Dark Angel, page 18
Bellado didn’t seem to notice. “I know, I know. When he disappeared—he hasn’t been gone a week, he’s been gone five days, but he wasn’t talking to anyone but me, so maybe they thought he’d been gone longer. Anyway, he’d started doing some research and a couple of days before . . . he got lost . . . he emailed me pictures of cars, but I didn’t know what to do with them.”
“Could we see them?” Letty asked.
“Who are you guys?” she asked.
Letty nodded at Baxter and said, “He’s a hacker. I’m his bodyguard.”
“I don’t . . .”
“That’s the truth,” Baxter interrupted. “If you push her, she’ll show you her gun. Anyway, we need to see those photos. We’ve got a guy who can get into LAPD files . . .”
“William?”
“Yeah, William,” Letty said. “We need to see the photos, so we can figure out what Daniel was looking at.”
“Well . . .”
She showed them the photos, taken with a decent camera, sent in emails to her desktop Dell. Three of the photos showed the blue SUV identical to the one the killers had driven to Loren Barron’s house. Three more showed a black Mercedes G-Class SUV, and a dozen more images showed a miscellany of other cars.
Letty tapped the blue SUV and said, “We know these guys. They’re Russians.”
Baxter asked, “Mind if we copy the pictures?” He took the truck keys from his pocket. The ring included a rubbery pink plastic human thumb as a key fob, which Letty had thought was odd, but then, Baxter was Baxter. He pulled the thumb apart, revealing a USB plug. He said, “Thumb drive.”
Letty rolled her eyes and said to Bellado, “Nerd.”
“Go ahead and copy them,” Bellado said. “If you think it’ll do any good.”
“He thought he was being followed, so maybe we can find out who those people were,” Baxter said, as he sat in front of the computer, plugged in the thumb, and began dragging one photo after the other to the flash drive.
Letty, looking over his shoulder, said, “Look at the backgrounds. He got shots of the SUV and the G-Wagen in different places. Maybe he was followed.”
“But he was taking pictures of the cars, not their license plates,” Baxter said.
“You think the Russians got him?” Bellado asked, fear in her voice.
Letty thought she knew the answer, but said, “We don’t know that yet.”
Fourteen
Baxter sent the photos of the blue SUV and the G-Wagen to Nowak. They said good-bye to Bellado, told her that they’d call when they found Daniel Delph. Back in the truck, Letty called Nowak and asked what the FBI was doing.
“They’re putting pressure on the man they’ve got, but he’s not giving up anything—not yet, anyway,” Nowak said. “Might be too scared to talk. There are worse places than American prisons.”
“So they’re not focused on a person or location?” Baxter asked.
“Not at this point.”
“We need to know where the G-Class Benz is registered—the owner and the address,” Letty said. “We don’t have a license, so it may be impossible.”
“We’re working on it,” Nowak said, “though we’ll come up with probabilities rather than certainties.”
“That could be good enough. Did you hear anything from Barbara Cartwright?”
“She was visiting her cousins on their ranch outside San Antonio. She’s already in the air, should be landing at LAX within the hour. We’ve filled her in as much as we could with nonencrypted messaging, so you’ll have to brief her when you get together.”
“Got it,” Letty said.
They were still talking about the identification of Ordinary People at the Poggers meeting when Nowak broke away for a moment, then came back and said, “The G-Wagen is likely leased to the Mammuthus Corp . . . that’s based on its year of manufacture, color, location there in LA, that it has optional armor, and the fact that we don’t find its license plates anywhere on LA freeways or streets. That means it’s not wearing its legal plates, or possibly the plates have a reflective covering or spray that shields them from cameras.”
“Why would the LA cops allow . . .”
“The LA cops don’t have that information. We do.”
Mammuthus had an address in Long Beach, not far from the port, Nowak said. There was almost no information available on the business, which was registered in Delaware. Satellite and street view available to the NSA suggested that its headquarters were a single-story warehouse-style building that gave no clue as to what might be inside.
“I’m looking up Mammuthus . . .” Nowak said. Then: “A Mammuthus is a woolly mammoth. That’s all I have on that.”
“Whatever. We’re gonna head down there,” Letty said. “Give Barb my burner number, tell her we’ll pick her up at the airport.”
“Don’t forget you’ve got the FBI SWAT team available. They could be anywhere in the LA area in a couple hours,” Nowak said.
“Not really something I’d forget,” Letty said. To Baxter: “Let’s go. Airport.”
* * *
Of all the bellyaching Baxter had done between Washington and Los Angeles, which had amounted to a small mountain of complaints, protests, cavils, groans, whines, and remonstrations, along with his routine bitching and moaning, he reached his peak as he tried to get his truck through the traffic scrum at LAX.
“What’s wrong with these fuckin’ people? You see that guy? You see that guy? How did he get sideways? Here, he wants to go sideways? The Avis van is gonna . . . Get your gun out, get your gun out . . . Shoot the guy in the Tesla . . . C’mon, shoot him . . .”
* * *
Cartwright was standing outside the American terminal with two bags at her feet; one was soft and obviously clothing. The other one was hard-sided and had locks that would have protected a bank. She wore a battered straw cowboy hat, a raggedy tee-shirt that said “Born Again Christian Dior” under a tan cotton jacket, black jeans with unfashionable worn spots and tears in the legs, and cross-training shoes. Her sunglasses were as dark as obsidian.
“Shoulda been there when I checked the case at San Antonio,” Cartwright said as she climbed into the backseat. “I was told none of my mags were legal in California. Not a problem in Texas, of course.”
“How you been?” Letty asked.
“My cousin Ray told me my time was running out if I want to have a family,” she said. “He told me the baby alarm would go off at any minute and I better have another guy picked out.”
“Ah, jeez.”
“Yeah, no shit,” she said, looking at the back of Baxter’s head. “Who’s the large guy?”
Letty introduced Baxter, who told Cartwright that Letty had refused to kill anyone in the LAX traffic jam, and Letty told him to shut up and quit whining, because they had a lot to talk about before they got to Long Beach.
“Bet you haven’t even shot anybody yet,” Cartwright said with a grin.
Baxter jumped in again: “You’d be wrong about that. She shot a Russian killer, which means Russian killers are going to be annoyed with us. Then the FBI took her gun away, and they gave her another gun, exactly the same as the one they took away. She had to sign for it so they can get theirs back, when they return the exactly-the-same gun they took away, cutting down an entire Canadian forest for the paperwork in the identical trade. You gotta love the FBI.”
Cartwright looked at Letty, as if judging whether Baxter was joking. She decided he wasn’t. “Tell me everything,” Cartwright said.
Letty told her everything, including the compartmented top secrets, as they headed south down nearly featureless freeways to the port of Long Beach.
On the way, Baxter said, “Holy guacamole—see the yellow one? The yellow one?” He meant a car. “That’s a fuckin’ McLaren. I’ve never seen one on the street. Hell, I’ve never seen one, period, except in magazines.”
Farther down the freeway: “Rolls. Good one, I like that black-and-gray look.”
“You’re calming down a little,” Letty said. “You sound bored by the Rolls.”
“I’m kind of overwhelmed. That fuckin’ McLaren we saw, after that lime green Lambo this morning . . . I mean, it’s like something broke.”
Cartwright: “Broke? You mean, in you?”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”
Letty and Cartwright looked at each other, and Letty said, “He’s weird.”
* * *
The navigation app took them to an area north of the port, streets lined with parked semi-trailers, fenced-in warehouses with acres of parking lots, power lines strung from a forest of wooden poles.
The Mammuthus building, if it was the Mammuthus building, was a low white cracker box with few windows, and those were covered with something that might have been raw cardboard. The parking lot had a single pickup in it, nosed into the front of the building. Two loading docks punctured the back, but no trucks were loading or unloading. The front side featured a glass door and two uncovered windows, looking out at the parking lot.
Cartwright said, “Cameras.”
“Lots of cameras,” Letty said. “Four on each side . . .”
“Makes me wonder what needs the protection,” Cartwright said. “Or who.”
“If you’re like, CIA . . . don’t you get jump training, parachute training?” Baxter asked.
“Well, some CIA people do, as I understand it, not saying I’m one,” Cartwright said. “And I’ve jumped out of airplanes, but not on the job, just recreationally.”
“Could you jump onto the roof?” Baxter asked.
“Maybe, but then what would I do?” Cartwright asked. “I’d have to get off the roof and there are still cameras looking at me. I might as well walk up.”
“Right. Sorry about the brain fart.”
“Look over there. At the container yard,” Letty said, pointing.
Down the block from the front of the warehouse, a sprawling lot was stacked with shipping containers, rust-red, yellow, a few blue, most with Chinese names on them. “Nothing keeping us out of there,” Letty said. “We could sneak in with granola bars and some water bottles and watch Mammuthus. See who comes and goes.”
“That could work, if you’ve got the patience for it,” Cartwright said.
“What else have we got? I don’t see that G-Wagen anywhere . . . And I’d like to get a photo of the plates on that pickup.”
“Let’s get that and then get those snacks,” Cartwright said. “Rod could pick us up after dark . . . Maybe we’ll see a way in.”
* * *
Baxter rolled them past the front of the building and Letty got a photo of the plates on the Dodge Ram. She sent them to Nowak, who identified the owner as Dale Weston of the City of Industry. Weston had three arrest records for theft, and one for public drunkenness and fighting with cops, so was unlikely to be either a criminal genius or a Russian spy.
They got snacks and water at a Sunshine Market, which Letty put in her yellow REI bag, along with jackets for both of them should it get cool, and Baxter dropped them off on a side of the container yard not visible from Mammuthus. They walked between stacks of containers until they got to a spot facing the target, found an old wooden cable reel to sit on, rolled it inside an open container, and settled in to watch.
They’d been there for an hour, talking about personalities in their jobs, about growing up with guns, fathers, the stinky-sock smell that seemed to be coming from a patch of small pink flowers, divorce, and etcetera, when a man came out of the Mammuthus building and walked to the pickup, dug around in the backseat for a moment, and came away with a sack that might have had his dinner in it.
He was shaggy: hair on his shoulders, jeans, cowboy boots, a muscle shirt. Earring. He looked up and down the street, unselfconsciously dug in his pants to scratch his balls.
“He’s got a gun on his hip,” Letty said.
“Saw that,” Cartwright said. “Hope he washes his hands before he eats his lunch.”
* * *
They watched as the man went back inside the building and noticed that he’d left it unlocked as he walked to the truck, so either there were more people inside or he wasn’t especially security-conscious.
Baxter called: “You guys want pizza?”
“We’re okay.”
“I figured out how to get in the building.”
“How?” Letty asked.
“There are all these eighteen-wheelers sitting around with nobody in them. Barb’s probably been trained how to steal cars and trucks. She could steal one and we could run it right through the front of the building. Probably get five minutes inside, at least, before the cops got there.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Cartwright said. “It’s a step up from parachuting onto the roof, though.”
When Baxter was gone, Letty said, “How about this? Soon as we see him, Dale Weston, we hook our arms up, laugh a little, like we’re drunk, yell at him. He’s gonna see a couple girls coming up on him and from the looks of him, he’ll talk to us. We stick a gun in his ear and walk him inside.”
“I like it,” Cartwright said. “Simple, yet with a potential for out-of-control mayhem.”
* * *
The wait got long and some streetlights came on. No sign of the G-Wagen. The western sky turned red and as the phone-pole shadows got longer than the phone poles, Dale Weston walked back out to his truck.
“We’re on,” Cartwright snapped, and she and Letty more or less bolted out to the street, linked arms, and Letty sang out the first three lines of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and they saw Dale Weston step back from his truck to look at them.
Cartwright laughed and then pulled Letty to a stop and pointed at Weston and said, quietly, “Make it look like we’re talking about him. Take a quick peek at him.”
Letty did it, and then they walked farther up the street as Dale Weston stepped to the back of the pickup and watched them coming. They slowed as they got close, and Cartwright turned her face to Letty’s ear and said, “More whispered confidences about what a stud he must be.”
“Makes my heart flutter thinking about it,” Letty whispered back.
Cartwright laughed again, a low sexy sound that Letty immediately envied.
Dale Weston had leaned back against the pickup and called, “What’re you girls doing out here at night?”
“Ain’t night yet, cowboy,” Letty called.
Cartwright, leaning hard on a Texas accent: “We’re going down to the store to buy some more PBR. We are flat run out.”
Letty to Cartwright, loud: “We shouldn’t be run out, you almost drunk a whole goddamn case all by yourself.”
“And I gotta pee like a Russian racehorse,” Cartwright said, looking around. “You see a bush?”
Dale Weston laughed and ambled toward them, asked, “How long you been drinking?”
“Can’t remember,” Letty said. “I sold my watch. You got a watch?”
Dale Weston was three feet away and Letty identified his pistol as a Smith & Wesson .357, buried in an old leather holster with a retention strap. She said to Cartwright, “Retention strap.”
“Yeah, I see,” Cartwright said.
Dale Weston: “Wut?”
Cartwright pointed her Walther PPQ subcompact at Weston’s left eye and said, “Let’s go inside, Dale.”
Letty had her 938 pointed at his navel. “It’s very unlikely, but you might live through jumping one of us, but the other one would kill you. Do you want one of us to kill you, Dale?”
“Dale? Who the fuck is Dale?”
“That would be you,” Letty said.
“I’m George. Hewitt. You girls got the wrong guy,” the cowboy said.
“We got the right guy, just the wrong truck plates,” Letty said. “What’d you do, George, steal them?”
Hewitt shrugged. “Maybe an MVD mistake?”
“Right. Let’s go inside,” Cartwright said. “We go inside, we won’t have to kill you.”
“You wouldn’t kill me anyway,” Hewitt said.
Cartwright giggled and Letty felt the hair go up on the back of her neck and suspected that it also went up on the back of Hewitt’s. Cartwright said, after the giggle, “George, I’d be happy to kill you. Happy. To kill. You. Got it? Don’t even think about that piece of shit on your belt.”
Hewitt, if that was his name, got it, and led them inside the building. The front of the place had a counter that something might once have been sold over, and a door that went into the back. The only thing on the counter was a mostly used roll of 3M packaging tape.
They disarmed Hewitt, and Letty said, “You are going to turn around and put your hands behind your back and I’m going to tape them together. Think about that. If we wanted to kill you, we could, and though my friend would really like to do that, I won’t let her—as long as you cooperate. So put your hands back, and let me tape them . . .”
It took two minutes and the rest of the roll of tape, but Letty eventually got both his hands and feet taped up, along with a few wraps around his knees and a few more that pinned his arms to his side. When it was done, Letty turned to Cartwright and asked, “Where’d you get that giggle?”
Cartwright said, “With a lot of practice. Sounds exactly insane, doesn’t it? Scares the shit out of everybody.”
Letty nodded. “Scared me,” she said. “Let’s find out what’s in here.”
They opened the door into the pitch-dark back room, though Hewitt said, “You girls don’t want to go there, nothing you can use.”
