P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

She asked if he could give her a precise location. He retrieved his notebook and gave her the GPS coordinates they’d given the helo pilot.

“You have a good night, Just Cam,” she said. “And stay in touch, yes? Of course you will. Bye.”

After he hung up, he remembered that he’d meant to ask her what she had found in Annie’s computer, if anything. On the other hand, that was probably a moot point right now.

The next morning, he inspected the Merc, looking for signs of intrusion in the electrical and ignition systems. He looked underneath, checked the brake lines, fluid reservoirs, the locking gas tank cap, the fire wall, and the entire interior of the vehicle. Then he checked for surveillance tracking devices behind the license plate frames and all the other places where he and his people routinely put such devices.

Then he pulled out the Blaupunkt radio and examined it for “extra” features, such as a second antenna or an additional tiny circuit card. A car’s radio was a favorite place to put a locating transmitter, because it had constant internal power and was hooked to an antenna. He found nothing out of the ordinary. Then he checked the permanently mounted cell phone, but that also looked undisturbed. The police radio was a multichannel transceiver, but it could not access the Sheriff’s Office secure communications system without someone entering a code that changed daily. Because it was a crypto device, it was a totally sealed unit, and there were no signs of intrusions there, either. He checked all the external antennas, looking for extra connections or splices in the antenna cables. Still nothing. He checked the front and rear frames for signs of recent towing. His guys had done that once-picked up a target’s car with a platform tow truck in the wee hours of the morning, taken it to the lab for installation of a surveillance system, and then towed it back to the street lot where the crook had parked it. There were no marks on the attachment points of his car.

He then ran all the same checks on his pickup truck, which was a full-size four-wheel-drive Ford with close to eighty thousand miles on it. When he was done, he sat in the truck’s front seat and thought about what he’d been doing. No signs of anyone screwing around with his rides, unless it had been a really sophisticated job. So that “deputy” talking about his ignition system? That had been a threat, pure and simple. Bellamy’s car had blown up when she’d started it. Yours can, too, partner, he told himself. On the other hand, the ATF report had said they’d found the remains of a timer in Annie’s yard. Their opinion was split: Either the timer had been the ignition device or it had been put into the car to deceive those who’d be doing the subsequent investigation. Some of their people were convinced that starting the car had set off the bomb. In their favor was the fact that the bombers couldn’t have known Annie would go down there at that particular moment. More important, the word circulating in the Sheriff’s Office was that it had been in the ignition circuit. The man last night had kept urging him to take a trip. Okay, maybe he would. There’d been no calls from Kenny Cox asking for details about this case or that, so if there were any loose ends, Kenny was handling them. And like his visitor had said, he was free to go anywhere. The round-the-world cruise might have to wait, but there was no sense in sitting at the wrong end of a shooting gallery, waiting for something bad to happen. He rubbed his chin and felt the beginnings of a heavy beard. He decided to let it grow out-a small statement of his newfound independence. There were no beards permitted in Bobby Lee’s Sheriff’s Office. And he’d stop getting a haircut every ten days, too. Enough of this Marine Corps stuff. He thought about taking up tobacco again, then smiled. It had taken him two years to quit, and there were some fires too dangerous to play with. But first he’d make one important change. He went back in the house and called his local Ford dealership to find out what they had in the way of new pickup trucks.

Just after sundown that day, Cam sat in an old rocking chair in the shadows of Kenny Cox’s front porch. It had cooled off considerably, and he was wearing jeans, a red flannel shirt, his black mountain man hat, and a bulky hunting jacket. He’d driven the old Merc, not willing to let anyone who knew him see him in his new truck quite yet. And his Mercedes was known. He’d passed a Sheriff’s Office cruiser set up as a radar trap while leaving Triboro, and the deputy had waved at him. Just for the hell of it, he’d deliberately misspelled his name on the new truck’s registration papers, hoping to evade the web of curious computers.

He’d brought along his favorite sidearm from his small collection, a replica single-action army Colt. 45. He knew that a single-action revolver would not be very useful in most tactical police situations, but he’d been taught to shoot at a Marine Corps school, which stressed the efficacy of wellaimed fire over the fire-hose approach. Having to pull back the hammer for each shot forced the shooter to slow down and take careful aim. The only things it required when some hopped-up bad guy was shooting at you were a steady hand and unblinking courage. Right now, the big Colt made a heavy, comforting lump in one of the coat’s roomy pockets.

He’d parked the car right where Kenny usually parked his own pickup truck-on the circular gravel drive in front of the house. He wanted to talk to Kenny, not surprise him. There was a sliver of a moon out, and silvery gray clouds were blowing across it in the night sky. The farm consisted of almost fifty acres, most of it bottomland along the banks of the Deep River. The two-story farmhouse was on a small knoll at the back of the property, surrounded by aging oaks and within earshot of the river when it was up and running. Kenny maintained the yard around the house, but the fields and fences had long ago reverted to nature. He could just make out the silhouette of an ancient tractor that was turning into a pillar of rust out in one of the fields.

The house itself was set back nearly a thousand feet from the county road, which gave Cam plenty of warning when Kenny finally pulled into the driveway. The truck’s high beams fully illuminated him on the porch for about five seconds before they were turned off. Kenny got out, closed the door, and came up the porch steps. He was in uniform.

“You didn’t tell me about all the meetings,” he said, stopping on the top step.

“Bureaucratic popularity,” Cam said. “Comes with the private cube and all that extra money.”

Kenny sighed. “You want a drink?”

Cam stood up and followed Kenny inside the house. They went straight back to the kitchen, where Kenny turned on some lights and retrieved a bottle of single malt. He poured them each a measure, handed one glass to Cam, and then hooked a chair out from under the kitchen table. Cam sat down and put his hat on the spare chair.

“One day and you already look different,” Kenny said.

“So do you. Congratulations on the promotion.”

“Very temporary,” Kenny said. “I hope.”

“Maybe not,” Cam said. They both drank some whiskey and stared off into the middle distance. Cam thought Kenny looked tired.

“About the other night,” Cam began, but Kenny waved him off.

“I was out of line,” he said. “You’d just been kicked in the teeth. I had no business being there, or bringing up that… other stuff.” He looked over at Cam. Even sitting at the table, he was still big enough that he had to look down to make eye contact.

Cam nodded for a moment, not trusting himself to speak without saying something stupid. “What’s the word on the bombing?” he asked.