Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

So even though the FBI could not prove it — even though the FBI said repeatedly that they could not prove it — the public was convinced that an American Muslim was responsible for the death of a United States senator, a man whose character had already improved tenfold in the hours since his passing.

Mahoney thought about calling DeMarco but decided not to bother. Unless DeMarco could find something in the next forty-eight hours, the Broderick Act was going to become law.

‘Mr Speaker.’

Mahoney turned his head. Aw, shit. His four secu rity guys were jogging across the grass toward him, the Notre Dame offensive line for sure.

They’d found him fast. These guys were good.

‘They blindfolded me,’ Danny said.

‘Son of a bitch!’ DeMarco said, glaring at his cousin.

‘Hey! It wasn’t my fault. I did what you wanted. I got ’em to show me the lab.’

Patsy Hall said, ‘Yeah, but for all you know, it wasn’t even on Pugh’s property.’ She thought for a minute. ‘Was the lab in a cave?’ Looking at DeMarco she said, ‘There’re a couple small caves on Pugh’s land. I snuck in there one night to check ’em out, but at the time they were empty.’

‘You went onto Pugh’s property by yourself, at night , and explored these caves?’ DeMarco said.

‘Yeah. I didn’t have a warrant and I wasn’t going to get any of my guys in trouble.’

Wow, DeMarco thought. Patsy Hall was something else.

Danny said, ‘This place I was in, it didn’t look like a cave. It was man-made. But it was underground. I could tell because we walked down these stairs to get in and the floor was dirt. But the walls weren’t made of rock, like a cave. They were built out of railroad ties, like they dug the space out and reinforced the walls with the ties so they wouldn’t collapse.’

They were in a conference room in Winchester where the DEA had a small field office. They all sat in silence, Danny worrying about his future, DeMarco annoyed at his cousin, and Patsy Hall thinking about Pugh, her lips set in a stubborn line. Hall got up after a moment and opened a file cabinet and pulled out a topographical map that included Pugh’s land. She spread the map out on the table.

‘How long were you driving around?’ she asked Danny.

‘Half hour, maybe forty-five minutes.’

‘Well, which was it? Half an hour or forty-five minutes?’

‘I don’t know! They took my watch when they made me strip.’

‘Shit. And how fast do you think you were driving?’

‘Wherever we were going, it was pretty rough. I’d say less than fifteen miles an hour most of the time, but a couple of times Randy, that asshole, really opened the thing up. Scared the crap out of me.’ Then he added, ‘I mean, being blindfolded like I was.’

‘But most of the time you were going less than twenty?’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

Patsy scratched some numbers on the edge of the map. ‘If it took you forty-five minutes at an average speed of twenty miles an hour, you would have gone fifteen miles. She looked down at the map and said, ‘Shit, if you were traveling in anywhere near a straight line, you’d be off Pugh’s property.’

Danny said, ‘But we weren’t traveling in a straight line. We made a lot of turns. I could feel them.’

‘I know,’ Patsy Hall said, shaking her head, ‘but if you drove that long I can’t establish that you were on his property.’ She stood there a moment, studying the map, tracing a slim forefinger over the heavy black line that outlined Pugh’s land. ‘Could you feel anything or hear anything while you were driving?’

‘Like what?’ Danny said.

‘Like was the vehicle going up and down hills?’

‘Sometimes,’ Danny said, ‘but not big ones.’

‘There’s a train track on this edge of the property,’ she said, tapping the map. ‘Did you hear a train? Or other cars, like you might have been near a road?’

‘No. No noises. It was quiet, like we were deep in the woods.’

‘This is hopeless,’ DeMarco said. ‘Maybe we can set up a delivery right away and get Pugh when he delivers the dope.’

‘That won’t work,’ Hall said. ‘ Jubal won’t be de livering anything. All we’ll get is some mule who won’t talk.’

‘There was one thing,’ Danny said.

‘Yeah, what was that?’ Hall said, obviously not expecting much.

‘Right before we stopped, maybe five minutes before, we drove over something that went bumpitty-bump,bumpitty-bump .’

‘ Bumpitty-bump ?’ DeMarco said.

‘Yeah, like we were going over logs or one of those whaddaya-call’em — cattle guards. It happened twice, right before we stopped. Bumpitty-bump, bumpitty-bump , then a couple minutes later, bumpitty-bump, bumpitty-bump again. Then, a couple minutes after that, we stopped.’

Hall studied the map. ‘Here,’ she said, pointing. ‘This could be it. There’re two creeks running through his place, small ones, no more than two or three feet wide. If I remember right … Wait a minute.’ She went to the file cabinet again, the one from which she’d taken the map. She pulled out an accordion file folder and came back to the table. From the folder she pulled a stack of eight by ten black-and-white photographs.

‘We did one aerial surveillance of Pugh’s farm. I tried to get ’em to park a satellite over his place for a week, but they laughed me off.’ She flipped through the photos, then stopped and studied one.

‘Here. You see that? A little bridge made from logs, and here, about two hundred yards away, is another one. The two bridges are where these two creeks come close to each other and run parallel for a while. So if you’re right about the time it took you to get from the second bridge to the lab, the lab’s probably someplace within a quarter mile of the second bridge.’

‘But which one’s the second bridge?’ DeMarco asked.

‘Were you going uphill or downhill when you came to the second bridge?’ Hall asked Danny.

‘Uh … downhill,’ Danny said.

‘Then this is the second bridge,’ Hall said, stabbing a finger at the topographical map. She looked directly at Danny, her eyes bright, and said, ‘You’re going to have to go in there tonight and find that lab.’

‘Bullshit!’ Danny said.

DeMarco put on the night-vision goggles. The trees in the woods were clearly visible, everything a greenish color. He’d never worn night-vision goggles before — or a military camouflage suit, combat boots, and a bulletproof vest either. And he wished he wasn’t wearing any of those things right now.

Hall said she couldn’t search for the lab with them. She and her guys — a bunch of DEA cowboys who knew how to shoot and sneak through the woods — couldn’t go onto Pugh’s property without a warrant, and they didn’t have sufficient justification to get one. If Danny had been positive he’d been on Pugh’s property it would have been different, but since he’d been blindfolded and didn’t have a clue as to how far he’d traveled, it was impossible to state with certainty where the lab was. Then toss in the fact that the judge would have to accept the word of a convicted felon regarding its whereabouts, and there was no way Hall was going to get a warrant.

So DeMarco and his cousin were on their own. DeMarco didn’t want to go with Danny to search Pugh’s farm, but he didn’t trust his flake of a cousin; he couldn’t put the unveiling of a national conspiracy in the hands of a mafia fence.

Hall and another agent had driven them to the northern boundary of Pugh’s four hundred acres in a black Jeep Cherokee. To reach that spot it had been necessary to go through two pieces of property not owned by Pugh, and Hall had to cut through two barbed-wire fences on the way. Cutting the fences didn’t seem to bother her a bit, DeMarco noted.