The Guilty by Gabriel Boutros Page B

always get this patrol, and waved his own Bar card casually past the window, fully expecting the policeman to recognize him instantly. The agent, though, was staring straight past him and at Kouri, who was holding his card out toward him, in front of Bratt’s face. The agent reached his gloved hand out and Bratt took Kouri’s card and handed it to him. Glove, hand and card disappeared back through the window, which was quickly closed while the policeman punched Kouri’s name onto his computer.
    “Why’d he take mine?” Kouri asked, hi s voice betraying his concern.
    “You’re a new face. They’ve been pretty jittery up here since that transport bus got shot up, and now they’re extra careful if they don’t know you.”
    Kouri leaned forward in his seat to see what the SQ officer was doing, and received a suspicious glare over the walkie-talkie the cop was talking into in reply.
    “Geez. He’s looking at me like he’s ready to throw me in jail.”
    Sensing some nervousness in the younger lawyer’s voice, Bratt couldn’t resist having some fun at his expense. Noting Kouri’s Mediterranean features, he smiled sarcastically.
    “It’s not his fault you look like a terrorist.”                                                               
    “Hey! What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”     
    Kouri’s angry tone surprised Bratt, who never would have expected his young idolizer to take exception to anything he said. With the ethnic and linguistic mix in his office, Bratt was used to all sorts of slurs and epithets being flung around at will, with nobody ever feeling aggrieved. He looked at Kouri’s firmly set chin and purse d lips and burst out laughing.
    He laughed so loud that the SQ agent looked suspiciously in their direction through the frost-covered window, and seeing this only made Bratt laugh harder still. Kouri must have begun to feel silly, looking and feeling furious while Bratt was so obviously enjoying himself, because his angry expression faded away until he looked merely con fused and somewhat embarrassed.
    Bratt’s laughter finally died down, and he wiped the tears from his eyes with his sleeve, then looked over sympathetically at Kouri. He shook his head in wonderment and patted Kouri’s face w ith the palm of his right hand.
    “God, you’re cute when you’re angry,” he said. At that point the police car window was lowered and Kouri’s ID card was wordlessly handed bac k, the cop looking at them as if they were more crazy than dangerous. “Merci beaucoup,” Bratt called out to him, with a big smile and a wave, then drove toward the nearest parking spot.
    Kouri took his card back from him without a word, looking as if he knew that there was a joke somewhere that he had just missed.
    Once the car was parked they disembarked and set out on foot across the snow-covered parking lot. They had to wait for a sliding gate to open, allowing them passage through the barbed wire fence that surrounded the compound, then waited again to be buzzed through a door into the main building. Overhead, cameras were aimed unmoving at the spot where they stood and waited. 
    Since this facility had opened half a dozen years earlier, security had always been strict. But once the bike r gang wars of recent years began including police officers and prison guards among their victims, security had been tightened even further.
    Bratt explained all this to Kouri just before they passed through the steel and glass door to the reception area. Inside, they would have to empty their pockets and open their briefcases before passing through a metal detector. Bratt recalled a time when lawyers were not searched at all, and were allowed to pass ahead of other visitors. But the violence brought on by the motorcycle gang wars had brought such casual practices to a screeching halt.          
    After going through all the required security