P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

The Sheriff normally drove one of those half pickup truck, half SUV hybrids. Cam had tried to spot one of these in the parking lot, but the floodlights effectively blinded him. He drove down two blocks and then began a surveillance circle of the area, looking for stakeout vehicles or any other indication that other cops might be in the vicinity. He looked at his watch. It was almost ten o’clock. He doused his headlights and drove back up the street until he was half a block from the gate into Tilly’s. He pulled over and left his vehicle running, waiting to see who or what might show up. He checked the pager in his pocket to make sure it was on and that he hadn’t missed a message, but it was blank.

After ten minutes, a lone Dodge muscle car came rumbling down the street from the opposite direction and nosed up to the gates. One goon lifted the latch and stepped out to talk to the driver, while the other one came out and went around to the other side of the car, his right hand held inside his jacket pocket. Cam could just make out a white face on the driver’s side, and then there was a mass of bleach-blond hair sticking out the window as a female lifted her head from the driver’s lap. There was much guffawing at the gate and then the first goon waved at the other one to open the gate. The Dodge burned rubber as it leapt forward into the lot. The gate muscle closed the gate again, both of the goons still laughing.

Cam looked at his watch again: 10:00 P.M. There was no way Bobby Lee Baggett could have gotten through that gate by himself, and Cam wasn’t willing to try it without substantial backup. “Tilly’s 10” had been the message. Tilly’s at ten o’clock. Clear as a bell. He decided to wait and watch for another thirty minutes and then get the hell out of there before he attracted some unwanted attention. The patrons of this particular bar would be popping crystal and chasing it with whiskey. They wouldn’t think twice about beating a cop to death, putting his body in one of those Dumpsters, and then setting fire to the Dumpster.

Thirty minutes came and went. He’d watched as a brace of obnoxiously loud Harleys had been admitted, each one sporting a pair of protohumans of uncertain gender. But there was no sign of Bobby Lee or any of his troops anywhere on the street. He checked the pager again, but it remained blank. He checked his cell phone to see if there were messages but found none. At that moment, a fight broke through the front door of the bar, with two bruisers beating on each other with what looked like pieces of furniture. The gate guards watched as more bikers spilled out into the parking lot. Cam saw his opportunity and ordered the dog to lie down. Then he started up his truck and swung it out into the street in a lazy U-turn away from Tilly’s. He left the lights off until he was pointed away from the commotion behind him, then drove down the block and made a right toward the trucking warehouses. He had to wait at a stop sign at the next corner for three big rigs to cross, which is when he became aware that there was now a vehicle behind him. From the height of the headlights, he thought it might be a semi, but the shape was wrong.

As the last truck cleared the intersection, Cam drove straight across, going deeper into the warehouse complex. The headlights followed without so much as a pretense of halting at the stop sign. He gave Frick another down command, not wanting whoever was behind him to see her distinctive head in the backseat of his truck. He turned left at the next corner and drove down the full length of a warehouse that had two dozen trucks backed up to articulating ramps. He could see forklifts working the freight at one end as he drove by. The vehicle stayed with him, and now he thought he recognized the shape of a Suburban in his mirror when it turned to follow him.

Okay, so who is this? he wondered. No signals were being made, and the pager in his pocket should have been buzzing if Bobby Lee was back there. The Sheriff’s Office had some Suburbans, although they tended to favor Ford products. The feds liked Suburbans, he remembered as he made another turn-to the right this time-and sped up to drive down along the back of the warehouse. To his left was a line of trees, and beyond that was the stagnant ditch that had once been Cross Creek. The Suburban stayed with him, going right through the stop sign, just as Cam had done. He knew that the main drag out of this complex would take him back past Tilly’s, and that was a direction he didn’t want to go. He wondered if there was a way to page the sheriff, but he didn’t know any of the numbers. Now that he thought of it, that was odd-the Sheriff had said he wanted the pagers to be a two-way channel. So maybe this page had come from someone else.

He drove down past two more blocks of warehouses and then he had to turn right because the creek and the perimeter road made a dogleg turn to the right. The warehouse parking lots were well lighted and filled with trailers awaiting their trucks. They were also surrounded by high chain-link fences, so he couldn’t duck into one of the parking lots. He turned right again, which pointed him back toward Terminal Avenue. The Suburban stayed behind him, neither closing in nor falling back. At the next corner, he saw a semi rig pulling out of the gates beyond a warehouse’s loading-dock apron. He turned right and went through the gate as the semi pulled clear, ignoring the angry yell from the elderly gate guard. The Suburban had had to stop to let the semi get through the intersection, but it then turned right and came up to the gate as the guard was trying to slide it closed. Cam drove over to one of the empty loading docks, turned his pickup truck around as if he were going to back up to the dock, and then stopped.

There were trailers on either side of him, but he’d left enough room to drive out if he had to. He left his lights on and the engine running. A forklift driver up on the dock backed out of a nearby trailer with a load, but if he saw Cam he paid no attention. Cam saw the gate guard arguing with someone sitting on the driver’s side of the Suburban, and then, to his surprise, a very large man dressed all in black appeared around the back of the Suburban, grabbed the gate guard, and shoved him into the backseat of the Suburban. He then slid the gate fully open and got into the backseat himself, slamming the door shut behind him.

Show time, Cam thought, and there are at least three of them. A driver, someone in the backseat to hold the gate guard, the big guy, and maybe even a fourth in the right front seat. He put his foot on the brake, dropped the truck into drive, and waited as the Suburban came over to where he was parked, stopping about fifteen feet in front of him. All four doors came open at the same time, and as soon as he saw figures in the doors with what looked like baseball bats, he floored it, his truck leaping forward and hitting first the door on the driver’s side and then the left rear door, slamming them into them before the men had gotten clear. He swerved left, stomped on the brake, hit reverse, and this time backed up at full speed along the other side of the Suburban, aiming for the doors on the right sides, although by now the men who’d been getting out were diving out of the way of the roaring pickup truck as his rear bumper stripped the doors right off the vehicle. He slammed on the brakes again, put it in park, opened the front passenger door, and sent Frick out the door with a “Get ’em” command. Then he piled out the other door and rolled under the adjacent semi, pulling out the. 45 as he went and ending up in the prone position behind the trailer’s jack stand.

The shepherd achieved complete surprise, lunging at the nearest of the men on the right side and knocking him down in a frightening display of teeth and growling. From underneath the trailer, Cam couldn’t see the top half of the fourth man, but he could see that he had a baseball bat in one hand and a gun in the other and that was enough. These boys weren’t here to talk. Aiming at the man’s legs, he fired once with the. 45 from under the trailer and saw the heavy bullet hit him in the right shin, causing him to scream and windmill backward toward the loading dock, gun and baseball bat flying. He swung the gun around to set up on the man wrestling with Frick, but the guy was already down on the concrete, trying to protect his arms and face from the snarling shepherd. His bat was lying on the concrete.