What was Grogan doing with a telenizer in the first place, and what was he up to? Just personal revenge against me?
How did I know for sure that it was Grogan?
That question startled me. I opened my eyes and sat up straight. In moving so suddenly, my hand knocked over the defense mech and it thudded to the floor. As I bent quickly to pick it up, it started clicking again.
Several things occurred to me at once, then, and my stomach wadded itself into a tight ball and shot up again to press against my heart. My neck and back muscles tightened.
The first thing that struck me, I think, was that the defense mech had started clicking again. It had been clicking before.... As Maxwell and I left the bar, the defense mech had begun clicking steadily. Then—sometime—it had stopped. Probably when I hit Scarface with it. But I hadn't noticed. And for thirty minutes—closer to forty-five, now....
There was no particular sequence to the flood of realizations that rushed my consciousness next and left me feeling weak and shaky.
The desk sergeant had said ten minutes. The policeman had gotten there in less than five. We were driving, not through side streets toward a police station, but along a high-speed lane of a main thoroughfare, away from the city. Two dogs had yapped at my heels. The "police" vehicle was unmarked—unusual if not illegal.
When I looked at the driver, he was not, of course, a policeman.
He was one of Grogan's bodyguards—the one into whose arms I had thrown Maxwell not long ago.