“Will do,” Teagarden said.
Chapter Eighty-Two
Donnursk made a snap decision.
He’d already spotted her pick-up truck in the airport parking lot. Confirming it was hers was easy for an FBI agent. The first commercial flight arrival of the day was still several minutes off.
Yet there she was.
She was stalking the terminal waiting area after arriving on a privately owned DC-3. He decided to lay back. It was what the training manual called “manifest evidence of aiding and abetting.” Maybe it was because of the Adderall tablets that he couldn’t recite chapter-and-verse from the textbook as he normally could. His mind was simply working too fast, overriding all natural impulses to sleep—but that was okay. He could still remember the basics from his Quantico training: “wait…be patient…surveil…observe…photograph and identify any and all collaborators.”
The tenth floor would be impressed if he got more than just Teagarden and his daughter. Killing Teagarden would be easy enough, but it would be far better if he could kill Teagarden, his daughter—and—Ice Skater all in one quick, and very quiet piece of work.
If that happened, the tenth floor would practically anoint him as the chosen one to replace Paula Trippler.
He had no use for McCanliss, but the man was a seasoned veteran of the game. That he’d been so soundly tricked by this arithmetic teacher surely meant that Teagarden had help, including generous financial help at the international level. If he could prove that assistance came from Beijing or Moscow, or better yet—Tehran—he’d be a shoe-in for the top job once they dumped Paula Trippler the same way she’d dumped Walter Natujay.
In the parking lot, Donnursk attached a magnetic GPS tracer inside the wheel-well of Eva’s truck. He returned to his own truck, departed airport grounds and parked on a side road, where he turned off the engine, turned on the GPS tracer, and waited.
Chapter Eighty-Three
McCanliss snapped awake at dawn.
On the morning of his final day, he was awakened by the close buzz of the first airplane bringing more tourists to the southernmost point of the continental United States. Chispa lay next to him on the cramped captain’s bed. She was on her stomach, head turned to one side, her lips contorted into a moist coil of pink. The back of her throat emitted a rhythmic cricket snore as the boat rocked gently where it was moored in stagnant swampy waters of the inner harbor. Her body had two color tones, deep bronze and alabaster white. The latter was perfectly contained within her bikini lines and looked sickly by contrast with the sunbaked brown.
He rose and pulled on his clothes. The Glock lay on the side bureau, next to her silver .22. When he laid his gun there while getting undressed, she laid hers next to it, saying, “Maybe they’ll fuck during the night.”
“Cute,” he mumbled at the time, thinking again how much she disgusted him. “I hope they don’t go off.”
He verified that his weapon was loaded, checked the safety and tucked it where it had always lived, in his belt at the small of his back. Chispa barely shifted when his Glock made clicking noises. The whiteness of her buttocks was padded with fat and cratered with a subdural cottage cheese effect. McCanliss watched, wondering if she would waken. She did not.
Her bureau was a small laminated component built into a recess beside the captain’s bed. He slid open the top drawer: socks. He pushed it back and slid open the second drawer: underwear. He pushed it back and slid open the third: more underwear. It jammed when he pushed it back, making a squeaking noise. Still, she did not wake. He opened the final drawer: two boxes of .22 caliber bullets, an electric vibrator with a bright blue rubbery cap shaped like a medium sized penis, and a toilet kit with a broken zipper that bulged with money.
He couldn’t be certain from that distance and in the faint light, but after thirty years on the job, he’d developed a sense about these things. He snatched a hundred-dollar bill and held it to the morning sun beaming through the small window.
Yep. His instincts had been dead right.
Okay, so she’s got a toilet kit full of funny money. He seriously doubted she was a counterfeiter. That meant that whatever she was doing, she was being double-crossed. They were paying her in bogus bills. It was probably illegal aliens. She probably went out at night in this old boat, maybe thirty miles offshore, picked up a dozen Cubans, then ferried them back and turned them loose on South Florida’s restaurants to compete for busboy jobs. Maybe she double-dipped by driving them all the way to Miami or Lauderdale. If so, that’s probably what the dump truck was for. It would carry a lot more wetbacks than her taxicab.
The question was, did she know she was being paid in phony Franklins? He doubted it. Anybody on the run from Bayonne was too dumb to know if she was being cheated. If you’re going to work the drug trade, smuggle illegal immigrants, cheat the welfare office or run a credit card hustle and end up hiding in South Florida to avoid a grab bag full of outstanding warrants filed by the Bayonne P.D., then you’re definitely scraping the bottom of the barrel. He ought to know, he lived next door in Jersey City where his walk-up apartment had a view of the Holland Tunnel tollgate. It was ugly, but he liked it.
It took only a few steps in his bare feet to exit the cabin. From the rear deck he could see what he had not seen in a drunken stupor the night before. Like her taxicab and dump truck, her boat was an aging hulk. Perhaps forty feet long, it was made of wood and probably dated to the late 1950s. The whole thing consisted of two tiny rooms below the pilot’s cabin, a small sundeck up top, and a compact fishing deck at the rear.
He tip-toed around the narrow edge and scaled the ladder to the sundeck. It was just large enough for a pair of bamboo lounges and a clay pot filled with drooping red gladiolus.
He braced his hands on his hips and leaned back to stretch his spine as the belly of a gray fuselage glided directly overhead on approach to EYW in the morning light. It was a Bombardier Dash 8 turboprop. The noise of the propellers was like a voice from the past. There may or may not be a pilot on board. Aviation had become the perfect nexus of past and future in a single industry with old planes retooled so that software did the flying. The same was happening with fighter jets and trains. Cars and trucks were next. After that, it was anyone’s guess which business would be revolutionized, or what occupation would be rendered obsolete by automation.
They’ll never invent a computer to replace me. There will always be a need for black-ops hitmen.
McCanliss watched the plane’s path from east to west as the computer made a smooth landing, cut the engines and rolled toward the small terminal. He stopped watching when it cruised past the DC-3, parked where he first saw it at the end of the Key West taxiway. And just behind that was the nose of the triangular X-47 poking from the old hangar beyond the swamp.
The presence of the DC-3 meant Pangolin was back from Virginia Beach. Which meant the fox was in Key West to meet with his daughter. Which meant that Durgan—“Dunno”—Donnursk was either in town or close to arriving. And all that, in turn, meant he had to go back to work.
“Time to turn in my retirement papers,” he said. He gave another greedy glimpse at the sky before returning to the inner cabin where he sat on the edge of the bed. Chispa was still asleep. The sharp contrast between bronze and alabaster turned his stomach. Now that he was awake and nearly sober, he questioned his judgment. Was—she—really going to be his last?
Why hadn’t he taken up Svetlana on her offer before he killed her. She would have been more enjoyable. But then, his judgment with women had never been good. As his ex-wife said, “you only love what you despise.” And he certainly despised this woman.
McCanliss withdrew the Glock from the small of his back and tapped the barrel at the base of her spine, the sacrum bone just above the intergluteal cleft. It woke her up. She roused, wiped her face and rolled over. She saw the Glock in his right hand and smiled.
“Well, good morning to you, too!”
He tapped the barrel on her other inverted triangle, the web of deeply black hair that pointed down, toward the delicate labia.
“Hey, you getting kinky on me, Mr. Ice Skater man?” she asked, adjusting her torso, pushing up pillows to support her neck and head. “What the hell’s come over you?”
He shrugged.
“Maybe you need a boilermaker to get your engine started? I’m out of whiskey. I’ll restock later. Meantime, maybe you need some chow. There’s a Cuban diner a couple of blocks away that makes a mean plate of ham and eggs. Serves potatoes and cornbread with plenty of melted butter. You want to get breakfast?”
“No, thank you,” he said. “I’m watching my calories.” He again tapped the barrel of the Glock on the delicate flesh of her pubis. “You need to do the same.”
“Hey, buddy, you didn’t have any complaints last night.”
He tugged a pillow from what had been his half of the captain’s bed and covered her abdomen with it. He pulled up the sides of the pillow and cradled the Glock in the fold.
“I guess you could say, I’ve become the troublesome guy in the back of the taxi. You see, Chispa, this is my last day on Earth.” Her eyes narrowed down like a camera lens. “Yours too,” he said.
“Listen….”
The pillow muffled the noise. It sounded more like a dog’s guttural bark than a gunshot. The bullet pierced her gut and shattered her spine, but did not kill her. He knew she had only another minute to live. Maybe two. Not wanting to risk the noise of a second shot, he did not fire a coup de grace to the head. Instead, he took the keys to her taxi and tossed her cellphone overboard.
From the pier, he noticed the boat’s name painted on the bow in peeling yellow lettering: Beyond Bayonne. He turned one last time to admire the sunrise over the Atlantic.
Chapter Eighty-Four
Rose was weary with fatigue.
He sat in his truck parked near the cemetery where he watched the house on Olivia Street one block away. His eyes were so heavy it was difficult to focus.
Pushing through, he plugged in his laptop to send an encrypted message to Paula Trippler. She’d want to know he was in place after driving I-95 all day and all night in Ice Skater’s truck. He intended to tell her he’d practically broken the sound barrier. If done straight, the drive from New York required a minimum of twenty-four hours. He’d done it in a nearly unbelievable eighteen.
He intended to reassure her that he was ready to complete his first supreme authority mission. He would kill Teagarden, McCanliss, and Donnursk. Her last encrypted communication said Donnursk should be killed—if he gets in the way. That meant he should go ahead and do it. It meant she wanted Donnursk gone because he and Natujay owned the screw-up at the Watergate that had provoked the Metro D.C. Police to question Teagarden’s involvement. Consequently, the tenth floor was frantically trying to figure out how to explain the sniper-shot killing of a congressional lawyer.
Additionally, he needed to reassure her that he’d soon be back with her in the Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters building and her house in Adams Morgan. But he didn’t. He didn’t pass on any information to his boss and lover because he didn’t send the encrypted communication. He didn’t send it because while sitting in the truck and booting up his laptop, he fell into a deep sleep.
Chapter Eighty-Five
“Oh gosh, Eva,” Teagarden complained as he climbed into her pickup.
“Hush, Dad. Just get in, and duck down in the back.” From the front passenger seat, Pangolin reached over and draped a blanket over him.
“My daughter makes a living zooming through the sky in a sexy spaceship, but she drives a rusty old pickup. There’s a psychology at work there. I’m not sure I want to know what it is.”
“I don’t do the zooming, Dad. I only operate the remote. Besides, I have to get around in something. And this old truck is convenient for storing all of Marnie’s stroller gear.”
He was only teasing. He’d been in her truck during previous visits and never lost an opportunity to kid her about it. In the age of expanding solar and battery-powered vehicles, it was a relic of big machinery: a rusting four-door, two-tone green, 1999 Ford F250 Super Duty with a corroding camper shell on the back. She bought it after her divorce when she needed wheels. John Ghent kept his remodeled ’68 Porsche, which was all he wanted in the split. The reason for their divorce was about what he did not want. He did not want a child. Eva did. And that was that.
When the final divorce papers were signed, he kept his classic sports car, his pilot’s job at American Air, and, as they later learned, his girlfriend in Miami. Eva kept the pregnancy and the Conch House beside the Key West cemetery. Marnie would turn three-years-old the same day in late August that Teagarden turned fifty. She had earned the nickname Chopper because of her habit of running in a type of whirligig while spinning her arms, which made her look like an out-of-control helicopter.
“Your mother thought that nickname was too masculine,” he said, adjusting the blanket in the truck’s back seat, as he’d done in the Jeep belonging to the girlfriend of Cynthia’s son. “She preferred you call her grandbaby ‘Princess,’ or ‘Cutie-Pie,’ or something appropriately feminine like that.”
“Dad, we’ve got a lot more to worry about than mom’s sensitivity to nicknames. Besides, when we first started calling her ‘Chopper,’ Mom agreed that it was perfect.”
They drove for a while in silence with the truck windows down. Teagarden inhaled the aroma of salty ocean air carried by the rushing wind. It felt good, but it made him sad because it was exactly what his dog Coconut had loved to do when the windows of his own car were down.
It had been warm in the Northeast where the summer heat hung over the Catskills. He expected it to be much hotter in Key West, where it actually felt about the same, maybe even a little cooler. That must be one of those mysterious climate phenomena caused by the waters of the Gulf and Caribbean. He liked mysterious things, but not mysterious meteorology. Numbers were his thing, and at that moment, the numbers were scary. The most applicable math formula to his current situation was known as the law of diminishing returns. Put too many people on the job and the eventual result is total failure. They simply get in each other’s way. That was the case with Cynthia. Her involvement in his ordeal bore ugly consequences: Danford Shackton was dead and she was in the hospital with a bullet wound to the leg. He suddenly feared that seeking his daughter’s help would cause similar results. In a flash, he realized the ugly truth of his mistake. He should never have come to Key West.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“My house.” He bolted upright.
“Eva, that’s no good. Your house is being watched. Let’s go to some hotel or something.”
“Hey, lay back down! I don’t want to lose you before we get squared away. As you know, I have an attached garage. We’ll be able to enter the house privately. Just stay away from windows and don’t use the phone.”
“Eva, it’s no good. People are trying to kill me, and people around me tend to get killed. I can’t take that kind of risk with you and Marnie.”
“Dad, this works for now. We need to let the Washington angle play out. News reports say there are more members of Congress moving into your corner. They’re on one of those Homeland committees, the one about domestic surveillance.”
“You’re welcome to hide out on my sailboat,” Pangolin volunteered. “It’s just a little twenty-foot sloop, but has all the comforts of home.”
Teagarden knew the idea caught Eva’s attention. He couldn’t see her, but he could feel her looking with interest at the passenger in the front seat. He too liked the idea. All right, he thought—a boat, and with only him on it they’ll all be safer. He didn’t object further about going to Eva’s house because he wanted to see his granddaughter, to hug her and tell her he loved her. He also wanted to figure a way to contact Cynthia in D.C. But after that—he’d go to the boat.
As the ancie
nt Ford pickup maneuvered the narrow streets of Old Town Key West, it was followed several car lengths behind by a truck labeled “Durgan’s Lawn & Garden Service.” When the pickup turned into the driveway on Olivia Street and pulled into the garage, the pursuing truck parked on the south side of the cemetery. On the opposite side, another truck of identical make was already parked under the sheltering limbs of a drooping banyan tree. That one was labeled “Harry’s Heating and A/C Repair Service.”
No one noticed either truck as being unusual. Neither did anyone notice the old taxicab parked near the graveyard’s west gate. Nor did anyone see the man perched in the second floor front window of The Poor House Inn on Poor House Road, binoculars dangling from his neck, a Savage Arms 220 bolt-action sniper rifle mounted on a tripod base at his side, its sleek barrel poking one inch past the sill of the open window.
Chapter Eighty-Six
Chopper fully lived up to her nickname.
She shouted, “Da-Da Tea-Tea, Da-Da Tea-Tea,” as she ran to her granddad while looking like a jet-propelled cartoon character with arms churning high overhead and legs bouncing.
When the rotor-blades arrived at his knees, Teagarden ignored the pain and scooped her up, closed his eyes and clutched the small body wearing only a diaper. During the embrace, he inhaled the aromas of toddler saliva, apple purée, sweet shampoo, and cornstarch powder from her puffy baby flesh—which was also his own flesh. When he opened his eyes, his daughter, the nanny, and Pangolin were all looking on with radiating smiles. For Pangolin and the nanny, it was the outward smile of universal human kindness. His daughter’s smile was deeper, with the inexpressible happiness of generational blood.
“Ella esta muy feliz de ver a su abuelo,” said Pilar, the nanny. “She has been, you know, mucho happy for this moment.”
Flight of the Fox Page 25