by Roger Johns
“I would never have guessed,” she laughed. “So why did you decide to come down here?”
“I almost didn’t, but it was just too disturbing not to take a firsthand look. If I just went with the data, and got it wrong, the cost in money and lives would have been too great.” Mason shifted in his seat, turning away from Wallace, and stared out his window.
“What are you thinking?” Wallace asked, after nearly a full minute of silence.
“You have no idea how foolish I feel. Don and I have been colleagues for years. How could I have missed something this malignant right under my nose?”
“Parents miss things with their kids who still live at home with them. What chance would you have against an evil-genius colleague who was determined to keep things below the radar?”
“This thing has got to be contained. Once it gets loose, the response from the cartels is going to be extreme. People will be sent to steal the method and snuff out anyone who even looks like competition. Killing in the cities, in the most lucrative markets, is going to skyrocket. This is going to be a disaster.” He shook his head, still obviously stunned by the developments. “He must have left signs along the way. I just missed them, plain and simple.”
“Do you think that Don suspects you know he’s here?”
“No. He thinks I think he’s home sick.”
“Then he won’t be worried about being tracked, so there’s a chance he’s still in Bayou Sara and that his cell phone is still on. Call Whitlock, and tell him to get the phone company to look for it.”
“The FBI’s already doing that,” Mason said, then filled her in on his call with his boss. “By the way, where are we going?” he asked, noticing they were in an area they had not been in before.
“I need to deliver the stuff in that bag,” she said, pointing to the grocery bag in the footwell behind her seat.
Mason turned to look at the produce-filled bag. He waited for her to explain further but she remained focused on the road ahead. “To whom?” he asked, his curiosity getting the better of him.
“One of the men in that car, right over there. The one facing us.” She pointed toward a police car idling in the parking lot of a crummy strip center. One-oh-seven was stenciled on the front left fender. During the drive, she had remained alert for one-oh-seven’s periodic location broadcast.
The driver-side window of one-oh-seven was positioned alongside the driver’s window of a second police car facing in the opposite direction. The windows were down and the drivers appeared to be engaged in animated conversation across the three-foot space between their cars. The driver of the car Wallace pointed to was resting a muscular forearm on the bottom of the window frame. He was a beefy, thick-wristed man, with a see-through comb-over hair style. Long-timers on a beat tended to claim the driver’s seat, so Wallace assumed the man behind the wheel was Marcels.
“Please tell me you’re not about to do what I think you’re about to do,” Mason groaned.
“You don’t have to be here, if you don’t want to. See that little coffee shop at the end of the parking lot? If you don’t have the stomach for this, you can wait for me in the ladies’ room.”
“Wallace, this doesn’t seem wise.”
“Look, this shit heel has it coming. He’s been terrorizing those elderly people on Choctaw Ridge. It stops today.” With one hand, she hauled the bag over the seatback into her lap as she steered the car with her other hand.
When it looked like Mason was about to say something, she cut him off. “Is this where you insist on coming along as my backup?” she asked.
“This is where I stroll on over to that ladies’ room you mentioned.”
She reached in the bag and pulled out the receipt and dropped it into the console cup holder next to Mason’s phone. She brought the car to a stop, nose-to-nose with the car driven by her intended target and waited until a what-the-fuck-do-you-think-you’re-doing expression hardened onto the driver’s face. Then she opened her door.
“Wallace?” Mason asked, as she put one foot out of the car.
“Yes?” she drawled, afraid he had succumbed to an impulse to either try to talk her out of it or to go along as her protector.
“If this thing goes south, is there next of kin you want me to notify?” he deadpanned.
She was about to give him a dirty look, but laughed, instead, when she realized he was playing with her. Shaking her head, she climbed out of the car with the bag in her hands and moved into the space between the two cars in front of her.
* * *
The driver’s name tag confirmed that he was her man.
“Officer Marcels, I’m so glad I found you,” she said, noting his pasty complexion and his small furtive eyes.
“I need you to move your vehicle,” Marcels said in the tone they all used to assert control of a situation. Every eye in both cars was riveted on Wallace.
“I’m Detective Wallace Hartman,” she said, showing her badge. “I brought you something. I think you’re gonna love it.” She flashed a saucy smile at the other men in both cars.
“What I’d love, is for you to move your car, like I told you, okay, sweety? Now just—”
“I heard you the first time,” she interrupted, keeping a gentle quality to her voice. “Here you go,” she said, shoving the bag through the open window onto his lap. “Now you won’t have to steal from the poor. Plus, you can get a little more fiber in your diet. You could stand to drop a few pounds.”
An anxious quiet fell over the group.
“What’s in the sack?” Marcels’s partner asked, craning in for a look.
“Fuck off,” Marcels snapped, as he peered into the bag and realized what was happening.
He tried to ram the bag out through his window, but he hit the top of the frame. Some of the vegetables scattered back into his car while others flew onto the ground around Wallace’s feet. A tomato burst against the top of the window frame and gobbets of pink sludge slopped onto the inside of his door.
“What the fuck is this?” the driver of the other car asked, laughing.
“All a y’all just fuck off,” Marcels bellowed. He shoved his door open, trying to pin Wallace between his door and the other car but Wallace shoved back, slamming the door closed and rocking Marcels down into his seat. Shreds of tomato splattered from the window frame onto his uniform shirt.
“What’s the matter? Did I bring the wrong stuff?” she taunted. “Isn’t this what you usually shake them down for?”
Uneasy laughter came from the other officers.
“You fuckin’ bitch,” he hissed, trying to heave his door open again, with the same result as before. “You don’t know who you’re messin’ with.”
“You’re wrong. I do know,” Wallace countered, then waited a beat. “You look like you want to hit me. Go ahead. Hit me, little man.” She leaned forward, hands on her knees, her face looming in his open window. “Go ahead. I won’t tell.”
Marcels just stared at her, his face was crimson with rage.
“What’s the matter? Afraid you’ll get your ass kicked by a girl? And with so many eyes watching.” She paused. “Hey, we’re all brothers in arms. No tattletales out here. Come on,” she said in a quiet, singsong voice. “Hit me, you fucking coward.”
“Stay cool, bubba,” his partner urged. “Don’t let this ragged-out bitch make you do nothing stupid. It’s just noise. Just a buncha bullshit yappin’.”
“Oh, I can just see the wheels turning in that mean little gorilla brain of yours,” Wallace said, her face still framed by his window. “Just remember this. If a dark cloud of any kind should sail into the lives of those people you’ve been thieving from, behind Choctaw Ridge … if any one of them should so much as get a headache … I won’t bother looking for who … I’ll come looking for you.” She waited a few seconds to see if he would respond. When it became clear he wasn’t going to, she stared at each of the other three men in turn. When no one offered a challenging stare she strolled back to her
cruiser.
1:10 P.M.
“Remind me not to get on your bad side,” Mason said, as Wallace started the car.
She waited several seconds, letting her elevated emotions shed some altitude, then turned toward him. “Consider yourself reminded.”
“Aren’t you worried he’ll make a move against you?”
She gave him a quizzical look, as if his question didn’t make sense. “Did you call Whitlock yet?”
Mason was about to respond, when his phone rang. “That’s him, now. Yes, Chief,” he answered. “I’m in the car with Detective Hartman and I’m putting this on speaker.”
“Okay, you two. We got trouble in paradise, so listen up. After your hysterical call this mornin’, Agent Cunningham, I got one of my people to do a little look-see with the phone company, on the off chance Ms. Chapman’s phone might be visible. After your next call, letting me know she appeared to be on some kind of job interview, I should have canceled the lookup on her phone, but it slipped my mind. And, wouldn’t you know, they just got back to me.”
“With what?” Mason asked, impatient with the chief’s roundabout way of speaking.
“Well, long story short, it turns out Carla Chapman’s phone was right here in Bayou Sara as of late this morning. We don’t know where it is now. It’s been turned off. But the triangulation gurus at the phone company tell us a transmission from her phone very definitely originated from here right around eleven o’clock, when you said she would have been in New Orleans getting on a plane.”
“What’s your next move, Chief?” Wallace asked. She glanced over at Mason. The look of dread was back on his face.
“My next move is some heavy-duty dream time. I’m having a colonoscopy. In fact, I’m prepped and on the table, and they’re about to start pumping the happy gas. And my doctor is giving me the same hurry-it-up look I get when he thinks I’m taking too long to sink a putt.”
“Chief, we just finished some business here, and we can be in Bayou Sara in about twenty minutes. Do you mind if we take a look around?” Wallace asked, heading north and pressing hard on the accelerator.
“If you want anything done in the next hour, you’ll have to do it yourself. That’s why I’m calling you now, instead of after this scope job. There’s only three other officers on my force and they’re all committed on some pretty serious stuff. Sophie and Jake are doing a prisoner escort two parishes away, and my only other one, if all’s going according to plan, is eyeballing a pretty nasty group of highly dedicated automobile thieves. At the moment, I haven’t got a spare body to put on this. Just remember. Usual conditions—I get everything you find, and don’t screw anything up. And one more thing. If you end up at Carla’s house, the key to the gate by the garage is in the peonies.”
“Thanks, Chief,” Mason said, ending the call. They rode in silence for a few minutes.
“I know we already went over this but are you sure you want to be in on this?” she asked.
“I’m the cause of this problem. What else would I be doing?” He turned to look out the window. “Any ideas on where we should start looking?”
“Carla’s house, of course.”
“Whitlock looked already,” Mason protested. “She isn’t there.”
“Wasn’t there,” Wallace corrected. “But, forget Carla for a second. Focus on Don. He either sent, or forced Carla to send, that bogus job interview message from her phone. And Whitlock just told us that her phone was in Bayou Sara when the message was sent. That means Don was in Bayou Sara as recently as a few hours ago.”
“But it doesn’t pinpoint his location.”
“It does. There are only two places I would know to look for Carla, once she failed to show up today—her house and the Tunica lab. The phony interview message presumed I knew she was no longer at Tunica. That leaves only one place I’d be sure to look—her house. And since the message was intended to keep me from looking for Carla at all, and since her house was the only place the sender assumed I would know to look, it’s clear to me that the real purpose of the message was to keep me away from Carla’s house, because there’s still something important that’s going to happen there.”
“Someday you’ll have to teach me how you do that,” Mason said. “Are you always so clever?”
“Couldn’t be a local detective, otherwise,” she smiled. “And look, if Don had control of her phone, he had control of her. So he’s not looking for her, he’s looking for Matt.”
“And she’s the bait,” Mason said.
“That means, as recently as two hours ago, Don still didn’t have what he came for.”
“Which means Matt’s still alive. And hopefully Carla, as well.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” she said, as they closed in on Bayou Sara.
Mason called his contact in the Baton Rouge FBI office to let him know Don was probably still in Bayou Sara and that Carla Chapman’s house was a likely location. He gave the man Carla’s address, then he leaned back and closed his eyes.
BAYOU SARA 12:50 P.M.
Carla could barely keep her mind focused on one thought. Whatever Don had given her was powerful and still in her system. Her body had always been resistant to sedatives, but this was something else entirely. Every time she tried to gather her wits she found herself drifting off. Once, though, she had heard him next to her. It seemed like it was just a few minutes ago, but it could have been hours. Her sense of time was too disjointed to tell. She had had enough sense, however, to know that she needed to remain motionless and appear to be still unconscious. Playing possum had been easy. She just let herself slide back down into the darkness. But not all the way.
He had nudged her with his foot, and shined a light in her face, to see if she might be coming around, but she had hidden from him in the welcoming embrace of the drug itself.
Now it felt like he was no longer there. She tried hard to focus on listening, to see if he was nearby, but she could no longer hear him. At least she didn’t think so. After a few minutes, she allowed her eyelids to open just a hair, but for a second, she couldn’t remember why she needed to do that. Then she remembered. She opened her eyes wider and turned her head from side to side. Wherever she was, it was gloomy. She was flat on her back, and she could feel the strapping tape that bound her arms straight at her sides and she could feel more of the tape wound around her ankles. A strip of tape covered her mouth. She tried to raise her head so she could look around, but her head felt like it weighed a ton. All of her did.
Her back ached and the floor was hard. She tried to raise her knees to take the pressure off her lower back, but she couldn’t. She rolled onto her side and looked toward her feet. Don had tethered her feet to a standpipe that ran up through the floor and continued up through the roof above. Slowly, she turned her head and looked around. She was inside a small, closet-sized room. She moved her head some more. The small slatted fanlight in the wall behind her was the source of the gray light. She was in an attic.
She felt herself slipping back into unconsciousness. The effort of rolling onto her side and looking around had been exhausting. No, she had to stay awake. She had to clear her head. She had to get away before Don came back.
Slow, deep breaths. Her shallow breathing while she had been unconscious would have slowed her metabolism of the drug. She had to get it out of her system. Deep, steady breaths. That would speed things up. But soon her rhythmic breathing began to feel hypnotic and she felt herself slipping away again. She switched to sharp heaving inhales, but when that brought on a bout of nausea, she was forced to dial it back.
Finally, the clouds in her thoughts receded a bit. If she could keep her eyes open, she might make it.
Turning her head, again, she spied salvation—a nail head, just barely visible, was protruding from one of the studs in the wall to her left. It was only a few inches above the floor.
Summoning all of her strength, she sidled over to the wall and squirmed until she was up against the nail head. She could
feel the tape near her left wrist catch against it. As she wiggled, she felt the tape start to tear against the sharp metal. She moved as fast as the tape and the remnants of the drug allowed her to.
* * *
Matt jogged up the alley behind Carla’s house. His small pack contained a pistol, a throwaway phone, and a pair of binoculars. He hoped his gimme cap and the heavy-framed sunglasses made him look different enough that neighbors who had seen him in the past wouldn’t recognize him now. He called Carla’s landline. Her outgoing message came on.
“It’s me,” he said in a low voice. “Pick up.” No one answered. Maybe she hadn’t arrived yet. Maybe she had come and gone already. Wouldn’t that be just like her? She’d probably show up early for her own funeral.
Matt counted gates as he moved up the alleyway. Carla’s was the fourth house on the right. He checked the gate to make sure it was locked, then turned his attention to the huge sycamore tree in her backyard. A thick branch ran almost parallel to the fence, extending a foot or so over the top, into the alley. It was too high to reach from the ground, so he pulled a neighbor’s heavy plastic dumpster against the fence and climbed onto the lid. The branch was still nearly two feet beyond his reach. Looking carefully for a spot to grab hold, Matt leapt. He wrapped his hands around the thick branch and swung free for a few seconds.
His jump unbalanced the dumpster. It fell noisily into the alleyway, leaving him swinging about six feet above the ground. He swung his right foot up and over the limb, then wrangled his torso up as well. From there, he stood on the branch, steadied himself, and then walked tightrope style to the massive trunk of the tree. He climbed a few feet higher until he found a place that provided a reasonably sheltered view of the back of the house. Once he knew Carla was inside, he would use his key to get in through the back door. He would strike quickly, recover his property, and move on.
* * *
Through the partially blocked window in the shed, Don could see Matt standing on the limb several feet above. He watched Matt take a phone from his pack and place a call—probably to Carla’s cell phone. After several seconds he saw Matt end the call and make a second call. When that call also went unanswered, Matt stowed the phone and brought out a pair of binoculars and began scanning the back of the house.