by Scott Blade
The driver was a heavily built guy, thick like a tree trunk. His head was shaved bald. He more resembled a Neanderthal caveman than homo sapiens. The only thing he didn’t have in common was he didn’t drag his knuckles, but they did hang low by his sides when he wasn’t driving.
The bald guy wasn’t the best fighter in the crew, but the size of his fists matched with big boulder arms and relentless power made him deadly. That was why he was often assigned to wetwork duty. When someone needed shutting up, he did the shutting.
The passenger in the Escalade was the man with the forgettable face.
He rolled the window down as they drove and scoped out all the parked cars that didn’t look like they belonged. He had his smartphone out. He video recorded all the cars he passed, making sure to get their license plates on camera.
At the end of the street, the driver asked, “Which one is theirs?”
“Not sure. But one of them. Has to be.”
“The guy from the church didn’t have a car. Not the other day.”
“Maybe he doesn’t own one. But they got here in a car. Probably the other guy’s. Whatever. We’ll find it.”
They drove around the block one more time. This time they searched for a parking space, preferably one that allowed them to view the big red doors in front of the fire department headquarters, but they couldn’t find one with that view. They ended up parking in a lot down the street.
The bald guy asked, “How are we going to see them leave?”
The man with the forgettable face said, “Stay here. Watch the road. I’ll go stand across from the entrance. I’ll text you when I see them. So be ready.”
The bald guy nodded.
The man with the forgettable face stepped out of the Escalade and left it. He walked back to Fourteenth Street. He saw a newsstand on the street corner up ahead. He walked over and bought a newspaper and continued to the fire department headquarters. He found a concrete ledge across the street with grass on the other side of it. He climbed up on it and perched himself there.
To passersby, he was just a guy reading the paper. Sometimes he glanced at the paper, turning the pages, moving his eyes up and down and across the page to make it look like he was scanning the paper, but he wasn’t. He kept constant eyes on the doors to the fire department headquarters, waiting for Widow to step out.
Nineteen
As soon as Widow stepped out of the fire department headquarters, the man with the forgettable face saw him. There was no eye contact, luckily.
Widow followed an older guy that the man with the forgettable face had never seen before. But Widow was too close behind the guy for him to grab a photo.
The man with the forgettable face hopped down from the ledge, shoved his hands into his pockets, and started walking in the other direction so that Widow couldn’t see his face. He was just a guy walking the streets—no big deal.
As soon as he was near the end of the street, he turned and saw Widow and Tunney get into a BMW. The man with the forgettable face already had the license plate in the picture he had taken earlier of the whole block.
He stopped and picked up his phone and called the bald guy in the Escalade.
“They’re out now. Silver BMW.”
“Want me to follow it?”
“Come pick me up first. Other end of the street.”
“On my way,” the bald guy said. He hung up the phone. He pulled out of a parking space and roared past a pedestrian walking to his car.
The bald guy pulled the Escalade out onto the street fast. A car honked at him as he cut them off.
He looked in the rearview mirror and saw the driver behind him wave a hand with the middle finger up. The bald guy looked past it and saw the brake lights of a silver BMW. It was the same one that he was looking for. The occupants were stopped at a traffic light at the other end of the street.
The bald guy turned his eyes back forward and saw the man with the forgettable face walking toward him on the opposite side of the street.
The bald guy hit the hazard lights on the vehicle to warn the pissed-off guy behind him that he was about to make an abrupt U-turn.
Then, the bald guy hit the brakes and spun the wheel. He came up on the opposite sidewalk and braked to a quick stop, fast enough for the man with the forgettable face to open the passenger door and hop in. As soon as the door was shut, he peeled out and hit the gas.
“I saw them. The BMW, silver. It was up at this light ahead.”
“Good.”
The man with the forgettable face reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a Glock 19. He checked the weapon, made sure a bullet was chambered. He knew it was, but checking it often was second nature by now.
He rested the gun in one of the cup holders next to him. The bald guy’s weapon, a Glock 34, was in the other cup holder.
The bald guy asked, “What you want to do?”
“Follow them for now.”
“Then what?”
“First chance we have, we kill them.”
Twenty
The Starbucks on the corner of Columbia Road and Eighteenth Street was perfectly fine. It had seating and it had coffee, the two things Widow wanted in a Starbucks. But what it didn’t have was a view of Haspman or the fire department headquarters or even one of the two ends of Fourteenth Street, so Widow could give himself at least a fifty-fifty chance of spotting Haspman leaving his building. Even that was no good because Widow had no idea what kind of vehicle the guy owned.
After Tunney dropped him off on the street corner, Widow entered the Starbucks with the intent of buying coffee. He planned to buy it and drink it and regroup. What was his best next option?
But inside the Starbucks, he watched Tunney drive off and he stood in the back of a three-person line. A fifth person came into the store and got in the queue behind him.
As he waited, he thought, strategized, contemplated. By the time it was his turn to order, he had come up with a solution. It had been staring him in the face. Across from the fire department headquarters, there was a café or restaurant or bookstore—he wasn’t quite sure which—but he remembered seeing it. It was called Busboys and Poets.
Widow had heard of it once before. And he knew who had told him about it. It was Rachel Cameron, his old boss. Exactly what she had said about it, he couldn’t remember. It was years ago. He thought it was something in the vein of a recommendation to him.
He had no idea if the store was the only store or if it was a chain, and he didn’t know exactly what it was. But he knew that with a name like that, there had better be some kind of coffee served there. And if that didn’t work out, there was also a martini bar that had a decent view of those red front doors to the fire department headquarters.
The barista asked if he was ready to order. He apologized and told her that he had changed his mind. He stepped out of line and walked out of the store just in time to miss the black Escalade passing by on the street.
Widow walked to the corner, crossed over to the other side of the street, and walked part from memory and part from his Navy sense of direction, back to Fourteenth Street and back to the fire department headquarters.
The whole trip turned out to be a grand total of one hundred fifty meters, give or take.
The first thing he did was walk to the parking lot for the fire department headquarters.
He saw a pair of Capitol Police standing around the entrance to the building. They were chatting. He was pretty sure they weren’t looking for him and Tunney, but to be safe, he kept his distance and his eyes down.
The parking lot for the fire department wasn’t under any kind of security other than a valet in a booth the size of a portable toilet. The guy was lounged back, reading a magazine. There was a mechanical arm out in front of his station. It stopped people from entering or exiting without him lifting the arm.
Widow passed him without much effort. He didn’t walk past the arm. Instead, he walked along the sidewalk and waited till he was in the guy’s b
lind spot. Then he took a big step over a long stretch of chain that acted as a barrier between the pedestrians on the sidewalk and the cars in the lot.
Widow entered the lot and walked around looking for the fire marshal’s car. He knew he would find it easily and recognize it without fail.
It only took about two minutes to locate it, but that was because he circled the long way around from the back of the lot. He did that just to be sure the guy in the booth wouldn’t see him.
Part of the lot was near the fire department headquarters. There was a single door on the same wall that touched the parking lot. It looked like a fire exit.
Widow bet that Haspman took the elevator down to the lobby and went through the back hallways and used the stairwell fire exit to enter the lot.
His suspicions were confirmed when he found Haspman’s vehicle right there next to the door.
He knew it was the right vehicle for a couple of reasons. First, it was a huge Ford Raptor, black with black rims and a black bed cover to match. The second reason was that there was a sign posted on the wall in front of the space. It read: Reserved for Fire Marshal Haspman.
Widow shook his head. The guy he had met struck him as a man with no lack of vanity. The gold lettering on his office door, the expensive furniture in the suite, having not one, but three assistants, and the Rolex were all signs pointing to a man with an ego big enough to fit on the flight deck of the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier.
Widow didn’t need any more verification that the Raptor belonged to Haspman, but just to be thorough, he circled the truck and stopped in front of the grille. He knelt and looked behind the grille blades, and found what he was searching for: embedded red lights.
The truck had no decals posted on it to indicate it belonged to a fire marshal, but there were the lights.
He was pretty sure it wasn’t normal protocol, and potentially a violation of the fire department’s policies, to not have an official vehicle marked. But who was going to turn in Haspman? Who would they turn him into?
Widow had no idea and didn’t care to know.
He stood up and scanned the lot over the hood of the Raptor. He saw no one.
He walked back out of the lot the same way he’d come in and stepped over the same length of chain, back onto the sidewalk. Then, he slid his hands into his coat pockets and walked back past the guy in the booth, who never even looked up at him. He nodded at the Capitol Police as they began walking toward him. He had no choice. They made eye contact with him.
One of them was talking, but the other one did look him up and then down, and gave him a hard stare. But he didn’t say anything.
Widow passed them and continued to a designated crosswalk and crossed the street. He walked to the place that Cameron had told him about. It turned out it was a coffee shop/bookstore configuration.
He entered and glanced around and smiled.
He looked around at some of the other customers to figure out what the right sequence was to operate in a hybrid store like this.
It seemed the first step was to grab a book, then coffee, then a table.
Part of Widow kind of wished he wasn’t there on business because he would enjoy hanging out all day and reading a book and drinking all the coffee his stomach could hold. But he was there on business, personal, but business nevertheless.
The first thing he did was scope out a table near the front window. He saw a couple of good candidates. The second thing he did was to look for a clock. That didn’t take long. There was a huge wall clock on one end of the store, above a bookshelf. The clock was inside a giant, opened book frame. The numbers looked like page numbers.
The time was later than he thought.
After Widow noted the time, he remembered he still had Tunney’s smartphone in his pocket. Like all phones, it displayed time on the main screen.
He would’ve felt stupid for not realizing that, but he never carried a cell phone. He forgot about it.
Widow moved to the biggest book display. He didn’t have time to sit around all day browsing. The display was one of those famous celebrities’ book-of-the-month clubs. The top book he saw was called Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. He glanced up beyond the display and saw the New York Times Bestseller List of the top twenty books in fiction.
He walked to that wall instead. He wasn’t interested in what celebrities thought about books. Not that whoever it was didn’t have good taste, but Widow liked to make up his own mind.
Ironically, on the bestseller wall, the same book was also number one.
He grabbed the paperback version, flipped it, and browsed the summary on the back. It sounded interesting, but also like a heavy read. He wasn’t so sure if getting a book that might jerk tears out of him was the right thing to get into while staking out a potential lead in Eggers’ murder. So, he put the book back.
What he needed was something.
He skimmed the rows of books until he found something good, but forgettable.
In times like these, he found it best to stick to the golden oldies, the authors everyone knew, and everyone liked. The kind of author he needed was what he liked to think of as airport reading.
It was the kind of book that was a great, fast read while traveling through airports with long layovers. It was also the kind of book where he could read it quickly, set it down, and forget it.
He wasn’t looking for Shakespeare here.
Widow let his eyes bounce from cover to cover until he found two viable candidates. Stephen King was always a good choice. Except that lately, his work had been really, really good. But it was also deep. Deep was not the right choice.
The second candidate was perfect. He picked up a copy of the latest Dean Koontz book.
Koontz was a famous author that everyone liked, but he could never remember any of Koontz’s titles. It was quintessential airport reading.
Widow grabbed the book and walked to the counter at the coffee shop setup. There was a short line of other people doing the same.
At the counter, he ordered his coffee, a large, and paid for it and the book. He took them over to the window table he’d targeted and sat down. He adjusted his chair so that he was facing the window.
That’s when he realized his mistake. He was facing the big red doors, but he’d already established that Haspman would come out the side door.
Forgetting about the phone in his pocket didn’t make him feel stupid, but this did.
He got his butt up out of the chair and took the book and stared out the window to see if there was a better table with the right angle on the side door. There wasn’t.
He cursed himself under his breath, and then he took the book and the coffee and left the store.
He walked back outside and moved down the sidewalk until he found a spot that looked good. It was a concrete ledge.
It was better than he’d hoped for. From here, he could see the parking lot, Haspman’s Raptor, and the fire door.
Widow hopped up onto the ledge and sat down. He set his coffee on the perch and opened the book. He started the book from the beginning, taking breaks every five to fifteen minutes to glance up at the fire door.
He knew he would probably be there the rest of the afternoon until Haspman decided to leave.
What he didn’t know was that he was sitting on the same perch that the man with the forgettable face had sat on earlier, when he was staking out the place, waiting for Tunney and Widow.
Twenty-One
The man with the forgettable face and the bald guy followed Tunney’s BMW around all day. They were a little confused because there was no sign of the stranger.
They followed Tunney and ran his plates through a contact at the FBI; their boss had contacts all over the place. That’s how they got Tunney’s name and occupation. Knowing what he did for a living told them what part he played.
Another confusing thing was that it seemed he had given up. There was no sign of Widow, but also Tunney wasn’t doing any kind of investigati
on work. He spent the rest of the day running errands, and they were there with him every step of the way.
First, he went to the bank, stopped for gas, paid some utility bills, mailed a package, and picked up a dry-cleaned suit, along with some female garments. They figured those must’ve been for his wife.
They knew he was working for the lawyer, Aker, and they knew the stranger must’ve been too. Soon, they would have their answers because evening had rolled around.
They drove the Escalade slowly through Tunney’s neighborhood. They followed him into a subsection of the neighborhood literally called Friendly, which made the guy with the forgettable face smile.
Tunney lived on Fort Hill Street in a two-story colonial, painted yellow. The suburb was quiet and peaceful, a real family-friendly place. The houses were far enough apart that if they raided his home, they could be in and out pretty quickly with little worry of witnesses. But there would be collateral damage; namely, they would have to kill his wife—if he was married.
They staked out the house for twenty minutes. Then they took a drive and studied the neighborhood streets. The only worry was that they saw a police car parked in one of the driveways on the street directly behind Tunney’s house.
The bald guy said, “We should’ve taken him in the car.”
“How? In the middle of the evening, traffic rush home on Three Fifty-Five? We’ll do this the smart way. We’ve already caused too much exposure.”
“Everything woulda been fine if not for the stranger.”
The guy with the forgettable face nodded but didn’t speak. He knew the bald guy wasn’t wrong. They had the whole thing planned out. Even though he had never been a Navy SEAL, he still knew some of their mottos. One that he knew was: Plans all go to hell once the first shot is fired.