The Big Wheel

by Scott Archer Jones

  Angie said, “Paste up the middle frame.” It flicked back up to show the two seated on the bike as they peeled off helmets. The man’s hands and headgear obscured his face. The woman already had her helmet off. “Zoom in on her. Now, can you paste up Sibyl Boxwood’s photo file? Try the upper right one, the profile. Zoom that one for us.”

  They all stared at the two photos. Thomas said, “It could be her. The hair fools you—a blonde mop versus a longer black cut, kind of—”

  Angie said, “It’s called a punk mullet. That’s her. I’m sure of it.” The room buzzed; the staff agreed with Angie.

  “Let’s see the rest of it,” said Thomas. The screen splashed up more video. Evening, and the bike crouched at the limit of visibility for the parking lot camera. The team could just see the couple mount and motor out the end of the lot.

  “We catch them next as they ride back up into town. Software turfed up a distance shot from a cam on the other side of the Santa Monica Freeway. From there we got a photo on the Golden State Freeway, and another, and another. They exit the main road. This is Atwater Village—in northeast L.A., and here is my killer shot. They go past the Metrolink—see the station name? No other photos—they went to ground, home for the night. This is their neighborhood.”

  Thomas leaned forward on spread feet, calm under the reassurance of his yellow jackets. A quick, measuring scan around showed the staff jazzed to the limit. They appeared to vibrate in place, trembling in delight, buzzing like a hive. After months of mystery, Zlata had gone from the invisible man to a guy who lived within a mile or so of a specific train station. Calm, Thomas leaned over a staffer. “Please, could you get Don Garland on the phone? Tell him we’ve got a probable on Robko Zlata, and we’ll need full ground support in California. Ask him to come in right away.” He turned to Angie and raised an eyebrow. “Ms. Tommo, let’s be quick to inform the Governor. If you would, call O’Brien out on Long Island, and let him know we have his quarry in sight.” The team cheered, the end of a long manhunt.

  “Mr. Garland wants to talk to you personally. No video—he’s in purple silk pajamas,” said the staffer. Giddy, she broke into a giggle.

  “Don, Thomas here.—Yeah, we think we’ve got him. We found the motorbike.—Yes, a clever idea.—Northeast Los Angeles, Atwater Village.—I agree, joint operation. What do you have on the ground?—That many? I forgot we had so many companies out there. Are you going out yourself?—No, I’ll stay here, on top of the technology.—We’ll pass all the current location data to your people now, and we’ll let your people know anything we get as it comes in.—Sure, as soon as it happens. But, we’ll be short-handed when we get live feed for people to watch. Can you bring a liaison in here with us? He can pick up from my people and let you know instantly.—No, I don’t think I’ll offer the same deal to LeFarge.—Yeah, best to wait until you’re at least on board the plane before you tell him.—All right, we’ll brief you fully when you get in here.” He handed the phone back to the staffer.

  Angie sidled up and murmured in his ear. “I convinced the Governor he needn’t come in right away. He said he’d be here first thing in the morning, seven-ish, so we have ten hours to nail it. O’Brien also said he’d swing by and pick up LeFarge.”

  “Great. Okay, we’ll live with it. Can you call our Tran Cam CEO on one of our burner phones? I want to make sure he gives us what we need.”

  She did so and handed the mobile over. “Find out the number of surveillance points he can give us in Atwater. I’ll set up a shift schedule based on that.”

  Chapter Twenty-One: Guns on the Ground

  O’Brien and LeFarge burst into the team’s operation space escorted by Angie. O’Brien charged forward; his massive head swung from side to side, like a grizzly in a herd of deer. Thomas intercepted him and shook his hand.

  “Tommy, your luck is back.”

  Thomas too, thought his luck was back. “Let me introduce you to the team. It’ll be good for morale.” They made the rounds while LeFarge ignored them and strode over to the digital map. LeFarge stared at Atwater Village as if one of the feeds would flash up Zlata’s image.

  Looping through the room shaking hands, finishing at the wall, Thomas stood the Governor up in front of the map. “We can tell you the story and show you the layout at the same time.”

  Like a dog barking at some threat, LeFarge jumped out. “Where’s Garland?”

  “He’s in California. He took a corporate jet and a team out at midnight.”

  O’Brien caught LeFarge’s eye. “Good man. Don’s already on the ground, Egan.”

  Thomas signaled his techie over. “Can you take the Governor through the layout?”

  “Glad to.” IT had a laser-pointer that ran the board. “We first saw them as they left this area of Los Angeles… here,” and he indicated a freeway camera location. “We tracked them to, and back from, the beach; they re-entered here, a different route. I confirmed the license plate—the bike carried Tim Boxwood’s plate.”

  “Who?” O’Brien’s voice sounded like a growl.

  Thomas said, “One of Zlata’s aliases. The point is we have a confirmed sighting.”

  IT picked up the tale again. “We now have live feed from four locations, here, here, here, and here.” He flourished the pointer at red spots on the map. “Angie Tommo identified these six blocks as transient housing.” More flourishes. “Census data also says eighty percent of the population in this neighborhood is non-white, so our chances go up; our couple should stick out like sore thumbs. Mr. Garland has deployed some unmarked vans on patrol and will start a ground search as soon as it’s daylight out there. In the meantime, we watch the four cams and the train station from here.”

  Thomas leaned over to his guy. “They’ve covered the exits that we can’t see?”

  “Mr. Garland has guys on them. I’m afraid, Governor, that your buildings in California won’t be well guarded today.”

  Angie added, “You should expect this to leak out. With all this manpower deployed….”

  O’Brien grumphed and shook his head. “Screw ‘em all, prying little pieces of dung.”

  Thomas grasped him by the elbow, fearing what the Governor would say next. “Perhaps, sir, we can continue the discussion in your office.”

  They rode upstairs and paced down the halls still silent in early morning. LeFarge strode behind them, unbidden. In his office, the Governor wheeled about, big as a house.

  O’Brien slapped his hands together. “We’ve got the son of a bitch at last. Egan, scramble your troops. I’ll call Garland and make sure he turns over operations to you.”

  Thomas objected, “Surely Garland has earned the right to take Zlata down?”

  LeFarge whispered in O’Brien’s ear. O’Brien grunted, nodded, and said to Thomas, “I told you at the beginning I wanted Don’s hands clean.”

  “Don could use LeFarge as the backup threat,” said Thomas.

  The Governor said, “I don’t need backup; I need a guarantee. I won’t sideline LeFarge’s team. Egan, get your Foreign Legion out to L.A. now.”

  Thomas tried one more shot. “We lost Zlata here in the City and in Ithaca because of the so-called Foreign Legion.”

  “I also remember you were in Ithaca, Tommy, and interfered with Egan’s men.”

  “And we found Zlata for you again.”

  “You want thanks? Wait until he’s under lock and key. My decision stands—Egan is going, and your team will support him. You can get back to your watching—we’ve got some work to do here.”

  O’Brien turned on the ball of his foot and stalked back to his desk. While O’Brien’s back was turned, LeFarge pointed at Thomas’s face and fired an imaginary pistol.

  ***

  In the elevator, Thomas shook two benzos into his hand and dumped them down on his anger to douse it. He charged off the elevator onto the computer floor, punched in the four-digit code to their office, and stuck his thumb on the pad. When the door slid open, he breathed deep and let it cl
ose back in front of him. Best to wait a minute.

  By the time he flopped into a chair beside Angie in front of the digital map, his pulse had dropped back to normal, and he idled along on cruze. Angie perched in the chair, her desktab open. He leaned over to her, “LeFarge is on his way to the airport. You were right. O’Brien enjoys the mob-boss role. He’ll do his Don Corleone bit through to the last act.”

  “Something I wouldn’t have minded getting wrong.”

  “I’ve learned you’re seldom wrong.”

  She shook her head, brushing off the compliment. “Got time to talk to Jean now?”

  He jumped up, marched across the room, and leaned over Jean’s shoulder. “Are you ready? I know we were supposed to meet this afternoon, but Ms. Tommo and I want to hear what you have to say as soon as possible.”

  Jean nodded yes and picked up her tablet. Thomas waved Angie over as they crossed the room; they converged on his desk space. Knee-to-knee in three chairs, they suffered the intimacy of an office cubicle. Jean balanced her tablet on her knees, so they could all see it.

  Jean said, “You still want all of this to be confidential?” Thomas nodded, and she continued. “As you can imagine, a private militia is astonishingly expensive, so the costs can be disguised but not hidden. Governor O’Brien has a shell company that handles the money—of course, an improper use of shareholder money.” Thomas and Angie grinned at each other while Jean frowned. “The shell company expends fifteen thousand a month per mercenary for eight mercenaries. We have the mercenaries’ bank numbers. They pay an additional thirty thousand a month for ex-Captain LeFarge. There have been performance bonuses that total another hundred thousand. I also detail equipment costs, a leased warehouse, and an old fire station rented for housing.”

  Thomas blinked. “How much does all that add up to?”

  “It adds up to over two point six million a year without travel, vehicles, or expense accounts.”

  Angie said, “We guessed it wouldn’t be cheap. So to summarize, you know the names and addresses of all the mercs, how much they’re paid, where they keep their gear, and where they sleep when they’re off duty.”

  Jean chuckled. “I even know LeFarge’s favorite restaurant. And you’ll find this amusing—the shell company deposits Captain LeFarge’s salary in a joint account held with a Mrs. Jonathon LeFarge. LeFarge may be a dangerous man, but he lives with his mother.”

  “Funny,” said Thomas. “I hadn’t imagined LeFarge having a personal life, much less a mother.”

  Angie hmm’d. “We could pay for a hack at the right time to syphon all this money back.”

  Thomas nodded. “At the right time.”

  Jean didn’t much want to hear that. She went on, “There’s something else; I’m not sure if it’s relevant. I found other irregular transactions in the shell company that will never stand up to audit. The largest abuse—Governor O’Brien pours fifty million dollars a year into a research facility in Georgia.”

  Angie said, “But all O’Brien’s companies do some amount of research.”

  “Yes, and we have a lab in Georgia, a pharmacological facility. But—and I say but—the shell company funnels a great deal of money through the back door into this place.”

  Thomas said, “Whoa, don’t know what that means. Might take some digesting.” He frowned and picked at the starched crease in his jeans leg, distracted.

  Angie began the wrap-up. She grinned, and touched the auditor on her shoulder. “Jean, this is all that we’d hoped for. It’s a great piece of work.”

  “When this special task force is over, I’d like to file a report with the Head of Audit and our General Counsel,” Jean said.

  Thomas felt the shock run down his neck. “Not until it’s all over, please.”

  Jean’s smile dimpled out, a beam of cheerfulness. “Yes sir. Plus I don’t want to look for a new job today. I’ll transmit the summary set of files to your desktabs. I’d advise encrypting them.”

  Angie lagged behind. “Great stuff, but what do we do with it?”

  Thomas shrugged. “Suck the money back into the shell company?”

  “That shines the light on us, not them.”

  “Hire outsiders to do surveillance on the warehouse and fire station?”

  She nodded. “Possible. But why, with LeFarge and his team in California?”

  “And it doesn’t catch them in the course of a crime. Expensive too. I bet it wouldn’t pass Jean’s audit.”

  Angie laughed. Then her grin faded.

  ***

  Robko padded around the L.A. apartment, restless in the early morning hours. The road called him—he could see it all singing out to him, black pavement striped in white and yellow, green interstate signs flicking by. Outside, October’s pre-dawn night lay warm and murmuring with traffic noise; they had all the windows open. Freeway sounds filled the rooms and made it impossible to lie back down. He decided to pack.

  While Sibyl dreamed away the pre-dawn hours, or tried to, he emptied out their workshop into garbage bags and set them one by one near the front door. He separated into two piles, the keepers and the tossers. When he finished and the workshop lay empty and forlorn, he hassled the tosser bags into the minivan. The dawn’s half-light obscured his activities from his neighbors. He drove to a nearby grade school and slung his trash into their dumpster.

  At seven, he drove into East L.A. near the train tracks, where he knew a moving company that sold surplus trailers and trucks. He’d chosen this firm because the beat-up trailers all came in a tattered, anonymous white, painted over from the garish orange of the original company. He purchased the largest the minivan could drag, towed it back to the motel, and pulled it up parallel to their front door.

  Unhooking the screen door, he wheeled the bike out and up the ramp into the trailer. He found it a piece of cake to strap the motorcycle down. He heaped bags all around the bike like a lake of black plastic. Lastly, he locked the roll-down door with a stout combination lock and went back in to wake Sibyl.

  ֍

  They left Atwater Village in the clear midmorning light. He slept in the front seat. Sibyl drove them past a white panel van, past someone selling carpet cleaner door-to-door, past the Metrolink. As she turned up the frontage road by the freeway, she saw graffiti painted below the bridge, scribing out, “Wandering Bird On The Wing.” The trailer tire ran over a black spray can, squirting it out unobserved to clatter against the curb. Robko dozed through the omen.

  Love and Pain

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Locked Into the Depth of Night

  Steward’s team room bore a resemblance to a Las Vegas casino—no outside window distinguished day from night, no hint of outside reality intruded. Flashy equipment scrolled eye-catching displays; a bustle of people wore faces either hopeful or grim. A Vegas-like fragrance hung over all as a smell of institutional carpet, conflicting colognes, stale food, and that frisson of nervous perspiration. Thomas shuffled across the room and dropped into Angie’s visitor chair. “This is really boring.”

  “You’re not the one to complain, Thomas. You’re not glued to camera feeds.” She waved her hand towards the staff that stared into those screens.

  “Don’s had a day out there. Where’s Zlata anyway?”

  “I assume that’s a rhetorical question.”

  He leaned over his knees, his hands clasped, and his forearms on his thighs. His heels drummed on the carpet. “I’ve made a decision.”

  “Sounds portentous.”

  “Since I don’t have anything to do here, I’m going to have a peek at LeFarge’s warehouse.”

  She stared at him. “You’re joking.”

  “No—it’s the perfect time. LeFarge and his boys are in California. Jean got us the address, but we haven’t done anything with it yet.”

  Her frown chilled him to the marrow. No charming little girl here. “Ask Don’s people to do it.”

  “And have them discover Carl Dupont’s corpse stuffed into a refrigerator or buried in t
he basement? No, it needs to be someone who already knows about the murder.”

  “Thomas, you said we wouldn’t send any of our team out into the field. Are you trying to prove something?”

  “Maybe. But as counter evidence to your accusation, I’ve felt pretty shaky and apprehensive since they tried to kill me at the racquet club. This reconnoiter must be okay if a coward is up for it.”

  “Right. So you’re ambling into their lair. Any reason I should approve of this expedition?” He gazed at that one eyebrow, arched clear up to the sky itself, and at the piercing, unamused eyes.

  He ducked his head. “We might learn something. I’ll call in while I’m out there. I’ll back out if it looks like the bully boys are at home.”

  ***

  The warehouse and the fire station hid in general squalor on the edge of Bedford Stuyvesant, beyond the zone of gentrification in the old neighborhood, beyond the safe space and reliable cabs. He didn’t slope off to spy in the corporate town car. He hopped out to Bed Stuy on the Fulton Street Subway and hiked the remaining blocks. He felt quite vigorous, swinging along on his mission, following the map on his burner phone.

  The Foreign Legion rented an anonymous storehouse, a dinghy three-story on a gritty street of red brick warehouses. A padlocked garage door rusted beneath an old sign that said Cockaigne Industries. Cockaigne had painted the door black, but it had been tagged many times with graffiti. The top layer read, “Her Heart Is Pure Bitterness” in a bold red slash. He grinned and touched the text with his hand.

  Thomas scouted for cameras as he wandered around the block twice—cams he would have ignored a year ago. The alley provided its buildings with truck docks, and he skirted through that also, a path that splashed through puddles floating with filth. He rattled the back door—locked. He looked around and found a fire escape with its ground floor ladder well up over his head. With some difficulty, he rolled a battered dumpster underneath it, closed the bent lid, and hauled himself on top with a grunt. Gazing down, he spotted a streak of yellow slime on his black jeans. He teetered on the shaky support—the whole thing rolled a couple of inches, and he waved his arms for balance. His fingers could just graze the bottom rung.