Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

There was one spot near the southeast corner of the plant where there was a good windbreak, and for some reason, maybe the chemicals they had in these pipes, the pipes there were hot. So Eddie, when it was his turn to patrol, always headed right for that spot and planted his ass on one of the hot pipes, and then he would sit there and take little hits from his flask and smoke until it was time to head back to the shack.

What the hell? Was that somebody standing there? The guy — he thought it was a guy, a little guy — was just standing there in a shadow between the lights. What the hell was he doing? Eddie waited a bit, figuring the guy was just some bum and he’d haul out his pecker in a minute and take a piss and move on, but the guy just continued to stand there. What the fuck?

Eddie thought about pulling the pistol out of his holster, but to do that he’d have to take off his glove again to unsnap the little metal button on the holster flap. Screw that. He pulled the flashlight off his belt and shined it right at the guy’s face.

It was a kid. A short, scrawny kid with a big honker. Not black. Mexican or something else, and man, did he have a nose on him! He figured the kid would bolt like a scared rabbit when the light hit him, but he didn’t. He just shielded his eyes with his hand.

‘What are you doing?’ Eddie asked.

‘Looking for my dog,’ the kid said.

‘Your dog? At this time of night?’

‘I live over there,’ the kid said, and pointed vaguely behind him. ‘My dog was barking, and when I looked outside to see why I saw him run off. He must have seen something, a raccoon or a possum, and he chased it. He came this way and I just saw him, here along the fence, but now I don’t.’

‘Well, he sure as shit ain’t on this side of the fence,’ Eddie said. ‘Not unless he dug a hole to get under it.’ Eddie shined his flashlight along the bottom of the fence. ‘And I don’t see no hole.’

‘Yeah,’ the kid said. ‘Maybe he went back home.’ Then the kid turned to leave, but before he did, he said, ‘Thank you.’

Nice kid.

‘Hey, what kind of dog was it?’ Eddie said.

‘A German shepherd,’ the boy said. ‘Be careful if you see him. He bites.’ Eddie thought the kid might have smiled when he said this.

It was his fault the boy was almost caught. He hadn’t been watching the guard shack at all. He’d been watching a group of three workers who had left one of the buildings and were working on a pump on the north side of the refinery, and he’d been making sure that the workers didn’t go to the other side of the refinery where the boy was. If they had, he would have called the boy on the cell phone he had given him. The boy had been told that if the cell phone vibrated, he wasn’t to answer it; he was to come quickly back to the car. But he never saw the guard leave the shack, and that was inexcusably careless on his part.

‘You did well,’ he told the boy. ‘Very well. The worst thing you could have done was run.’

He was extremely concerned that the guard had been standing where he was. Previously the guards on this shift had never left the shack near the front gate. And the boy said the guard had been sitting in the shadows, not walking where the lights were, so he hadn’t been able to see him.

‘You still think the southeast corner is the best place to enter?’ he asked the boy.

‘Yes. It’s the shortest route to the tanks.’

‘Well, the guards have changed their procedure since the last time we were here. We’re going to have to come back a few more nights and watch them.’

The boy didn’t say anything. He just nodded his head.

He loved this boy.

DeMarco needed Emma and he needed Fat Neil. He needed Emma because there was something he wanted her to do that he couldn’t. He needed Fat Neil because he wanted to pry into the finances of a United States senator.

Neil was an old friend of Emma’s, and DeMarco had used his services in the past. He called himself an ‘information broker,’ this bland euphemism meaning that if a client was willing to pay his outrageous fees and wanted information on a certain party or subject, Neil would tap into a vast network of contacts to obtain said information. And if he couldn’t obtain the information legally, he would hack into computer networks or place bugs in boardrooms and bedrooms or do anything else necessary to satisfy a paying customer’s desires. Neil worked for both the private sector and the U.S. government, and it was most likely because of his government work that he wasn’t currently in jail. DeMarco assumed that he had worked for Emma on occasion when she was with the DIA, though neither she nor Neil had ever confirmed this.

Neil was a short, wide man with a big head and a bigger ego. His once-blond hair was thinning on top, but what remained he tied into a thin, shaggy ponytail that reached down past his collar. Neil had married not long ago, and DeMarco was surprised that Neil’s new wife hadn’t made him clip off the unsightly extension. Wives can’t resist the urge to renovate their spouses, and Neil was ripe for major improvements. She was managing to get him to dress a little better, though, DeMarco noted. On all the other occasions when he had seen Neil, he had been wearing shorts, beat-up sandals, and a Hawaiian shirt. He must have owned fifty Hawaiian shirts. Today he was wearing a V-neck sweater, a nice pair of gray slacks, and cordovan loafers.

The meeting was being held in Neil’s office because Neil, even though he was the one billing DeMarco for his time, didn’t like to leave his desk. Emma, who was working for free and had come only as a favor to DeMarco, had been somewhat reluctant to attend. She said she was training Christine’s dog to do its business outdoors, and she didn’t want to disrupt the process. DeMarco immediately had a vivid image of Emma wadding up the critter like a bedraggled furry sponge and mopping up the pee on one of her Persian rugs. Fortunately, Emma didn’t like Bill Broderick’s politics and had decided that DeMarco’s problem took precedence over housebreaking Christine’s mutt.

After they had assembled in Neil’s soundproof, electronically impenetrable room — Neil was paranoid that there was someone out there as good as he was — DeMarco briefed them on the few facts he had and concluded by saying, ‘So I have no idea if there’s really some sort of super conspiracy going on here, but there are too many things that don’t make sense.’

‘Such as?’ Neil asked. He’d been only half listening while DeMarco had been talking, busy taking something out of a box.

‘Such as the following,’ DeMarco said. ‘First you have a guy like Reza Zarif killing his family, an act that’s inconceivable to those who knew him. Then the guy whose fingerprint was found on the bullet box conveniently dies in a car accident before the Bureau can talk to him. Next there’s Rollie Patterson, a normally indecisive slug who suddenly decides to take a walk around the Capitol in freezing weather and becomes some sort of take-charge Wyatt Earp when he sees Mustafa Ahmed. Rollie’s actions, just like Reza’s, were out of character and he too died, making it impossible for anyone to question him further. Oh, I almost forgot: Rollie had a newly purchased RV sitting in his driveway.’

‘So you’re assuming that this Rollie person was told in advance that Mustafa was going to try to blow up the Capitol and he was paid to kill him,’ Neil said. Neil had finally managed to extract from the box whatever was inside it, but DeMarco couldn’t see what it was.

‘I’m not assuming that,’ DeMarco said. ‘I’m just saying it’s a possibility. And although I don’t have any evidence to support it, I think something similar may have happened with the air marshal who shot the hijacker. I think he may have been tipped off in advance that Youseff Khalid was going to try to hijack the plane, and just like Rollie he plugs the guy before he can do anything. Or confess to anything.’