A pegboard, corporate IDs hanging from nearly every spot, suggested I’d been right, as did the high-end computer sitting by the desk, and the stacks of data disks on most of the flat surfaces. I couldn’t legally take any of it—I’d have to present Wilson with a seizure order before I could—but I could find more than enough to justify coming back to kick the door in down the line. I set to work, looking through the ID cards, and said to Sam, “Go have a look around the rest of the place.”
He left, and thirty seconds later, I heard footsteps behind me. “You can’t have finished already,” I said.
The voice that answered me did not belong to Sam. “What are you doing in here?” It was cool and measured, but hard. I turned around.
Isaac Wilson stood in the room with me, two meters away, aiming a pistol at my chest. I thought about going for my sidearm, but he’d caught me flatfooted. He’d get his shot off before I could get mine in. “Police business,” I said. “You’re a person of interest—”
“I know,” he replied. He was on the verge of saying more when Sam appeared in the doorway behind him.
“Don’t move,” Sam said. Wilson tensed, and tried to look over his shoulder. “I said, do not move,” Sam repeated. He was holding something and pointing it at Wilson—not a gun, I knew, since I hadn’t given him one. “The whirring you hear comes from the gyroscopes built into my sidearm. They hold it precisely on target, which is, in this case, the back of your skull.”
“I’ll kill your partner,” Wilson threatened.
“No, you will not,” Sam replied. “My sidearm is also watching you. Tense to shoot, and it will see. You’ll be dead before you realize you were going to pull the trigger.”
Wilson’s eyes darted to one side, trying to catch sight of Sam. After a moment, he held up his hands and began to turn around. The moment I was out of his sight, I took one running step and launched myself at him. He snapped the rest of the way toward Sam and leveled his pistol. That was when I left my feet and hit him in the back with a flying tackle. (When you’re my size, you don’t go in for half measures when it comes to bringing someone down.) The pistol went flying. Sam dropped the threevee remote he’d been holding and caught the pistol neatly out of midair. I scrambled onto Wilson’s back and grabbed his arms while Sam covered me.
“Quick thinking,” I told him.
“I learned from the best.”
I showed him a toothy grin, closed the cuffs around Wilson’s wrist. “Are you aware of your rights?”
Wilson nodded, not speaking.
“Very well.” I stood, dusting off my hands. I sighed, and Sam raised his eyebrows at me. “I was just thinking,” I said, glad Stein wasn’t there to hear me, “that if you’re to be doing this sort of thing very much more, we ought to see that you’re properly armed.”
