Poisonfeather (The Gibson Vaughn Series Book 2)

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  Swonger got out of his car livid. “Guard took my picture.”

  “He took mine too. Now’s not the time.”

  Swonger started to say something else.

  “Not now. Stick to the plan.”

  That temporarily stifled Swonger, who moved to the driver’s door and took out a power amplifier that cost all of eighty dollars. Ordinarily a car’s keyless fob needed to be within a few feet to automatically unlock the doors. The amplifier extended that range to a hundred yards. Swonger turned it on, and the impounded Mustang’s fob, locked somewhere inside the depot garage but suddenly in range, opened the Mustang’s doors helpfully. Swonger got in and set to work on the ignition. The Mustang roared to life before Gibson could switch vehicles—Swonger was every bit as good as advertised. He backed it out, and Gibson parked the replacement Mustang in the spot, wiping it down before exiting. The impounded Mustang had been used in the commission of a crime. That much Gibson knew. He also knew that when trial time came and the VIN didn’t match, the car would be rendered inadmissible as evidence, gutting the case. And that would put Deja Noble’s crew in very good standing with someone it paid to be on good terms with. Deja hadn’t shown a lot of interest in divulging much beyond that. For the sake of Gibson’s conscience, it would have been nice if they’d committed only a simple moving violation, but that was wishful thinking.

  The line kept receding into the distance.

  “How are we looking?” Lea asked in his ear.

  He looked back toward the front of the lot. It seemed quiet. Apart from the candid photography, everything was going as well as could be hoped.

  “One down, one to go. How’s it looking out there?”

  “Oh, you know, just a girl on the side of a road at one in the morning, waiting for Ted Bundy to stop and offer roadside assistance.”

  “Get a selfie with him if he does.”

  “You’re not funny.”

  Gibson got back in his van, and their motley caravan made its way to the second stop on their itinerary. The Mustang was for Deja; they’d come for a van. It was waiting in spot 354, exactly as Deja had promised. It seemed Virginia had quietly purchased a Stingray a few years back and mounted it in a black panel van. All had been peaches and cream until the Richmond Times-Dispatch had written an exposé that forced the governor to explain why the state police had been capturing the public’s cell-phone data without a warrant. A very good question, Gibson thought, and hard to answer. The resulting scandal had seen both the chief of police and the Stingray put out to pasture. The chief had retired to Boca Raton while the Stingray quietly lived here in spot 354, undisturbed for eighteen months now. Swonger and he would trade their van for the van housing the Stingray, and with a little luck it might be years before anyone even noticed. Even when they did, the police might not be in any hurry to admit that they hadn’t disposed of the Stingray as promised.

  Police vans didn’t come standard with keyless fobs, so Swonger had to jimmy the door the old-fashioned way. While he worked on the ignition, Gibson swapped the two vans’ plates. They were identical in every other way except for the four antennae on the roof. He would roll the dice that Michaels wouldn’t notice them in the dark. Gibson slid open the side door and climbed in back to make sure everything was there.

  A built-in desk ran the length of the driver’s side wall. Gibson sat at the flip-down desk chair and scanned the racks of communications gear until his eyes alighted upon the Stingray module itself. A good start, but fixed to the end of the desk, the docking station for a laptop sat empty. Gibson’s heart nearly stopped. The Stingray module was no more than an expensive doorstop without the laptop that ran its software. Desperate to know he hadn’t crossed the line for nothing, he rifled through the equipment drawers under the desk. He eventually found it and breathed a heavy sigh of relief when the laptop snapped neatly into place. They were in business.

  The van’s engine flared to life, and Swonger took that as a signal to start yapping about Bill Michaels and the photographs. Gibson stayed silent, hoping Swonger would talk himself out, but instead Swonger built himself a head of steam.

  “We gotta do something,” Swonger said.

  “We’re not done yet. Let’s go.”

  “I’m serious,” Swonger said but got back into the Mustang.

  They pulled around to a door on the far side of the main building, out of sight of the front gate. The last item on Deja’s to-do list. As long as they didn’t dawdle, Michaels shouldn’t be a problem.

  The door was locked, but with security off, it was simple work for Swonger. He could open a lot more than cars.

  “I need ten minutes,” Gibson told him at the door.

  “Need to deal with that guard,” Swonger said.

  Gibson didn’t answer him. He didn’t want to get dragged into an argument here. “Stay in the blind spot until I get back.”

  “We’re not done talking about this.”

  “Fine, but later,” Gibson said and slipped inside; Swonger relocked the door behind him.

  Gibson toggled his radio. “Lea, turn everything back on.”

  “Done,” she said in his ear.

  He listened to the building, for the jackboots coming for him, but the only sound was the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. With nowhere to hide anyway, Gibson made his way down the hallway like he belonged there. As long as he didn’t act suspicious, there was always the chance that someone might buy that he was just looking for a restroom. Ideally, though, the mechanic would be asleep, and Bill Michaels’s partner would be up front.

  Deja’s map of the interior, like everything she had provided, was top-notch, and Gibson found the office without incident. He let himself in, sat at the desk, and tapped the space bar to wake the sleeping desktop computer. It was an old machine and warmed up slowly, but eventually the screen flickered to life and a Virginia State Police log-in prompt greeted him.

  Gibson didn’t understand the point of having a log-in if you weren’t going to encrypt the hard drive. Funny thing about computers, people were so concerned about hacks from the Internet that they didn’t stop to consider how vulnerable their machines were to a hacker with physical access. Gibson checked the back of its tower. No USB port, but there was a CD drive. Fortunately, he’d brought one of each. He inserted his CD and powered the computer back up.

  The CD contained a modified copy of the Linux operating system designed to break Microsoft encryption. So standard that Gibson had downloaded it from the Internet. So simple that if you could follow a series of simple prompts, you could break into an unencrypted Microsoft hard drive in about a minute. Back when he’d been sixteen, he’d looked down on such tactics as pathetic script kiddie hacks. Now all he cared about was efficiency, and if Microsoft couldn’t be bothered to try a little harder, then neither could he.

  It appeared the Virginia State Police were still operating on a hopelessly unpatched version of Windows XP. Not that it would have mattered. Windows stored passwords in a database called a “hive.” Cute name. Gibson didn’t know the reference, didn’t care. He just knew what it did and how to defeat it. When active, the hive had layers of security, and its passwords were encrypted. But only when it was on. When it was dormant, as it was now, so was its security, rendering it defenseless.

  Using the Linux boot disk, Gibson dug down to the passwords, which were still encrypted; however, for reasons that escaped him, usernames were not. The machine had three usernames: Ramsey.T, Administrator, and Guest. He chose Administrator because his tampering wouldn’t be noticed until an administrator attempted to log in, and judging by how out-of-date this machine was, that could be years from now. He deleted its encrypted password and left it blank. When Gibson let the computer restart normally, the computer would trust that the new password was correct, because its operating system trusted the hive natively. The computer didn’t have the ability to question why one password wasn’t encrypted. What the hive said went.

  Gibson removed the CD an
d rebooted the computer. The prompt reappeared. Beneath it, a banner read “Local Mode/Cached Copy.”

  Perfect. The entire operation took fifty-seven seconds.

  As planned, the constant disruption of Internet access to and from the depot had forced the central servers to adjust. Normally, changes to files on this computer would be made automatically to the state DMV servers. However, the state servers required a second set of log-in credentials. Credentials that Gibson didn’t have and didn’t have time to acquire. But in local mode, he could make changes to files on the depot’s local database, and because the network was in “local mode,” they would be automatically uploaded to the DMV, overwriting whatever data was stored there. It would do his job for him.

  Gibson typed in the case number Deja had given him.

  The Mustang belonged to one Borya Dvoskin, a twenty-year-old Russian national who had been pulled over in Virginia Beach. A search of the vehicle had yielded drugs, guns, and $57,000 in cash. His trial was scheduled for the end of the month. Reading Dvoskin’s sheet didn’t make Gibson jump for joy, but it could have been a lot worse. Thinking about Judge Birk and Charles Merrick while entering Deja’s changes to the arrest report made it a little easier. The changes were nothing major, just enough that nothing matched, creating a pattern of inconsistency that a good defense attorney would spin into gold.

  Thanks to him, Borya Dvoskin would be back running drugs in a few weeks. That felt good to know. What would Nicole have to say about that? Gibson logged off and radioed Lea to kill the network again. He gave the room a once-over to be sure he’d left nothing behind, and exited the building a little bit less of a man than when he’d entered.

  Back outside, Swonger leapt angrily off the hood of the Mustang. He’d had time to work himself up and wanted to know what they were going to do about Bill Michaels. Gibson told him to drop it.

  “I’m not going back to prison because some old bastard took my picture.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Gibson said, thinking back to their near-disastrous argument outside Slaski’s house. They would go down in the annals of dumb criminals if they got arrested because of a yelling match.

  “Deja ain’t going to like it. She’ll want something done.”

  Deja hadn’t impressed Gibson with her delicate touch so far, and he didn’t care to think about her solution to the Bill Michaels situation. Gibson couldn’t have that on his conscience, although he doubted Swonger would have any such qualms. Instead, he appealed to what he knew Swonger feared most.

  “What do you think Deja will do? Kill the guard and risk being caught? No, she kills the guy and frames you for it. You ready to go down for murder one?”

  Swonger hesitated, and Gibson took the opportunity to argue that if they left now, no one would know a crime had been committed. When it was eventually discovered, Michaels wouldn’t even connect them to it. They just had to leave the way they’d planned.

  Swonger was shaking his head. “Can’t do it.” He drew his .45 from the back of his pants.

  “I said no guns.”

  “You also said the cameras would be out.”

  “They are out.”

  “We take it from him now.”

  “Swonger, think.”

  But Swonger had about thought himself out. The .45 came up level with Gibson’s heart, safety off, finger on the trigger.

  “We take it from him now.”

  Gibson moved without hesitation. Sidestep, hands moving together from opposite sides, one around Swonger’s wrist, the other coming across the pistol itself, snapping it out of his stunned hand. In one smooth motion, it was pointed at Swonger’s eye. Gibson had learned that disarm in the Marines, but was a little surprised at how flawlessly he’d executed it. Now, if the .45 had still had a firing pin, he doubted his hands would have been anywhere near as steady. But Swonger didn’t know that, and Gibson was happy to leave him in awe.

  Swonger’s hands went up. “Hey, man, I’m sorry. It’s just . . . you know . . . I can’t go back inside.”

  “I feel like we’re on kind of a steep learning curve here, you and me.”

  “I just lost my head.”

  Gibson held the gun on Swonger a moment longer, letting Swonger contemplate what options he might be considering. He dropped the gun to his side. “Get in the car. We’re leaving.”

  “Cool. It’s cool.”

  “And listen to me good. Not one word at the salvage yard about this, or I walk. I’m done with this whole mess, and good luck figuring out how to work a Stingray.”

  “Jesus, all right, I get it.”

  At the gate, Gibson slowed to a halt. Michaels looked at the van with confusion. “Forget something?”

  “You’re never going to believe this.”

  “What?” Michaels asked, ready not to believe it.

  “I brought the wrong van.”

  Now Michaels looked very confused.

  “We have three of these. One of them needs servicing, but they gave me the wrong one. I just wasted half the night driving over here in the wrong van.”

  Michaels gave him a long look and burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, man. That’s a raw deal.”

  Gibson pretended to see the humor in it too.

  “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

  Michaels shook his head. “Not me. Tomorrow’s my day off.”

  Gibson knew that, of course, but wanted to close the narrative loop in Michaels’s mind. Didn’t want him wondering later why that guy had never brought the right van back.

  “Ah, well, then. Take it easy.”

  “You too,” Michaels replied as his eyes started to drift to the top of the van.

  “Hey. Want a suggestion about your yoga situation?”

  Michaels looked back at him.

  “They have videos on YouTube. You can just do them in the privacy of your living room.”

  Michaels nodded thoughtfully. “You know, I might just do that.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Despite the mission going like clockwork, it had still been the longest thirty minutes of Lea’s life. She’d sat with her back against the junction box in the dark and listened for the sound of sirens—the inevitable unraveling of Gibson Vaughn’s plan. So when the van and Mustang finally pulled up, she felt a giddy relief that shot through her like whiskey in December.

  She greeted Gibson and Swonger excitedly but got only grunts in return. They started the security system and relocked the junction box, neither one talking, which she wrote off as coming down off an adrenaline high. Some men needed to go off alone to process things, so she left them to their moody silence, although she didn’t know what they had to be so gloomy about—Gibson’s plan had worked. It was unbelievable. While she hadn’t been any great fan of Deja Noble’s full-frontal assault, Gibson’s proposal had sounded like wishful thinking. But she’d be damned if he hadn’t sweet-talked his way onto police property and driven away with a half million in high-tech equipment. Ironically, she had never stolen anything in her life. Now, here she was, an accomplice in a heist. Was that the right word for it? Heist. She liked the sound of it—a daring heist. She grinned to herself. It was a rush unlike anything she’d ever experienced.

  Of the two vehicles, the Mustang was by far the nicer ride, but she didn’t entirely trust Swonger behind the wheel of the muscle car. As if to prove her point, Swonger peeled out as she got in the passenger seat of the van. Thankfully, Gibson made no effort to keep up. A bored cop might wonder why a van and Mustang were caravanning across Virginia in the wee hours of the night. The two vehicles would stay in visual contact but give each other a safe cushion.

  “You think he’ll cry?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “When we destroy that car.”

  Nothing. Not even a smile.

  “Were there any problems?”

  He shook his head, a million miles away.

  “So no snags?” Still unconvinced.

  “What?” he asked, a
faint trace of annoyance in his voice. “No, we got it.” He hitched a thumb toward the back of the van as if she’d lost the power of sight.

  She looked in back, but it didn’t look like much. Hard to believe it might be the answer to their problems, but she would give Gibson the chance to prove it. He’d earned it. If she were honest, what she’d read about her new partner online hadn’t exactly bolstered her confidence, but tonight had earned him some leeway in her book. He’d talked a big game, but he’d also delivered, so she would go another round with him.

  When they reached Dette’s Auto Wrecks, Swonger was waiting for them, Mustang idling outside the salvage yard’s gate.

  “Wasn’t going in there alone. Spooky as hell,” Swonger said.

  Lea couldn’t say she blamed him. Beyond the gate, the junkyard was pitch-black. They drove in cautiously, headlights casting medieval shadows off canyons of rusted cars. A vast wasteland of amputated vehicles stretched out of sight on both sides—trunks and hoods all open, scavenged for doors, hubcaps, windshields; carcasses picked over by crows. As they approached the main office, a pair of Belgian Malinois appeared from the shadows and trotted alongside. Powerful-looking dogs with black muzzles that accentuated curved ivory teeth. Gibson pulled up behind the Mustang and killed the engine but left his headlights on. The dogs, positioned between the office and the vehicles, watched them speculatively. Not hostile but not nearly welcoming enough for Lea to open her door. A whistle split the night, and the dogs retreated under the covered porch of the office.

  “You can come out now,” a woman’s voice called. And when they didn’t move fast enough for the voice’s liking: “Well, come on, now. I got things to do.”

  Floodlights lit up the junkyard, and Lea’s hand went up to shade her eyes. Up on the porch sat an older African American woman, matriarchal and stern, with stately gray-white dreadlocks that swirled above her head like a nest of snakes. She set down an e-reader, took off her glasses, and rubbed her eyes. Nearby, a shotgun and a sledgehammer leaned side by side against the doorframe. The dogs flanked her, one by each knee, and as the three visitors approached the porch, the animals tensed and showed their teeth. The woman touched each dog’s head gently, and they crouched, obedient but alert.