Megan Abbott - Phoenix Noir

We notified the phone company of our target lines and anticipated start date, so they could build the parallel circuits for the wiretap. Two days later, they called back to tell us Mike had disconnected his home phone. He’d done it the same day we submitted the affidavit.

Kolchek hung up and sat there, thinking it through. Finally, in an oddly sunny voice, he said, “We’ll bug his house.”

“You don’t get it,” I told him.

“I get it,” Kolchek said. “So? We tighten the circle of who knows what, rewrite the affidavit, wire up his house. Maybe we’ll get lucky. You get any better ideas, let me know.”

I didn’t get any better ideas, of course. And every time I tried to imagine who might be tipping Mike off, I could never convince myself I had the right man. Cavanaugh was the first and obvious choice, given how long he’d stuck up for Mike, but he was a hard cop and I’d seen the betrayal in his face before the Applebee’s job. Besides, like he’d said, fifty cops would vouch for Mike in a heartbeat — any one of them could be our leak.

Kolchek and I reworked the affidavit, kept the wire on the restaurant phone, and asked for three transmitters for the residence — one in the living room, one in the dining room, one in the bedroom — sensitive enough, at ten thousand dollars a pop, to catch voices throughout the house. The judge signed off and Kolchek introduced me to a tech for the county attorney’s office named Pritchard, who’d go in and actually set things up.

“I’ll go with,” I told Kolchek.

“No, I will,” he said. “I’m a pretty good lock pick and we only need two men inside.”

“What about the dog?”

Kolchek cocked his head. “Dog?”

“A white shepherd,” I said. “It’s in the surveillance reports.”

“Right. I remember. What’s your point?”

“I used to work canine. The white ones are unpredictable, you don’t want to go in there alone.” That was mostly crap, but there was no way I wasn’t going with them. I wanted a look inside that house.

The next day, when Mike and Rhonda were at the restaurant, Kolchek headed up their front walk and took a Polaroid, then went to the hardware store, bought an identical door, and set it up in his office, practicing till it took only forty-five seconds to pop both locks.

Meanwhile, I scoped the neighborhood for the best spot to place the undercover van. Mike and Rhonda lived in a mazelike community of town houses grouped in quads, and the geometry of the place was all wrong; there was nowhere within a hundred yards of their unit to park the van and not stand out. Then I saw there was a unit for rent one quad over. We could set up the wire room in there, as long as we kept a low profile.

I hit up Tally’s office for the rent and two days later, when Mike and Rhonda and most of the neighbors were off to work, we moved our guys in. Me, Kolchek, and Pritchard headed over for our entry to plant the bugs, while a ram car took up position on the street to force a fender bender, stall for time, if Mike or Rhonda came back while we were still inside the house.

When we got to the front porch, though, we found a brand-new security gate with two additional locks, barring access to the door. Kolchek just stood there, staring, holding his lockpick tools. “This isn’t happening.” He glanced at his watch and swallowed hard. Inside, the dog was barking like the place was on fire.

I started heading for the back of the house. “Bet you’re glad you brought me along now.”

There was a privacy wall around the patio in back and I scaled it, dropping down onto the pavers. A sliding Arcadia door led inside, with an insert for a doggy door. I got down on the ground, reached through, and flicked aside the dowel lodging the door in place. The dog realized what was happening then, and as I slipped inside he turned a corner and charged toward me, hackles raised, fangs bared.

I reached frantically in my pocket for the syringe of Isoforane I’d brought along to knock him out, only to sink my thumb into the needle. “Goddamnmother fuck !” I played air banjo with my hand for a second, then, glancing up, saw I wasn’t the only one to miscalculate. As his paws hit linoleum, the dog lost traction, sliding toward me helplessly. Stepping forward, I caught him under the jaw with a kick so fierce he cartwheeled backwards.

“Get in the goddamn bathroom!”

The dog sulked off, mewling, as I checked my thumb, hoping adrenalin would ward off any grogginess. Suddenly, I remembered my dream from weeks before — the lonely house, the wounded dog. A chirp from my radio broke the spell.

I clicked on. “Yeah?”

“ We heard that, detective .” It was one of my guys in the wire room. In the background, laughter. “ Punt the pooch — that what they teach you in canine? ”

I switched off my radio and searched out the front door. When I got there I found out the security gate was locked from inside, requiring a key. “This nails it,” I told Kolchek through the grating. “Somebody’s tipping this guy off.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Kolchek whispered, standing exposed with Pritchard on the porch. “Get us inside.”

Kolchek lacked the physique to scale the privacy wall, so I found a window in a small utility room near the back for the two men to crawl through. Once everybody was inside, we headed to the living room to set up shop. Kolchek got busy taking Polaroids of the room so we could put it back the same way we found it.

“Look at this,” I said, pointing to the couch. There were sheets, blankets, a pillow. “Christ, she’s kicked him out of bed. They’re in the middle of another fight.”

“Get to work,” Kolchek said. He was testy and pouring sweat. It dawned on me then that, despite a first-rate mind, Kolchek lacked any serious operational experience. The glitch with the locks had rattled him.

Pritchard hooked up his transmitters to the phone lines. Even though the service had been cut off, the wires still held voltage. We set them up in the three different rooms as planned, and Pritchard asked me to contact the wire room to see if we were live. Only then did I realize I hadn’t switched my radio back on after that crack about my canine prowess. When I flipped the button, a voice came through almost screaming. “ Jesus, Boghossian, where’d you go? We’ve been trying to contact you for ten minutes. The wife’s on her way, just west of Pepperwood. You’re lucky she stopped for smokes. Move! ”

We rushed to test the transmitters through the wire room and got an all-clear. Kolchek’s hands shook so bad from nerves he couldn’t screw the plates back on the phone plugs, so I took the screwdriver from him, told him to pack with Pritchard, I’d close up.

They scrambled out the utility room window and I locked it behind them. Turning back to finish up, something caught my eye, something I’d overlooked before.

On a shelf near the door, a small day pack rested among some other odds and ends.

We had no warrant to search the house or its contents, but I took the day pack down regardless and opened it up: A ski mask. A pair of black garden gloves. A .38 snubnose and a dozen plastic cuffs.

There was a desk in the room and I laid the contents out, retrieved the Polaroid from the dining room, and took a picture. This was a trophy, not evidence — I wouldn’t even tell anybody about it, let alone show them the picture. The whole investigation might vanish down a hole if guys started jabbering. I packed everything up again and put the day pack back where I’d found it, but then my curiosity got the best of me and I searched the desk. In the bottommost drawer, I found a snapshot — Mike with Cavanaugh, up in the mountains somewhere. They were hunting together, carrying shotguns, the best of friends from their smiles. Rhonda, I guess, had snapped the picture. I took another Polaroid. This too, of course, wasn’t evidence, and I told myself it didn’t really prove anything. It was just a reminder — my reminder — of what I might be up against.