Nick had written about citizens being wounded by officers reacting to unpredictable and quick movements. He’d also written about cops being shot during traffic stops. Both sides needed to know what the other was doing.
He opened the door slowly and then pushed his upraised hands out first and then stood.
“Come around to the front here, please,” the officer to the side said and Nick followed the instruction, only glancing at the cop standing behind him.
While Officer One ran his flashlight beam over Nick’s clothes and finally his face, he could see Officer Two doing the same kind of search of his car interior.
“License, sir?” Officer One said.
“I’m gonna get it out of my front pants pocket. OK?” Nick said before reaching. He had always kept his wallet in his front pocket since some street hustler had tried to pick it one day. And he knew reaching oddly into a waistband area was a motion that would surely agitate a cop.
The guy nodded and Nick took out the wallet and opened it away from his body and slipped out the license and handed it over. The officer looked at the license and then at his partner and said, “Mr. Mullins, may we look in the trunk of your car, sir?”
“Yeah, sure, no problem,” Nick said. “The button is right there on the left of the dash and the keys are in the ignition.”
He turned his head to watch Officer Two lean in and take out the keys and then walk around to the trunk. Officer One said nothing and while they waited Nick took in the uniform badge and seal on the officer’s shoulder. Fort Lauderdale Police Department. He knew that this was officially their jurisdiction, but had never even seen a sector car in this area before. A pair of cops doing foot patrol was way unusual, Nick thought.
“OK, Mr. Mullins,” Officer One said after getting an all-clear sign from his partner, who slammed down the trunk lid. “Can you tell me, sir, why you’re parked here so early in the morning?”
“Actually, I’m working on a story. I’m a reporter for the Daily News and I’ve got an early appointment to meet a guy here.” Nick nodded toward the buildings across the street. “And I usually show up early to, you know, go through the questions I’m gonna ask and stuff.”
“Yeah, OK.” Officer One was listening and looking down again at the license. “I was in on that plane crash over at Executive Airport back in August. I was one of the first units responding and you interviewed me.
“Larry Jacobs,” Officer One said and stuck out his hand.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Nick said, pretending he recognized the guy, but definitely remembering the crash. A small plane nosedived right after takeoff and went face first through the roof of a car repair shop. The pilot was thrown through the windshield and then the plane engine crushed him right in the center of the repair bay.
“Grisly scene, man,” Officer Jacobs said.
“Larry, yo,” Nick heard Officer Two say from behind with an impatient tone.
“OK, Mr. Mullins. You’ll have to move the car, OK? We’ve got a cordon going up because the feds are doing some political dog-and-pony show a few blocks down and they’re setting up security. OK?”
Nick looked around and said, “Yeah, sure. No problem. Probably why my guy is late. I’ll just get him on the cell and, you know, reschedule or something. I didn’t realize they were doing anything this far from the convention center.”
“Well, they were keeping it under wraps,” Jacobs said. “But I’m surprised you wouldn’t know.” The officer attempted a wink, but Nick’s head had already gone elsewhere and he just waved as he got back in his car, took one more look at Walker’s empty spot and drove away.
Two blocks away, Nick pulled over and parked in a coffee shop lot that was still empty and stared at his cell phone, thinking. I’m surprised you didn’t know? The cops always figure reporters know everything. Not so. But photographers usually do. He dialed Susan’s cell number and despite the hour, she picked up on the second ring.
“Hi, it’s Susan.”
“Well, good morning, early bird,” Nick said pleasantly.
“My ass,” she grumbled back.
Nick smiled. This was the stuff he’d miss.
“What’s up, young lady?”
“Goddamn early assignment,” she said. “But what’s up with you, Nick? I heard you cleared out your desk. You get that job down in Miami?”
“No. No. I think I’m getting out of the business,” Nick said.
“No shit! Good for you, Nicky,” she said. “Man, I’m gonna be the oldest one on this beat before long.”
“So what’s going on this morning?” Nick said, getting to it.
“You know. Some gig that has to do with that OAS thing down at the convention center. It’s all that hush-hush stuff. We have to meet them at the center and then they’re going to drive us to some secret location to shoot some VIP hand-grab photos.”
“Is it the Secretary of State?” Nick said, working.
“I gotta figure. That’s the biggest face down here.”
“Is it up north of the center? Like, by Tasker Street? ’Cause I got stopped up here by a bunch of security guys doing a sweep.”
“Could be, Nick. They’re not telling us anything yet,” Susan said. “But why are you poking around if you quit?”
Nick didn’t answer.
“Ha!” Susan laughed into the phone. “Can’t get it out of your blood, eh, Nick? Not even for a day.”
“You know everything, Susan,” he chided back. “Have a great morning.”
Nick’s next call was to Hargrave.
There had to be a reason Walker hadn’t shown for work. The son-of-a-bitch hadn’t been late yet. It was part of his goddamn parole agreement. He was breaking his parole!
Nick fumbled while punching in Hargrave’s number and got one of those high-pitched three-tone wailing sounds in his ear and cursed. Then he stopped, laid the phone in his lap, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Think it through, Nick, he told himself. So Walker’s late. Lots of possibilities. What were you going to say to the guy anyway? Hey, duck, you’re gonna get shot! Or maybe you were going to just sit there and watch him get shot? Watch the man who killed your wife and daughter bleed out on the street? If Redman is going to assassinate the guy because he has deluded himself into thinking you are his so-called spotter, why not let him? If he thinks he owes you by giving you this retribution, then maybe he’s a better man than you are.
He opened his eyes, took another deep breath, dialed Hargrave’s number and waited.
“Hargrave,” the phone said.
“It’s Nick, Detective.”
Hargrave pulled the old no-question-no-answer routine that so many hardass cops seemed to work at and remained silent.
“I was calling to tell you that Walker didn’t show up for work this morning at his usual time,” Nick said. “Did you by chance warn him of the possibility that he could be a target after we talked last night?”
“A target? Well, I didn’t really get that far,” Hargrave said and Nick thought that was going to be it until he continued. “But I did get some intelligence that he left his house this morning in his truck at six.”
“And where might this intelligence have come from?” Nick asked.
“I stopped him in his driveway,” Hargrave said. “He is one ugly guy, by the way.”
“Tell me something I don’t know, Detective.”
“I informed him that the Sheriff’s Office had reason to believe that he may be in danger and told him maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea to go to work today.”
“And?” Nick said, feeling the heat of anger crawl up his neck.
“He asked for an explanation and as soon as I got to the part that had to do with you, he told me to fuck off and move my car out of his way.”
Nick stayed quiet.
“Frankly, I don’t need that shit,” Hargrave finally said. “Even if you’re right about Redman wanting to kill this son-of-a-bitch, I don’t need it.”
Nick wanted to sa
y he agreed and just walk away. But somewhere in the last few days the story had changed for him. It was now more about saving Redman from himself than it was about saving his targets.
“Well, Walker never showed up here.”
“I know,” Hargrave said. “I’m watching his truck from four cars back. We’re stopped at a roadblock to warehouse row, they’re checking all I.D.s of people entering because of some federal action at a Cuban nursing home that’s supposed to go off at nine.”
“I heard,” Nick said.
“Oh, really? Fitzgerald told us it was supposed to be a need-to-know deal, highly secretive.”
“Yeah, well, what good is a photo opportunity like that if you don’t tell the press?” Nick said.
“Yeah, well, if that info is floating around, Fitzgerald’s not going to be a happy man,” Hargrave said.
“You talked to him?”
“Right after I hung up with you last night I called Lieutenant Canfield. Then he patched together a conference call with Fitzgerald. The guy sounded hinky. He was under the gun because they got some kind of intel that this sniper they’re looking for is definitely a foreigner and has been in the country doing one of those sleeper things, laying low, for a year.
“But that obit of yours with the National Guardsman’s dad blaming the secretary for his kid’s death might have creeped him out. They actually ran some kind of itinerary on Redman’s movements over there and he might have spent time with the dead kid’s unit. You didn’t know that too, did you, Mullins?”
“No,” Nick said. “But doesn’t that say something to you, Detective?”
“Like too many coincidences?” Hargrave answered. “Yeah, it talks to me. But I get the feeling Fitzgerald is sticking with the foreigner-on-our-soil theory.”
“But what do you think? Who’s Redman’s next target?”
“I already told you. I’m on Walker’s ass right now,” Hargrave said. “But you must be close by if you know he’s not at work yet, Nick. So where exactly are you calling from? And what the hell are you doing?”
Chapter 33
Michael Redman lay with the hooded binoculars up to his face for forty-five minutes, but still his eyes were not tired. His eyes had never been tired. He could hold this position, prone on the roof, forever if he had to because if that’s what had to be done, he would do it.
A week ago Redman had followed Mullins one morning and tracked him. He thought he might approach the reporter. Let him know what his stories had meant to him, how he’d planned this out for a year, how he was going to be the sword to Mullins’s pen.
But he’d held off and tracked Mullins to this street and then watched as the reporter tucked his car in behind a trash Dumpster and then just sat there. Redman had been intrigued by the behavior. Maybe Mullins was working some investigative story. Maybe he was having a liaison with some woman. Redman had read about the accident that killed Mullins’s wife and kid. It made sense that the guy wouldn’t be shacking up with a new lady in front of his remaining daughter. Mullins was stand-up.
Redman had watched the reporter until a Ford F-150 showed and parked in front of a tool shop. The driver, dressed in a work shirt and six-pocket fatigue pants, got out and unlocked the shop. Redman scoped Mullins at the same time and could read the hardness in his face. This was who he’d been waiting for. But once the mark was inside, Mullins simply waited a few minutes and then drove away.
Intrigued, Redman stayed. He had no deadlines. His was a patient study of people and what they did or did not do. In an hour the street began to fill with traffic and working men and women and Redman was about to slip away when the man Mullins had been watching reappeared from the shop, got into his truck and left. Maybe it was the bush pants that caught his attention. Military? Ex-military like himself? Redman trailed the mark first to a coffee shop and then to a liquor store. When the man emerged from the store with a small brown paper sack Redman watched him climb back in his truck, unscrew the top of a pint to take a snort and then slide the bottle into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants before closing the car door and driving away. Nine-in-the-morning boozer, Redman thought. And a secret boozer, at that. He took down the license plate number to check. It was never a bad idea to know the players. It was only later, when Redman tracked the name of the plate owner, that he found another name to add to his target list.
This morning at seven he took the position he’d found that week and was now scanning the street below. Traffic was again building, but there was a difference in the pattern. He tilted his binoculars up to sweep farther down the sight line and saw that some kind of barricade had gone up three blocks south. Uniformed police officers were manning the orange-striped sawhorses, but he could see that they had their arms crossed and were talking out of the sides of their mouths to one another, the classic sign of guys who were doing a special detail job, not really giving a shit because it wasn’t their beat. Inside the barricades there were some unusually expensive-looking cars parked in an area where they didn’t fit in. Some dark-colored Ford LTDs that Redman knew from experience were the car of choice for the feds.
He swung the glasses back down when movement in the kill zone caught his attention and he saw Walker’s truck turn onto the street and pull into the same place where he’d parked before. Redman set the binoculars aside and pulled the stock of his sniper rifle close to his shoulder and used the scope to zoom in. Walker got out of the truck. He was dressed the same way as before, uniform shirt, cargo pants. But today Redman could tell by his body movements that the target was agitated. Walker stepped out into the street instead of going straight into his building. He looked south toward the barricades for a moment and then swatted the air with his left hand as if to say, Fuck it, and then turned and went inside. Redman allowed it. That was not the shot he wanted. That was not the statement. He would wait. If he was the study of human behavior he thought he was, the guy would return and the plan would go down with perfection.
Nick was scrambling, working the numbers. What the hell had Canfield said when Nick was doing the SWAT story? When Redman worked SWAT, six hundred yards was his optimal sniper range, the one he felt most comfortable with.
He left his car at the coffee shop and walked back into the area, taking the back alleys and parking areas, the ones tucked behind the warehouses and industrial shops and delivery bays. He thought about Hargrave, tailing Walker. The detective would be watching from ground level. But Redman would be up high, like any good sniper. And that’s where Fitzgerald’s boys would be looking too if they were worried about a legitimate assassination attempt. But would they come this far out from the nursing home? This was way too far, probably a thousand yards, for even a great sniper to take a shot at the secretary. Nick was working the numbers. He settled on the block that figured to be six hundred yards from Archie’s front door, give or take. From behind the buildings he climbed up a utility ladder like the one he’d made his move on at the very first shooting site across from the jail. The top of the building seemed clear when he poked his head over the roofline. No man lying prone at the edge walls. No one dressed in black. He duck-walked to the front edge and took a bit of cover next to a metal container the size of a squared-off suitcase and snuck a look over to the street below. He could see Archie’s green door across the way, but it seemed impossibly small. How the hell could anyone hit even the door from here, never mind put a bullet in someone’s ear? He looked up the line, farther south, and started to retreat. But when he used the container to push himself up, the box gave way and tipped sideways, clunking over and making a racket. Nick again ducked down, softly cursing. He stayed silent and unmoving for a full two minutes and then carefully shifted around to look at the box. He had inadvertently knocked over the cover to a video camera that was wired onto the roof to record what was going on in the parking lot.
“Shit. A lot of good that does if a guy with a gun is walking around up here and the camera is looking out below,” Nick said out loud. “Yeah, like anyone woul
d be worried about that but you.” He moved to the back roofline and found the utility ladder and made his way down to the last four feet and jumped to the ground, landing awkwardly with a sick twist of the ankle.
“What the hell are you doing, Nick?” he again said out loud.
He was on one knee, rubbing at the ankle with both hands. He wasn’t sure why, but Nick found himself thinking about Ms. Cotton and her letters. “Forgiveness,” she had said. “What’s in them isn’t for retribution. It’s for your forgiveness.”
Nick looked down at the hand on his ankle and flexed it and then shut his eyes against the memory:
He and Julie, up late. Two days before Christmas. She had joined him at the patio table, the aqua light softening their hard faces but not their voices. They’d been at it for half an hour.
“No, I don’t understand, Nick! Why does your job always have to be more important than our family?”
He had stood up, angry that his obsession had started this all again, the late night on a story, the booze on his breath, the vision of another body swimming in his head. He’d meant to walk away, end it by saying nothing. But Julie’s words stopped him.
“Why for Christ’s sake do you care more about dead people than you care about your own family?”
The sting went through him. Truth? Did she really think that? Did he? When he looked up, his mouth started to open, but Julie’s lips had already formed a hard line. Without a word, she turned and walked into the house and closed herself in their bedroom. The question she asked would be the last words she ever spoke to him. Two days later, she and Lindsay were dead.
Nick got up off his knee and tested his ankle. He blinked the tears out of his eyes and walked south. At the back of the building he’d selected, he climbed atop a stack of metal barrels and then to a fire escape, a rusty contraption that you rarely saw in Florida. Halfway up, he started doubting the possibility that Redman had come this way. The rungs were cracked and weathered by the heat and salt air. The metal had oxidized and Nick’s hands were soon stained a reddish brown from the rust. But he made the top and as at the other buildings he was greeted by an empty expanse of tar and gravel interrupted only by whirring air-conditioning units and no Redman. He again moved low to the street edge of the roof. Nothing. Archie’s green door was closer but untouched, and when he looked south the three-story building next to him was blocking the nursing home building. He scanned the other rooflines. Nothing. No protruding muzzles. No spun-around baseball caps. Nick turned away from the roof edge and reassessed. Think like a sniper. Think like a countersniper. Think like Fitzgerald.
Eye of Vengeance Page 25