Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

‘You’re sure you know how to use a GPS?’ Hall asked Danny a second time.

‘Yeah, I’m positive. I got my hands on one once …’

This meant, DeMarco suspected, that one of Tony Benedetto’s crews had stolen a crate of the instruments.

‘… and I played with the thing for a couple of days,’ Danny said. ‘I know how to use it.’

‘Okay,’ Hall said, and she showed him and DeMarco the GPS unit she was holding in her hand. ‘Here’s the waypoint for where we are now, and here’s the waypoint for the second bridge. When you get to the bridge, start looking for a trail or a path.

Look for tire tracks made by ATVs, places where the grass has been beaten down. Understand?’

‘Sure,’ Danny said.

Sure, my ass , DeMarco thought. Like his cousin was Davy Crockett instead of some fuckin’ New York wiseguy who could barely find his way through Central Park.

Hall pulled a pistol in a clip-on holster out of one of the pockets of the black ski jacket she was wearing and handed it to DeMarco. ‘That’s a forty-caliber automatic. There’re eight bullets in the clip. You shoot somebody, even in the arm, it’ll put him down. Have you ever used a gun?’

‘Yeah,’ DeMarco said. And that was the truth. He’d once killed a man with a revolver. The man had shot at him and DeMarco had pulled the trigger of the gun he’d been holding out of sheer fright and amazingly hit the guy. But the total amount of time he’d spent with a pistol in his hands could be measured in minutes, and the number of times he’d fired one at another person was exactly once. He didn’t bother to tell Hall this. He did ask, ‘Is the safety on or off?’

The agent with Hall muttered, ‘Oh, great.’

Hall shot a shut-up look at the agent and said to DeMarco, ‘Give it to me.’ He handed her the weapon, and she did something to it and handed it back. ‘Now the safety’s off and there’s a bullet in the chamber. If you have to take it out of the holster, don’t shoot yourself in the leg.

‘Oh, and one other thing,’ she said. ‘There might be people working in the lab.’

‘What?’ DeMarco and his cousin said at the same time.

‘Pugh’s cookers work at night, but we don’t think they work every night.’

‘You don’t think ?’ DeMarco said.

‘That’s right. Every couple of weeks Pugh buses in a bunch of people to do things around his place: clear brush, prune trees, whatever. These guys will stay on his property overnight in his barn, sometimes for a couple of nights. What we think is that five or six of the workers are really Pugh’s cookers. They sneak off to the lab in the dark and stay there for a couple of nights and brew his meth, then they leave on the bus with the real workers when they’re done. Anyway, Pugh had a bunch of guys come in a few days ago and they left the day before yesterday, so we’re pretty sure they’re not in the lab now. But be careful.’

Be careful , DeMarco thought. That was just great fuckin’ advice. But he didn’t say anything.

‘So I guess that’s it,’ Hall said. ‘We’ll wait here for you. If you haven’t found the place by dawn, come back here and we’ll try again tomorrow night. And good luck.’

‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Danny said. ‘Aren’t you gonna give me a gun too? I mean, if there’re guys in that lab-’

‘No way,’ Hall said. ‘I shouldn’t even be giving one to your cousin. The DEA’s not supposed to go around arming civilians, and I’m sure as hell not giving one to a guy that’s still under indictment for murder.’

‘But-’ Danny said.

‘No,’ Hall said, eyes like flint. ‘If you’re in danger, call on the radio and we’ll come in and get you. But I hope we don’t have to do that, because that’ll really screw up our chances of getting Pugh.’ Then she laughed and said, ‘Unless he personally kills one of you.’

Yeah, that was real funny, DeMarco thought.

They didn’t make bad time. The good thing about the woods on Pugh’s property was that there wasn’t a lot of brush or ground cover. They had to veer around thickets of trees a couple of times, but Danny, who was in the lead, brought them back on course. Maybe he really did know how to use the GPS.

It took them twenty minutes to reach the log bridge. The bridge spanned a creek that was two feet wide and had carved a shallow gully into the landscape. Leading to and away from the bridge was a trail created by vehicle tires.

‘Which way,’ DeMarco whispered.

Danny pointed.

‘How do you know it’s not the other way?’ DeMarco asked.

‘The GPS. The other little bridge, the first one we crossed over when I was blindfolded, is behind us. It’s that way. So we go this way.’

DeMarco took off the night-vision goggles and looked around. There was no moon, maybe a dozen stars overhead that weren’t obscured by clouds, and it was so damn dark without the goggles he felt like he was standing inside a closet. He didn’t have any idea how the goggles worked, but he was damn glad they did, because if Pugh had someone standing guard, the guard wouldn’t be able to see them unless he was similarly equipped.

‘Okay,’ he said, putting the magic goggles back on. ‘Let’s go.’

They walked down the trail about seventy-five yards and the trail forked.

‘Aw, shit,’ Danny said. ‘Now what? You wanna split up or stay together?’

If Danny had been right about the time, the lab had to be within a hundred yards of the fork in the road. They had radios so if they split up and if one of them found the lab, he could let the other guy know. Nah, forget that, he thought; he didn’t want Danny doing anything by himself.

‘We’ll stay together,’ DeMarco said. ‘We’ll go that way a hundred yards or so and look around for an hour; if we don’t find it, we’ll come back here and go up the other road.’

‘You’re the boss,’ Danny said.

They walked for a couple of minutes. Then DeMarco said, ‘Okay, what are we looking for?’

‘Well, shit, Joe, I don’t know. There’s a door in the ground around here somewhere, I think, and there’s bushes or something coverin’ the door. Probably the best thing to do is just walk around and sniff . The place I was in stunk to high heaven.’

DeMarco went left and Danny went right, noses probing the air like a couple of Italian beagles. He searched for any anomaly on the ground, anything that didn’t look natural. There was nothing. He wondered if he should take off the night-vision goggles and use a flashlight, thinking it might be easier to spot something with the flashlight as opposed to the green color he was seeing through the goggles. They were at least half a mile from Pugh’s house and he didn’t think a flashlight beam would be visible from that distance. He was still thinking about using the flashlight when the walkie-talkie on his belt squawked, a burst of static that scared the crap out of him.

‘What?’ he hissed into the radio. Then he remembered and said, ‘Over.’

‘I found something. Over,’ Danny said.

DeMarco looked around. He could see Danny fifty yards away and he jogged over to him.

‘Look,’ Danny said, pointing to the ground.

Cigarette butts, a lot of them, in an area underneath a good-sized oak. Most of the butts were contained in a rough three-foot circle of ground and DeMarco guessed that the guys who worked in the lab came out here to smoke so they wouldn’t blow themselves up. They’d sit under the oak, puff their cigarettes, squash the butts out near the tree, and then go back to work. So the lab had to be fairly close, probably no more than fifty feet away, but DeMarco still couldn’t see anything with the night-vision goggles other than a fluorescent green forest.