I said as I unwrapped the chicken sandwich. The marinara sauce had leaked out from the inside and coated the edges of the bread. “Got any extra napkins?”
Patrick reached into the bag and handed over half a dozen. “I love it when Maron goes all fanboy on the guest.”
I took a bite of the sandwich and for a moment considered the possibility he was trying to loosen me up and build a rapport with me like I was a suspect. Walsh’s accusatory tone from the meeting in Ruiz’s was echoing in my head. Was Patrick setting me up for an interrogation?
“You should check it out,” he said. “It’s good.” Then he bit off a big chunk of meatball sub and I watched him chew. After he swallowed, he sucked some iced tea through a straw and said, “You have any idea who wants to kill you?”
I told him I didn’t, and he laid out what they knew so far. The bomb had been constructed out of an antipersonnel mine—like a claymore, he said, but a smaller version, made in South Africa. It wasn’t complicated, but the bomber clearly knew what he was doing. And, more alarmingly, had access to black-market military-grade hardware.
“Why detonate it at the mechanic’s shop?” I asked.
“That’s a good question,” Patrick said. “Maybe he figured they’d find the bomb and knew it would be harder to trace if he detonated it.”
I thought about it. “Maybe he hadn’t planned to set it off while I was in the car. Could it have been a warning?”
“Maybe. Walsh and I talked about that, too. We just don’t know yet.”
“Do they have any idea how long it had been there?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Walsh thinks they might be able to narrow down a window with more analysis.”
Patrick kept eating his sandwich as he spoke, taking small bites and chewing and swallowing in between sentences. I had lost my appetite.
“He says they might be able to get something that will help identify the bomber, but we shouldn’t hold our breath.”
“He actually say ‘don’t hold your breath’?”
Patrick took another bite, and a glob of marinara plopped down onto the table. “Yeah, he actually did.” He wiped up the sauce with his finger and licked it clean.
“What’s your take on him?” I asked.
“He’s a complete asshole.” Patrick sucked some more tea through the straw. “He’s supposed to have a good squad, though. Ruiz asked for him personally.”
“So how do we do this?” I asked. “I’ve never worked a bombing before.”
“Neither have I.”
“Well, then, I won’t worry.”
Patrick laughed, but I felt like a dick as soon as I said it. He was a good cop. I’d been working with him for more than long enough to know that. The only person I’d trust more than him to have my back was Jen. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Dude,” he said, examining me. “You okay?”
I nodded. “Why?”
“Because that crack was barely even passive-aggressive and you’re apologizing. You’re worse than that when there’s no more Splenda by the coffee machine.”
“There’s a giant Costco-sized box right in the cupboard,” I said.
“See?”
He was right. I didn’t want to admit to anyone, least of all myself, that I was rattled. And I didn’t want to be. But I could feel a ball of anxiety roiling in my gut. I imagined it spinning and growing like a cartoon snowball on its way down a hill. It wasn’t that I hadn’t come face-to-face with the idea of my own death in the past. I had. Many times. When my hand was nearly severed, I came very close to bleeding to death, and in the year I spent recovering, hardly a day passed when I didn’t contemplate my own mortality. That was the darkest period of my life. Even darker than the time I spent mourning my wife. I learned what the muzzle of my gun tasted like and made a list of songs to play at my funeral. When I came back from that, though, I thought I’d lost the fear of death once and for all. I’ve been in a handful of potentially fatal situations since then. In none of them, nor in their aftermaths, had I felt anything shake loose.
“So what do we do?” I asked Patrick.
“We let Walsh and his crew do their job and we do ours. Let’s start digging through your cases and looking for suspects.”
On the table was the two-thirds of the sandwich I’d left uneaten. I wished I’d had the other one. Meatballs save