Calamity (Captain Grande Angil Mysteries)

by Robert G. Bernstein

  “My turn?” I said.

  Hadley nodded. “Fair is fair,” he said.

  “Was that drive by at Loew’s an accident?”

  Hadley smiled. “Nope. We had a surveillance team working the hotel. They spotted you and called in a cruiser. We wanted to see if you’d scare off. When you didn’t, I had you followed to the docks.”

  “Were you waiting for Tanner at the hotel?” I said.

  “I don’t know nothing ‘bout this guy Tanner. It turns out the guy we were watching was also waiting to see who’d show up. That turned out to be your guy Tanner.”

  “The package at the front desk,” I said.

  “Looks that way.”

  “A payoff?”

  “My guess.”

  “And the plate?”

  “Explorer belongs to a private security company headquartered in Virginia. Tough-looking African-American gentleman belongs to them, too. Company’s called, SafeOps.”

  “Who’s the black guy?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe somebody important. Turns out the guy we were tailing is just a no-account delivery boy.”

  We had reached the police impound, what looked like an old three-story warehouse on Channel Street. There was a gate out front and a guard post with thick concrete walls and bulletproof glass. The cop inside waved to Hadley and opened the electric gate. We drove in slowly and circled the narrow entrance ramp. Heavy white and yellow caution lines and arrows marked the pavement.

  “I understand that you’ve gone way beyond the call of duty with me,” I said. “You mind if I ask what your surveillance was about?”

  Hadley pulled perpendicular to my truck on the third floor. He turned toward me and gave me a long, hard stare before answering.

  “I got a friend,” he said, his expression changing from all-business to something sad and retrospective. “About my age, a little older. He worked for SafeOps for over twenty years. Took an early retirement. We used to go duck hunting together. Our families would do the barbecue thing. Loves my kids. I got six of ‘em, eh? You got kids?”

  “Three,” I said

  Hadley nodded, turned away from me to gaze out the windshield of the Charger, staring at nothing. “Good friend. Maybe my closest friend. Could be my twin brother almost.”

  We sat for a while, very quiet

  “What happened?” I said.

  “He disappeared into thin air about a year ago. He’s from around here so we opened a file, started an investigation. I went to SafeOps, checked around. Nothing. They said they didn’t have a clue, said he still had his pension and everything, that he’d left the company in good standing, even offered him some post-employment consulting work.”

  Hadley got quiet again, thinking, trying to see something he hadn’t seen before.

  “What’d he do there?” I said.

  “Good question. Said he mostly did strategic planning and logistics.” Hadley shrugged. “We never got into specifics.”

  “Typical,” I said. “My friends and I don’t talk about work. Maybe a few stories.”

  “Girl talk,” Hadley said. “Boring work shit.”

  “Can be,” I said.

  “Thing is, I got suspicious,” Hadley said. “This company SafeOps. I don’t know. I had a hunch, you know? So I started checkin’. Off-duty, mind you. I did this a few times and then some of the guys on the job here in Annapolis, guys who knew Preston – that’s his name, Preston Mellville – offered to help. Surveillance mostly. We couldn’t requisition nothin’, couldn’t get any warrants. And then today, your guy shows up, and you show up behind him, and what looks like a payoff transpires. You see where I’m going with this? It’s the best lead I’ve had all year. And so I’m thinkin’, maybe you’re my guy, maybe you can get me some answers. I have you hauled in. Turns out, you’re on something else and I’m still at square one. Or maybe not. I don’t know.”

  I took in a deep breath and let it out.

  “Strategic and logistical planning,” I said. “Interesting.”

  “Yeah,” Hadley said.

  “How do you get into something like that?”

  “Oh, he did it in Vietnam and Cambodia. He was a pilot and then later a field operative. Flew the big stuff. That’s how he got the job at SafeOps. They’re all former spooks over there.”

  “Spooks.” I said, shaking my head, not liking the sound of it.

  “Yeah, CIA. Preston was with the CIA. He worked for Air America.”

  22

  I left Annapolis at three in the morning, right after I told Hadley what I had thus far learned about the case. Opening up the way he did, taking me into his confidence, even if it was out of sheer desperation, made me feel obligated to throw some information his way. I included what I knew about Pete Tanner and Jenny and Aaron Bowers but held off on telling him about the components we discovered in the waters off Hammond Ledge. I didn’t want to get his hopes up or send him on a wild goose chase, not for a few yet to be identified pieces of corroded aluminum. Meanwhile, I liked the guy, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to know somebody outside of Maine with law enforcement connections. He certainly had those. Before I left Annapolis he told me he was a graduate of the Naval Academy, had served eight years with the Navy Military Police, lived his whole life in the Annapolis and Baltimore areas, and had gone to school with squids who now worked for the FBI.

  The Tappan Zee Bridge in New York came into my sights at about nine in the morning. It shadowed a tug and tow crawling upriver, and its scaffolding flashed light and dark under the puffy cumulous clouds moving Eastward in the aftermath of the storm. East winds had wrapped around to the West and were continuing to moderate with each passing hour. If I hurried I could catch up to the storm’s tail in Maine. Lucky me.

  As I pulled onto Route-684 in North White Plains my focus shifted from the azure sky and the clouds with the coal-colored bottoms to a blue SUV in my rear view mirror. The car had to wait, though, because my cell phone rang with a call from one of the nurses at The Home. The nurse was letting me know my mother had fallen and was feeling sore.

  “We got her some x-rays,” the nurse said, “and everything is OK. Mom is in some pain, though, and we gave her Tylenol. It’s not serious. We just needed to call and let you know.”

  I had planned to pull over and get some sleep – my eyes had been open for twenty-two hours – but I told the nurse I was on my way and would arrive well before dinner. Keeping alert and myself up had never been much of an issue. Working as a crew member on a boat, particularly as captain, the ability to stay awake long hours and sometimes days gets drilled into you. One time, trying to outrun a hurricane on the Grand Banks, I had stayed awake for four days straight.

  The SUV, a late model, blue Chevy Tahoe, was another matter. It could be pure coincidence. Could be somebody headed in the same direction. I was slowing and speeding up, changing lanes, and it was always right there. Maybe I needed to shake the tree and see what fell out.

  I kept my speed at a steady sixty-five the whole way up Route 84, slowing down at all the appropriate locations, Danbury, Woodbury, Hartford, etc., and made it easy as pie to follow me, hoping to lull my caboose into a state of somnolence. At Route-90 in Massachusetts I sped out of the tollbooth and headed straight ahead as if I didn’t know whether I was going East or West. At the last second I turned East and forced the blue SUV to swerve with me. That cut it. The SUV was tailing me for sure. I doubted it was anybody from Hadley’s corner, and didn’t see how any friend of Tanner would be following me. That left the SafeOps people, and if my tail was from there, they weren’t very good at their jobs. I couldn’t believe a Langley-based, international security company would hire somebody incapable of handling a simple tail. And who would no better than I: Surveillance Wizard.

  The rest stop on Route-90, just East of the Sturbridge Exit and, coincidentally, East of the State Police Station, has four or five franchise fast food courts, a gas station, a dog walk area, and a gigantic parking lot. If I wanted to lose
the person or persons behind me, I would have pulled into the police station. They would have continued on their way with virtually no chance of finding me again. However, I needed to know who he or she was, or they were, and I wasn’t going to find out unless I met them face to face.

  I pulled into the rest stop and parked as close to the main building as possible. Glancing back, I noticed the SUV grab a spot toward the back of the lot and close to the dog walking area. I went into the building, used the bathroom, grabbed a cookie and an espresso from Starbucks and headed out the back way, which led me through the kiosk and the gas station.

  Cars and trucks lined the pump islands and the building’s curbside. A school bus with a church group pulled in close to the main entrance; forty or more kids got off and swarmed into McDonalds and the bathrooms like a hive of bees let loose in a botanical garden. A larger, more modern bus carrying seniors in heavy winter clothes that was probably headed to New Hampshire or Maine on a Christmas-light tour, pulled in next to the kiddie bus.

  I walked briskly around both buses and under cover of the cars parked illegally on the traffic approach to the gas pumps. I ate some of my cookie and polished off the espresso. Toward the back of the parking lot I was able to get between a Freightliner hauling tandem Shure-Fine trailers and a car carrier with Detroit’s latest offerings, a dozen shiny and annoyingly quixotic hatchbacks with rakish windows, fake dual exhausts, useless spoilers and oversized wheels.

  From my vantage point at the corner of the piggyback trailer I could see the blue SUV. The view inside was blocked because of the tinted windows and the glaring sun shining low over the turnpike. I had to move quickly and approach at a slant over the drivers left shoulder, where his vision of me might be obstructed by the rear panel of the doorframe. I also needed to stay out of range of his rear view mirror.

  I took a bite of my cookie and quickstepped my way across the parking lot, moving casually between cars until I had to cross about sixty feet of empty pavement. I had the cookie in my left hand in sheet of wax paper. It was a darn good cookie, chocolate chip with tiny shards of butterscotch mixed in, not too crunchy on the edges and just a little gooey in the middle, which can sometime mean not being cooked enough, but not in this case.

  I got to the car and used the left hand with the cookie in it to open my jacket and hold it open. Simultaneously, I stood sideways to the car with my back at an angle. This blocked any view of what I was doing from all directions. After all, I was less than half a mile from the State Police Station down the road and was about to pull a gun on somebody and do it in a very threatening manner.

  The business end of the forty-five made a distinctive and not altogether pleasant pinging sound on the glass. Without seeing inside, I could sense the start I gave the person in the driver’s seat. A second passed, and then the window lowered. It was an electric window and it rolled down very quickly.

  I leaned in a little and placed the barrel of the gun against the back of the driver’s thick neck. It had rolls of muscle in it and it was the color of rich dark chocolate.

  “Don’t you have better things to do with your time?” I said.

  Zeke looked at me sideways and almost snarled his reply. “The nice lady gave me a couple days off,” he said.

  23

  The back of Zeke’s Tahoe looked and smelled almost as bad as the inside of a shopping mall dumpster. There were empty fast-food bags and chicken bones and crumpled soda cans and Gods knows what else. We were seated in the front drinking coffee and talking. My firearm was back in its holster and snapped tight.

  “You look like shit, Zeke,” I said.

  “Maybe it has something to do with not having slept in over twenty-four hours,” he said

  I nodded toward the back seat. “When there’s no time to sleep, I find it helps to eat well,” I said. “Did Jenny send you?”

  “Hell no!” he said. “The Lady trust everyone. She kinda naïve that way.”

  “You’ve been with her a long time.” I wasn’t asking, just acknowledging what I believed as fact.

  “Thirteen years,” he said. “Ever since the accident. I was a cabby back then. She set me up with a car and a business. Limo stuff, airport runs, graduations and proms, that sort of thing. After a while, though, I decided I just wanted to work for her. She was OK with it, ‘cause she needed so much help. Back then. You know . . . she was a mess. She better at contending with difficulties now.”

  I nodded.

  “You have a family, Zeke?” I said.

  “No, Sir. Never married. I like my freedom. I like to be able to take care of The Lady without someone askin’ me all sort of questions or riding me about it.”

  “Like be able to take off and follow a guy for eighteen hundred miles.”

  “If I’d known it was going to be that far I would have planned better. This was kinda a last minute thing.”

  “How the hell did you know I was leaving?

  “It was kinda a stroke of luck. I dropped The Lady off in Bar Harbor yesterday morning, no wait, the morning before, and she told me to take a couple of days off. I decided maybe it was a good time to talk to you about things, find out if you for real. On the way down I got to thinking . . . no way in hell you gonna be driving that piece of shit truck of yours around all the time. So I talk to the guy at the rental place. Ya know, when I walk into a place, people like to talk to me.”

  “You’re about the size of a cement truck, Zeke,” I said. “I doubt it’s because they take an instant liking to you.”

  “Bein’ a big man ain’t just about lookin’ tough or runnin’ around with a football,” he said, and smiled at me. “And you ain’t exactly a tiny tot yourself. Anyway, what do you think the girl at the car rental tells me? She says you just left in a white Chevy pickup. Just like that. She points down Route-1 and off I go. It took me awhile to catch up but I’ve been driving many years.”

  “Apparently not enough to know how to follow someone, Zeke. You blew it big time back there in Sturbridge, and I had been on to you before that.”

  “Yeah, I know, man. I was dead tired. It’s a miracle I didn’t go sailing off into a guard rail. I ain’t as good as I used to be when I was driving a cab. Things is easier for me now.”

  We sat quiet and drank our coffee and watched the activity in the rest stop through the windshield of the Nissan. Different cars, trucks and people, which tended to blur into a kind of diaphanous flow of humanity. Like watching the tide or the current in a river.

  “This a rental? I said.

  “Yeah,” Zeke said. “I got it at the same place you got yours. My stretch is at that dump you call an airport.”

  “Here’s a thought,” I said. “One, we go our separate ways. Two, you keep following me but I tell you where I’m going; there’s no point in being discreet now. Or three, I call the rental company and let them know where the truck is and you and I drive on together. We can talk on the way up and you can tell me why the hell you don’t trust me and I can tell you why the hell you should.”

  Zeke thought about it for a few seconds and chose option three. “Fine, we’ll buddy up,” he said. “You drive.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “We just have to make one stop before we head back. It’s kind of on the way.”

  “Make all the stops you want,” Zeke said. “I be asleep before you hit the pike.”

  He wasn’t lying.

  24

  I let Zeke sleep for about a half-hour, until I reached the entrance to Route-495, then I woke him and told him we had to talk. He jostled like a grizzly bear in a snow cave after a winter’s hibernation. The Chevy’s seat, big enough for any normal size man, fit him poorly. Even with his legs and knees spread wide and the seat in an all-the-way-back position, his head touched the ceiling and his shins had to be jammed against the bottom of the glove box.

  “I’m surprised I didn’t see you behind me earlier,” I said. “Especially when we got down to Maryland. Were you there when I got picked up by the cops.�
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  “First or second time?” He was still shaking the sleep from his massive frame. “I think I may need to stretch he said.”

  “Can it wait an hour?”

  “S’pose it can.” He pushed his legs against the firewall a little and I heard something give in the seat. Not a spring, something more substantial.

  “I think you just broke the seat,” I said.

  “I hate this fucking car,” he said. “I hate all cars. Being big like this is a curse. I had to pay sixty-five hundred dollars to put a special seat in my stretch. I get all my clothes made for me. Not just shirts and slacks, man. Shoes, underwear, you name it. I hate being this big.”

  “Look at the bright side, you can scare the bejeesus out of mortal men,” I said. “I’m surprised the cops didn’t see you down there.”

  “No, man. They didn’t see me. They was too busy with you. Besides. I stayed with the truck. I followed it to the police garage. I was just about to leave when you showed up with that cracker cop. What was that all about, anyway?”

  “I’ll tell you sometime. Where were you at the hotel?”

  “I parked in the lot and went into the coffee shop across the street for something to eat. I could see you from where I was sitting.”

  “How was the food?”

  “I had a hamburger.”

  “No crab cakes? No oysters? No blue claw?”

  “I don’t eat no seafood.”

  “You kosher?” I said.

  “Ever see what fish eat? They eat worms and shit. Damn, they dirty animals, man.”

  “But KFC is OK.”

  “That hot grease’ll kill anything. Can I go back to sleep now you know what I eat and don’t eat?”