by Alaric Hunt
Guthrie nodded. “Where’re the receipts?”
Vasquez recited names and addresses—bodegas, laundries, gas stations, pharmacies, liquor stores. She shrugged.
“Ain’t about every one of those addresses in Little Russia?”
Her eyes fastened on the screen again and her finger tapped. “Damn,” she muttered.
“So check the DMV. What’s he look like?”
“I don’t—” Vasquez shot him a glance. Her hands grew busy, then she said, “Viejo, why you put me through that? No, wait—I know. I’m a smart girl. I’ll figure it out.”
“He’s down there,” Guthrie said. “In the morning, we’ll go take a closer look.”
The two veterans rushed over to see Vasquez’s computer screen. Michael Watson’s DMV photograph looked a lot like Marc Lucas Gagneau.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“You understand we’re going down there to have a look,” Guthrie said. He didn’t look up from the coffeepot heating on the charcoal grill. The cool twilight was unbroken, though sunrise approached.
Olsen and Linney exchanged a sour glance.
“Michael Watson ain’t committed any crimes, unless it’s illegal to own a foreign car, live in Brooklyn, or go camping,” he continued softly. “We know that’s Gagneau, but that don’t matter.”
The coffeepot hissed, and the men fingered their empty mugs expectantly. Olsen grunted, then said, “So this could be the time where you share a general idea of your intended operational procedure that concludes with—”
“Like that, but faster,” Linney interjected.
“We trick him into the first move,” Guthrie said.
“No, don’t tell me you saying we give the fucker first shot,” Linney said.
The little detective shrugged. He poured himself a cup of coffee. During breakfast, he checked his watch repeatedly, and finally made a phone call. He rented a Land Cruiser to serve as an OP, then called Fat-Fat in Brooklyn to offer him money to drive it up from the city. The big Korean had already gone to Venezuela; his answering machine had a message suggesting to call back next month. Guthrie grumbled for several minutes. Without Fat-Fat, he was forced to call Wietz, who had quit working for him before the Christmas holiday. After a short conversation, she agreed to drive the Land Cruiser up to the park with a load of surveillance equipment, but the little detective hadn’t wanted to ask.
Little Prince crawled from the backseat of his Escalade, ate a breakfast of champions—candy bars and cola—and nosed out Guthrie’s plan for the day. A stakeout rubbed up the young man’s impatience, but Linney gave him a long, slow walk and lecture. Vasquez kept quiet. Waiting didn’t suit her any better than it suited the young thug, but she had already seen it produce results. Real life just didn’t rush along as fast as a one-hour TV show.
By lunchtime, Wietz found Blue Ridge and called for better directions to the campsite on the mountainside. The clouds were gone and the sunshine was bright. The Land Cruiser nosed up to campsite number three like a sleepy cow. Wietz parked, then opened the side door so she could roll her Ducati down a two-by-ten from the cabin behind the driver’s compartment.
Wietz was a slim young woman about a decade older than Vasquez, with dark hair cut shorter than Sand Whitten’s. She had a cocky bounce in her stride. She took a quick look around the campsite while she pulled on her riding leathers. She had to go back to the city to get some sleep. She was watching a car lot in Brooklyn, waiting for some hit-and-run thieves; that kept her busy at night. She spent her longest looks on Vasquez and Olsen, then had a brief conversation with Guthrie before she rode back down the mountain on her motorcycle.
Guthrie drove the Land Cruiser down the mountain to the camper park. He made a circuit of the park, searching for the site they’d rented. One looping road surrounded a grid of dusty dirt roads, with the campers jammed close together. Suburban trailer parks had more privacy. Unevenly spaced oak trees provided pools of shade, but there were no lines of hedges or other windbreaks. In the front, Winnebagos lined up as neatly as the infield at a racetrack. Smaller campers mixed under the trees with pop-ups surrounded by crowds of kids. Farther from the entrance, the campers became old and ratty, often no more than a dusty chrome bubble fit to be towed behind a station wagon or light truck. A pair of square bathhouses squatted on concrete pads to one side in a tangle of pine trees. The early-morning arguments about Gagneau had been wasted. By the time Guthrie found the site and parked the camper, he had rolled slowly along every road in the park. The black Volvo was gone.
The little detective ignored complaints for a half hour while he arranged surveillance equipment inside the big Land Cruiser. A tinted cupola behind the driver’s compartment gained a hastily built ledge for the cameras; he spiraled the wires into a thick cable stretching to an array of monitors and recorders in the middle cabin. He held back a handful of wireless cameras to be positioned and tested at night in the trees around the Land Cruiser.
By the time Guthrie finished, Little Prince’s complaints were sullen silence and stormy looks. The little detective made a cup of coffee and sat down, watching the young man. The veterans waited uncomfortably. Vasquez sat in the driver’s seat of the camper and looked from the window at two old couples in nylon stretch pants playing pinochle at a folding table.
“I know he went back to the city,” Guthrie said.
“So I doubt you expect we’ll pick him up with these cameras, then?” Olsen asked.
“I’m not gonna play stalk with him in the city, Greg. He’s gonna be looking for you, or setting something up. When he gets tired of that, he’ll come back here. We got his bolt-hole, here. If we chase him in the city, it’s gonna be who spots who first. I ain’t gotta roll them dice.”
“How long do we wait, then?”
“Until I got him,” Guthrie said. “This spot right here, I think I got a trick that puts him away. Just be patient. Anybody wants out, now would be a good time.” He looked pointedly at Little Prince and stirred his coffee.
“No, man, I good,” the young thug growled, but he stood and stomped from the trailer. The cheap door didn’t make a very satisfying slam behind him.
* * *
Once the detectives settled in to watch, the camper park seemed quiet around them. Retirees played slow card games and dozed in the sunshine. Busy mothers hustled strings of kids along the assembly line of nature walks. Orderly leisure kept the wilderness around them as antiseptic as a suburban living room. Even the boys were neatly collared and chained by game machines; they formed silent circles where movement consisted of fingers trembling on buttons, and shrugs of triumph or disgust. The detectives were trapped inside the rented trailer. Only Little Prince could go out without wrapping up in hat and glasses. Everyone else played solitaire, drank coffee, or cleaned and loaded weapons.
As the afternoon declined, the suburbanites lit charcoal grills and sprayed bug repellent. In the back of the park, bearded men stacked council fires. Rusted cars roared to life and prowled around the park like muscleheads strutting the beach. Before she heard the engines purr, Vasquez pegged the heaps for scrap and wondered why the sunburned men bothered to lift the hoods and tinker. While the retirees settled down for radio shows and packaged dinners, guitars appeared around the bonfires. The young Puerto Rican watched continuously, fascinated by the transformation.
A few youngsters slipped over from the suburban campers, with furtive backward glances like Middle Americans crossing railroad tracks, but they hurried back before full darkness. Dancers that began at one fire wandered to the next to throw bottles in drinking contests. Their drunken choruses were audible at a distance. Pots swung above the fires, tended as carefully as newborn babies. When the stars came out and the men were drunk, they fought like tomcats. Insults and wars of words were followed by punches, curses, dire threats, foot chases, and thrown rocks, before being settled by the intervention of women. The warm night wrapped around them like an endless velvet blanket.
Guthrie slipped
from the camper when the air cooled. People were still gathered around the fires, but they had mellowed into peacefulness. Quiet music and storytelling had replaced dancing. The little detective climbed trees and placed his cameras, and Vasquez told him what she could see as he adjusted each placement. At the back of the encircling road, where the Volvo had been parked, two old chrome trailers sandwiched a large new towed camper. He figured the new camper for Gagneau’s. He placed two of his four cameras to watch it.
Parked beside one of the old trailers, in front of a small mountain of pallets, a rusted tow truck nestled in a bed of weeds. Like a shadow, Guthrie slid over and filmed the license plate. Little Prince hadn’t been able to get it from the road. On the Internet, they discovered that the tow truck had a salvage title originating in Louisiana. The owner, Oriel Robataille, had no driver’s license.
By morning, the waiting drew the watchers’ nerves thin and tight like wires. Every movement drew attention and comment. Little Prince kept his angry glances hidden behind dark glasses, but his mood was infectious. Arguments he had with Linney didn’t reduce the pressure, because he didn’t trust Guthrie. The little detective spent his time playing solitaire, watching the video monitors, and using the phone. Linney and Little Prince ate peanut butter sandwiches at lunch while listening to Guthrie recruit Joe Holloway, one of the house detectives who’d worked with Henry Dallen. The little detective wanted to bring him up to join the surveillance and was pulling on the idea that the house detective would get to take Dallen’s killer. Little Prince listened with unconcealed disgust.
“Fuck it, then,” Linney said after watching the young thug across the table for several minutes. “Get out. Don’t be back. I heard and seen enough of this to the point where I ain’t dealing with no more bitch shit.”
Little Prince seemed surprised for a moment. “No, fuck this. This slow-ass soft shit has got me tripping, and it about over. You forgetting you ain’t the only one got something in this—”
“And what? Moms took you in, so you feel some kind of way. That don’t give you rights to blow this.”
“Blow what? The plan? I don’t see nothing but some soft motherfuckers sitting around waiting on a car to roll back down the block. The fucking car ain’t been here since that night. I could have every set in the city scanning the bricks for the motherfucker right now. That’s where he at, and that’s where we should be.” Little Prince shot a venomous glance toward the back. Guthrie was laughing into his telephone.
“You just as stupid as them motherfuckers I made you leave in the city. Wild West and Drop couldn’t find they ass. Soft?” He looked at the driver’s compartment, where Olsen sat in the passenger seat, daydreaming through the windshield. “You too used to that street shit, Prince. You ain’t know what hard is. Ain’t emptying a clip at some motherfucker running down the bricks. What I’m thinking, since you pressing the issue, is that some stupid motherfucker done slipped when they came in here and got the tags, and he’s on we know about this. That’s what I’m thinking, and I’m kicking myself for using stupid motherfuckers to do a man’s work. If I wasn’t holding you back, you would’ve rolled out there last night flashing them silly-ass gold teeth and spit everything you know as soon as you drunk and looking to impress some bitch over there.”
“Fuck you!”
“No, fuck you. How many fuckers you killed, Prince? How many? Ain’t know shit for sure because you ain’t never been by yourself. Always three, four stupid motherfuckers throwing shots. Whose body? Every stupid motherfucker claims it at the same party. You lucky you ain’t in prison. That been what Moms talked about, worrying for your stupid ass. What’s worse? I put you there, from following me. I done told you about Slip. We gotta get lucky. We gotta catch him slipping, or that fucker gonna run up the score.”
The young thug was quiet for a minute, his eyes dropping to study the narrow tabletop. “What you even call me for in the first place?”
“’Cause I need your eyes,” Linney said. “But I need your brains, too. You gonna have to think, Prince, and leave that street shit behind. This a new world you seeing, and maybe it a chance for you to come on up.”
“I ain’t going in no army.”
“I ain’t said that.”
“Then you ain’t said nothing.”
Linney snorted. “This ain’t time to build, if you ain’t seeing the foundation around you.” The dark veteran laid out another slice of bread and twisted the lid from the peanut butter.
“All right,” Little Prince said. He stood up and dug the keys of his Escalade from his pocket. “I gonna be back.”
“Be sure to leave that bitching with some sisters, then.”
“Fuck you.”
After the trailer door clicked shut, Olsen asked, “So you don’t think that’ll turn into a problem, then?”
“No,” Linney said. “Child just got too much knowledge, without enough reality.”
The rented camper seemed quiet and empty with Little Prince missing. A lazy summer afternoon drifted past the windows, livened only by an argument from the two old couples angry about a pinochle game. The cards waited on their folding table until they returned with lemonade and shrugs. The dog days were over, but the summer was still hot. The black Volvo almost slipped past them without being noticed, even though they could watch a long stretch of the encircling road from their front windshield. They rushed to the windows, staring, and then to the monitors. They watched the Volvo park in front of the overgrown tow truck. A small dark-haired man climbed out and stretched. The veterans agreed that the driver was Gagneau. He walked smoothly over to the door of the large trailer and went inside without knocking. The killer was home.
Olsen and Linney began strapping on holsters, but Guthrie stopped them. He wanted more patience, because he had more backups to place. First, he called Joe Holloway again. He and David Lieberman had agreed to come up from the city for a grab. Lieberman hired on at the law firm after chasing bail jumpers for several years, when he was ready for a slower job. Guthrie expected they could help corner Gagneau.
The little detective didn’t mind a risk that Gagneau would drive away before they were ready. Clean beat fast on takedowns, and he felt sure Gagneau would keep returning to the camper park, even if he left again. Another more important piece of his plan remained in the city. Mike Inglewood owed him an old favor; he burned it by asking the NYPD detective to come up to Essex County. The phone conversation was short and simple; Guthrie asked him to take lost time to come up and talk him through a personal problem. A pause threatened after Guthrie finished, but then Inglewood’s response was clear: “I’m on the way.” The little detective grinned as he turned off his phone.
Before nightfall, everyone was assembled. Gagneau joined the crowds at the fires while they waited; Vasquez and the two veterans spied on him like suddenly avid bird-watchers. The house detectives didn’t press for an explanation after Guthrie told them he was still waiting for another man. Seam jobs were tricky, but they were also common enough in divorce and custody cases. Private detectives caught plenty of dirty work. After Inglewood arrived, Guthrie pitched his evidence with a delivery as smooth as Sandy Koufax’s. Inglewood was the insurance policy, and his part was simplest. He would watch the monitors and then call the police if Gagneau fired shots.
“You know, Guthrie, you’re maybe a little bit crazy,” Inglewood said after he listened to the plan.
Guthrie shrugged. “Your boss down in the big building don’t want him, and those people in Virginia don’t believe he exists. What else am I gonna do?” he asked.
“I’m just saying maybe you would try something different if you were the one gonna knock on the door,” Inglewood said. He looked at Olsen and pushed his taped-together glasses back up his nose. “Right?”
The big blond man tightened a strap on his bulletproof vest. “You bet,” he muttered.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Gagneau floated around the camper park like a windblown leaf. He swirled circles
around each bonfire, pulled by conversations, food, and drinking. The night darkened while they watched him, though Olsen and Linney warned the others that Gagneau wouldn’t settle for sleep until the small hours. Early in the vigil, Inglewood saw their quarry for the first time, standing in firelight, arguing with a woman. Gagneau pushed her away and then she screamed at him until he drifted away to another fire.
Inglewood looked around at the other men in the camper, making incredulous gestures at Olsen, Holloway, and Lieberman, who were all big men. “That guy’s about your size, Guthrie,” the NYPD detective said. “You called enough plumber butt up here to surround him, you think?”
“If you come along, we might be able to box him in,” Guthrie said.
“With these feet? That guy’s too quick; he’ll just get by me.” Inglewood slumped on the bench seat, staring at the monitors.
The displays didn’t cover the entire camper park. Guthrie hadn’t installed that many cameras. Vasquez went from window to window with video binoculars to watch Gagneau in the blind spots. The trailers in the back near the tow truck had the best coverage; two cameras crossed over them. They watched as the nightly celebration slowed.
Gagneau went in and out of his trailer a few times, and once, the young woman he had argued with tried to follow him inside. Another screaming fight ensued, until an older couple pulled the young woman away. The older man stood quietly outside afterward, looking disappointed, his hands on his hips. He had a bushy black beard and a chest like a beer cooler, without a belly beneath it. At 4:45 A.M., Gagneau disappeared into his trailer and didn’t return. Guthrie watched the clock for a half hour, then was satisfied.
The early morning felt cold after hours spent cramped in the trailer. A slice of moon lit the ground enough to keep it from disappearing beneath their feet. The watchers looked like a string of shadows; Guthrie threaded them between campfires and trailers to avoid sleepy people. On the monitors, filters made the images bright, but the ground around Gagneau’s trailer was dark. The nearest campfire was about forty yards along the encircling road, closer to the front entrance of the camper park. The little detective sent Linney and Vasquez behind the trailer, and the rest paused to allow them to settle.