So Yesterday

SoHo tourists walked by, casting puzzled looks in our directions. Hadn't they ever seen a stakeout before?

Our bald friend watched the work with a foreman's lazy disinterest while a woman stacked boxes on the curb. She was arrayed in a style commonly known as Future Sarcastic: a T-shirt emblazoned with a big-eyed alien, flight-suit trousers with dozens of gadget-shaped pockets, silver hair shining in the sun. Everything but the jet pack.

The guy riding the truck's elevator was muscular and lean, very dark. He was wearing a trucker cap and cowboy boots, jeans and a mesh shirt that showed off his muscles. In a friendlier context I would have pegged him as a gay bodybuilder doing an ironic take on NASCAR fandom. But alongside the other two, he looked more like one of many hopefuls sent down by central casting to try out for the part of Thug #3 in a hip new thriller.

Of which we were the unlikely heroes, I reminded myself.

"What do we do?" I asked, trying not to catch the eye of a curious young mother pushing a double-wide stroller past our position.

Jen pulled out her cell phone, starting thumbing. "Well, I'm inputting the license number of that truck."

"It's a rental."

"And rental places keep records."

"Oh, yeah." Maybe if I'd read more books about shoe consultants who solved crimes, I would've figured that out myself.

"And you should be taking pictures."

"Good idea. I mean, roger that."

I pulled out Mandy's phone and started to shoot. Between the five-millimeter lens and lack of zoom, they'd be pretty useless pictures, I was sure. But it was better than just standing there and being gawked at by passersby.

"Excuse me, is Broadway and Ninety-eighth Street around here?"

I looked up from my crouch at the two girls in their Jersey glitter shirts and floppy shoes, white capri pants tied at the calf with drawstrings, so last summer. I had to take pity on them—plus they were giving away our position.

"Yeah, it's about two blocks east" — hooking my thumb over my shoulder—"and about a hundred and ten blocks north."

"A hundred and ten blocks? That's far, right?"

I told them where to catch the 1 train.

"Your public-spiritedness is appreciated, I assure you," Jen drawled after the two had left, uncertainly repeating my directions to each other as they passed out of earshot.

"After when are you not supposed to wear white pants?" I asked.

"Roughly 1979."

I pointed. "They're leaving."

The truck was loaded, the bald guy scraping shut the building's doors. The shoes were going away. I thought of rising and dashing after the truck, jumping on just as it exceeded ru

"There's nothing we can do, right?"

"Nope," said Jen as the truck pulled away.

The ground floor was empty.

"This sucks," I said.

We’d squeezed our way in through the wooden doors, which the bald guy hadn't bothered to chain together very tightly. There was no point. Every last box was gone.

I checked Mandy's phone for the time. It was coming up on two o'clock, only two and a half hours since we'd been here.

Jen surveyed the empty cavern of the building, her eyes sca

"We should have come back earlier," Jen said quietly. "The shoes were right here."

"Did you forget the ru

"Overrated." Jen sighed. "There must be something we missed before."

She wandered off again, leaving me in the shaft of light by the doors, where I silently listed the reasons amateurs didn't solve crimes in the real world. Professional detectives would have sealed off the building with yellow tape from the start, dusting for fingerprints, searching for records of ownership and work permits. Actual police would have arrested the big guy in black and intimidated him into talking. Real cops wouldn't have run to the nearest coffee shop and then their friend's house to make expert use of wax paper. (Okay, maybe a coffee shop would have come into play, but they would have sent the rookie for doughnuts, leaving plenty of manpower for stretching out the yellow tape.) Non-amateurs might have the first clue how to take the license number of a rental truck and turn it into an address. I sure didn't.

And most importantly, a genuine crime solver wouldn't be terrified by the idea that the bad guys had his cell phone and were trying to find him. Real police were machines for turning coffee into solved crimes. I was a machine for turning coffee into jangled nerves.

"Hunter?" Jen's voice came out of the gloom, jangling my nerves.

"What?"

"Looks like someone left you a message."

She emerged, squinting and holding an envelope. A gray square of duct tape curled from it, the envelope glowing white in the gloom, carrying the letters H-U-N-T-E-R in red marker.

Her green eyes were wide, pupils huge in the dim light. "This was taped to the wall back there. Right where the shoes were."

I swallowed, holding out my hand. I'd seen Mandy scrawling notes during focus groups, her handwriting slanted, impatient, and unreadable. But my name stretched across the envelope in controlled and implacable letters.

"Aren't you going to open it?"

I took a slow breath and tore gingerly at the paper, not sure what I was nervous about. A letter bomb? Contact poison? The ace of spades?

It was two tickets.

I stared at them dumbly until Jen pulled one from my hand and read aloud.

'"You are invited to the launch party of Hoi Aristoi, the magazine for those with discriminating incomes. Huh. It's tonight."

I cleared my throat. "That isn't Mandy's handwriting."

"Didn't think so."

"They know my name."

"Of course they do. They called a friend of yours, who saw the ID and answered, 'Hi, Hunter. And the next number they call, they say, 'Hey, I'm a friend of Hunter's, and maybe ask for your home number, and so on."

I nodded. Piece by piece, my identity would be sucked out of the phone. Those Fi

I handed the tickets back. "So what are these about?"

"Search me. Have you ever heard of Hoi Aristoi?"

A vague memory of prelaunch buzz trickled into my mind. "I think it's the latest magazine for trendies with too much money. A waste of trees. I think that Hillary Winston-hyphen-Smith did PR for them."

Jen plucked one from my hand, turned it over, and nodded.

"I guess they're exactly what they say they are."

"Which is?"

"An invitation. And I suppose we should go."