Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“Stop and think about it. Would you do that for me, J.P.? Maybe. I sure hope so. But neither of us will know until the time comes. And maybe I’d do it for you, and I hope I would, but there’s no telling. What I do know is, Homer did it for me: he risked everything he had for me. He was willing to die or spend the rest of his life in the Indiana state pen, all for me. That’s the bravest thing, I think: not to be brave for yourself but for a buddy when it gets you nothing and costs you everything.”

“Homer would be happy that you spoke so well of him,” said J.P.

“It’s the only epitaph someone in our business gets.”

They went quiet for a bit, as Les worked on the Coca-Cola. But Les wasn’t quite done.

“Here’s the other thing. Homer leaps into the car, he’s the getaway driver, and he catches something in the head and it knocks him out cold. Johnny pulls him over and climbs behind the wheel, and he’s the one who saves everybody’s bacon. In less than two months, both are gone. These guys weren’t fools. They didn’t make mistakes. Nothing random was going to get them. They weren’t going to be shot by the kid in the gas station or even get picked up on a drunk-driving charge. So if they go down, they go down because somebody squealed them out. And who would know where they were — in two different cities, no less. Who? Helen, can you answer that? J.P.? Come on, you’re smart, you’ve been around. Who?”

“It doesn’t make any sense, Les. Why would the Italians turn on us? As long as we’re getting the headlines, nobody notices them taking over the wires, the unions, the pictures, the banks even. They need us. That’s why they let us stay at their safe houses, armor up from their weapons rooms, sleep with — excuse me, Helen — a Mob trixie. And I don’t mean Les, Helen, he’s as true as a cowboy.”

“I know that, J.P. That’s why I love him so much.” She reached out and put her hand on her husband’s wrist. He patted it but was not done with his riff.

“I don’t know why they’re doing this. I don’t know who’s doing it. But one guy is making this happen. I will find him. I will pay him back.”

Les’s depression didn’t clear, even if he had returned to talkativeness. But inside, where the little wheels were, those wheels were whirring and buzzing and rattling like crazy, so that even if he was joking with Helen, or fucking her, even if he was out on the prairie working on his shooting skills — say, he was damned good, getting better! — he had that issue somewhere in his brain. He knew he couldn’t move until he figured it out.

One day, he took a fiver to the bank, asked for quarters, walked through San Antonio until he found a phone booth in an out-of-the-way spot, and dipped in.

“Number, please.”

“I’d like to put through a call to Reno, Nevada. Enterprise 5487.”

“Yes sir. That’ll be two dollars and twenty-five cents for the first three minutes.”

“Got it.”

He fed in nine quarters and waited.

“Yeah?”

“Long Distance. I have a call for this number from a… What is your name, sir?”

“Les Smith.”

“Les—”

“It ain’t collect?”

“No sir.”

“Fine, I’ll take it… Les?”

“Skabootch? Is that you?”

“No, Les, it’s Doc Bone. How are you, kid?”

“I’m fine, Doc. This line clean?”

“Yeah, the heat’s off for now. It comes, it goes — who knows why? Listen, you want Skabootch?”

“It doesn’t matter, Doc. I need a favor, nothing big, just some help.”

“Sure, kid. Ask, it’s yours.”

“You heard about Homer going down?”

“Yeah, a shame. Good man. I heard they chopped him bad.”

“Bastards. Anyhow, here’s what I need to know. You must have friends who have friends who have connections with St. Paul Homicide.”

“If I don’t, Skabootch does. He don’t, Soap would.”

“Well, whoever.”

“What’s up, kid?”

“I have to know how it happened. It’s the Division that’s got the itch for us, and Homer thought he was home free in St. Paul. No Division there. But he gets burned by coppers with choppers. So I have to know if there was anything going on? Any new players, any decisions made on high, just what the hell happened that guys he’s palled around with suddenly park a drum on him. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe it was just bad luck, kid.”

“Nobody’s luck is that bad. Ask around for me, will you, Doc?”

“Sure, kid. You call me back tomorrow, this time, this number, maybe I’ll have something for you by then.”

“You’re the best, Doc. I knew I could count on you.”

So that buoyed Les up for a night, and he took Helen dancing in one of her new dresses, and then to a picture, and then took her back to the room and fucked her good. He awoke in good spirits too, and at the appointed hour, in a different booth, he put the call through to Doc Bone. But this time he got Skabootch.

“Yeah, Les, I know what you’re after. Kid, some advice. You got friends out here, you’re loved for your talent and guts, maybe you ought to give up on Chicago for a while. It ain’t healthy. We could put you to work.”

“In a few months when I get this stuff straightened out, maybe then. I could see it, Helen and me, J.P. too, we’d like it out there permanent.”

“You always got a place here.”

“Anyway—”

“Well, here’s what I found out. It was three St. Paul detectives, plus some other guy. It must have been important, because one of the shooters was the chief himself, Cullen, and another was Brown, who’d been the chief, but is in all kinds of soup for taking bribes, and maybe even going on out-of-state jobs with certain individuals.”

“The other guy? The fourth guy?”

“There’s your million-dollar mystery. It was some tall guy, always wore a fedora, always looked buttoned-up and official. Hard eyes — man-killer eyes — the three treated him like a guy who had to be respected. Wasn’t introduced to other cops by Cullen, so nobody knows. Disappeared right after the shooting, no mention of him to press or even to other coppers. The three on the job kept it to themselves, and nobody’s got the balls to ask ’em. Nobody knows.”

But Les knew in a second. It was the Western gunfighter who’d stood tall and straight on the hill off Wolf Road, while Les’s slugs tore up the earth around him, and fired a handgun from a hundred yards that missed Les’s head by an inch.

“Okay, Skabootch, thanks. Yeah, now I see. Now I know what I got to do.”

McLEAN, VIRGINIA

The present

“So the document is back in the archives?” Bob asked.

“Yes, but retrievable when we need it,” said Nick.

Rawley was the smart one on tech, and he had the StingRay cell site simulator, which impersonated a cell tower. It gets the call attempt, analyzes it, and passes it along to a real cell tower. It’s a highly advanced Gen 7 femtocell, small and portable, able to decrypt both sides of a cell call using NSA intercept software. It was about the size of a shoe box, had thirteen numbered LED displays, with up-and-down switches next to each, labeled “Target Phone,” and another thirteen digits underneath, labeled “Connected Phone.” The thirteenth made it feasible for deployment against foreign units. “On/Off” switch, self-contained speaker with volume control. Jack for headphone. He could tune into radio station WBOB anytime he was within two miles.

He sat in the back of the rented Chevy SUV parked in a McLean strip mall and had his program locked in, the device on his lap. It wasn’t your garden-variety, Amazon-bought toy, and where the two-hundred-dollar Amazon job would have said SAMSUNG, this $119,000-per-unit said PROP OF US GOVT and AUTHORIZED USERS ONLY. It was a state-of-the-art, military-grade penetration device, top secret, and carried by serial number in the inventory of the 465th Security Battalion of the 3rd Brigade, Military Police Detachment, Pine Bluff Arsenal, which was responsible for making sure none of the army’s stores of white-phosphorus munitions ended up in terrorist hands. Pine Bluff Arsenal was about sixty-five miles southwest of Little Rock, and it was on Rawley’s lap, courtesy of the battalion’s commanding officer, who had been discovered in a compromising situation on one of Rawley and Braxton’s recent adventures, something about a dancer in one of Mr. Kaye’s strip joints in West Little Rock while the wife was out of town.