of course, Budney had intended none of it.
    Georges Tatien, born rich, well educated, but too much of a risk-taker to follow society’s narrow rules, had opted for a life of courting danger in exchange for large amounts of easy, untraceable money. It gave him the thrills of the demimonde that so horrified and tantalized his peers, along with a lot of extra cash with which he did as he pleased.
    There had been frightening moments. Drug dealers were often unstable, unpredictable, and unreliable—quick to blur the distinction between loyalty and self service, and easily coerced by the police into betraying their colleagues. But therein lay a large part of the attraction for Tatien—he could flatter himself with having a psychological acuity that would keep him safe from the dealers and ahead of the police.
    Thus, Alan Budney’s unconventional icebreaker had come like a tonic at a time when Tatien had become bored by the likes of Matthew Mroz—an egocentric hedonist with little imagination.
    Budney finally turned away from the window to face the Canadian. “I hear you’re a careful man.” He jerked his thumb outside. “How careful have you been with them?”
    Tatien returned to his chair. He liked this setting—a near-empty room, with a thin coating of dust over two metal chairs and a cheap desk. It was theatrically appealing.
    “I have discovered,” he answered thoughtfully, “that if I give the police a shadow to chase, it is better than allowing them to make something by themselves. Roadstaken that are wrong are so much harder to drive in reverse. Do I make sense to you?”
    Budney smiled and sat in the other chair, completing Tatien’s picture of how this scene should look. “You’re telling me that Didry