Tracking Shot

by Colin Campbell

  McNulty held his hands up in surrender. “Whoah. Not the kind of panel beating I’m looking for.” He put a smile into his voice. “You know. Like a dent in the roof.”

  He nodded toward the workshop. “And a bit of red paint.”

  Billy Bob threw a nervous glance over his shoulder, then took a step toward McNulty. He took some of the gruffness out of his voice as he nodded toward the car in the turnaround.

  “You don’t got no dent in your roof.” The gruffness didn’t completely leave. “Yet.”

  McNulty smiled and gave a little laugh. “Not the car. A red panel van I landed on when I fell off my balcony.” He dialed the smile down a bit but kept his tone light. “After the other fella bounced off it first.” He watched for any movement from the workshop. “Looking to see if you can handle it. And get a quote.”

  It was Billy Bob’s turn to smile. “Here’s a quote for you. ‘I’m gonna make you squeal like a pig.’”

  McNulty nodded. “Bent over the tree trunk you don’t have, huh?”

  The man took another step forward. “We don’t need no tree trunk. There’s a mattress in back of the van.”

  McNulty circled to his right, maintaining the distance between them while looking around for the van. If it was here it must be inside the workshop. The smell was still bothering him. Confronting a lone hillbilly wasn’t a problem, but he didn’t think Billy Bob would be alone for long. This was turning into a bad idea.

  “You the mechanic or the guard dog?”

  Billy Bob shivered and blew out his cheeks. His lips flapped, dripping saliva like a rabid dog. He took a deep breath, obviously not fazed by the smell. “You casting aspersions again?”

  McNulty was near the edge of the turnaround now, facing the entrance road. “I’m casting for a bit part in the movie we’re making. No banjo.”

  A delaying tactic that was never going to work. Coming here alone had been a mistake. Not telling someone where he was going was an even bigger one. Billy Bob surprised him. He broke into a grin and almost started yuck, yuck, yucking. He was only missing the straw hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

  “In the movies? Me? Ya think?”

  McNulty shrugged and tried not to breathe in. “If your boss can spare you.” He nodded toward the workshop. “D’you want to get him out here? So we can talk?”

  Billy Bob shook his head, still grinning. “Ain’t nobody here. Just me.” He jerked a thumb then made the universal telephone shape. “Can get him though.”

  McNulty glanced at the cabin, then looked at the workshop. If there were any telephone wires they must come in from the back. There wouldn’t be any cell-phone coverage under all this steel and concrete. “You do that.”

  The simple giant turned and crossed to the workshop. McNulty watched him go, half looking at the doors and half wondering where the red van that used to be grey was hiding. Part of him wanted to see inside the workshop but the rest of him wanted a quick look around while Billy Bob was on the phone. The thing that was troubling him most though, as he was starting to put a couple of things together, was the bad smell and the mattress in the back of the van. And a shooting at an orphanage full of vulnerable children.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The trouble with coming from a background of abuse is that whenever you see something involving kids you tend to lean toward the dark side. You can’t escape it. Some abused kids grow up to be abusers. Some become protectors or avengers or Wrath-of-God fanatics. McNulty hadn’t been abused at Crag View Children’s Home, but he had witnessed plenty of abuse. Now anything involving an orphanage that was even faintly dodgy raised his hackles. His hackles were raised now.

  The man in the bib overalls walked toward the cabin then stopped, as if he had remembered something. He scratched his head, then turned toward the workshop instead. McNulty watched the full-length doors as the simple giant opened one to go inside. It was opened only a few feet and then closed again. Not enough space to see if the red van was in the repair bay. Not enough to tell whether there was anyone else in there with him. There were no voices. There had been no violent reaction to the offer of a walk-on part in the movies. Billy Bob was just making a phone call.

  McNulty went into search mode. He reckoned he had fifteen minutes at the most before the boss and his henchmen arrived to see the man asking questions about the red van; between five and eight minutes before Billy Bob came back out. That wasn’t a lot of time to search an area the size of the junkyard. He followed the same procedure as police inquiries. Start where you are then fan out. His priority was the panel van.

  First rule of executing a search warrant is to get your bearings and make a quick visual examination of the search area. Soft eyes. Not focusing on anything too closely but taking in everything around you. McNulty didn’t have a search warrant but the principle was the same. He stood at the edge of the turnaround and scanned all the way around.

  There were several things he could discount right away. The cars on blocks. The tractors on shredded tires. They weren’t big enough to hide the van behind. Next he scanned the carnival floats. Most were too embedded in a world of junk and spare parts to provide any free space, but there were a couple with a gap between them along the perimeter of the dusty circle—the rusty spaceship and the headless dinosaur. McNulty walked quickly and stood between the abandoned floats. Broad, deep drag marks swept out of the parking space before being lost in the dust of the turning circle. McNulty tried to see if there were any tire tracks but the dust and gravel didn’t leave any tread pattern and the marks were too wide to be the panel van anyway. He went to the back of the dinosaur and checked the space behind the floats. Nothing.

  He threw one last look around the junkyard then looked for the next place to search. Choice of two. The workshop or the cabin. Billy Bob was already in the workshop.

  McNulty went up the porch steps, using the edges so they didn’t creak as much, and peered through a dirty window with torn curtains. The cabin was small and dark and empty. He stood at the door and touched the handle. He’d told Alfonse Bayard, while teaching him how to act like a cop, that cops always knock at the door before forcing entry. That and a quick yell to identify yourself negated any claims later that the suspect didn’t know you were a cop. McNulty wasn’t a cop today, and he didn’t want Billy Bob hearing him in the cabin, so knocking wasn’t an option.

  He stepped to one side, turned the handle, and pushed the door open.

  The smell hit him as soon as he stepped inside.

  The room was small and bare and wooden. A log cabin without the logs, just planks and floorboards and a lot of dust. An open door at the rear showed an unmade bed and a kitchenette. There was a table and four chairs in the living room. McNulty assumed it was the living room. There was an old settee and the only cupboard was a shiny metal gun locker fastened to the wall. The half-eaten cake with marzipan and icing sugar on the table accounted for the initial sweet smell but it was quickly overpowered by the stench that had filled the clearing.

  McNulty covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. Bad smells always made his eyes water. The cause for bad smells like this usually made him cry. Once you’ve smelled a dead person you never forget it. The odors of rotting flesh and voided bowels stay on your clothes and up your nose for days. He scanned the room for clues of where the bodies were hidden. Because a smell like this, he’d bet a pound to a pinch of shit there was more than one.

  Rifle range targets shaped like charging men were thumbtacked to the walls. The bullet groupings on some of them were pretty good but the rest were abysmal. A blind man with a blow dart could have been more successful. There were miniature Stars and Stripes and canvas-unit pendants for the 101st Airborne and 1st Battalion 25th Marines pinned between the targets. Al Pacino and Robert De Niro stared down from a movie poster for Heat. There was no other furniture big enough to hide the bodies. There was no carpet or rug to cover a hatch in the floor. The smell wasn’
t coming from the bedroom.

  McNulty stood next to the table and removed the handkerchief. He took a couple of tentative sniffs, then followed his nose away from the door and the gun locker and the wall decorations. It wasn’t until he neared the side window that he noticed the window was wide open. The smell wasn’t inside the room it was coming through the window.

  He leaned out through the opening and found what he hadn’t found inside the cabin, a heavy wooden hatch covering a raised stone circle. A disused well perhaps. Or a charnel pit.

  McNulty didn’t go back out the front door, but instead climbed through the window. Bad thoughts ran through his head like half-forgotten nightmares. Body parts and stolen girls and a sex chain that had posed as massage parlors. Northern X. This felt worse than that. He didn’t understand the links yet, but he couldn’t get the van and the mattress and the children’s home out of his mind. He stepped away from the cabin and stood over the disused well.

  The thrumming traffic overhead sounded like distant thunder. The silence in the clearing was thick and heavy, and as muffled as walking in snow. He listened for Billy Bob coming out of the workshop but there was no sound. The hatch was old and rotting and didn’t have hinges or a padlock. It was just an old wooden door cut into a circle and laid over the well.

  He stood for a moment to compose himself, then reached down and grabbed the crumbling edge. His fingers sank into the wood and he had to find a stronger place to hold. He raised the edge a few inches then slid it off the opening. The well had been blocked six feet down by a landslide, and it was almost full. The smell made him gag. The sight forced him to stand up and step back.

  Billy Bob was like a brick wall behind him. “Yep. That’s where we keep ‘em.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Two cars sped down the road to the junkyard and screamed into the turnaround before skidding to a stop. The cloud of dust blotted everything out as it drifted across the clearing and turned the carnival floats into ghosts. The engines were turned off and car doors slammed. When the dust settled four men stood abreast like gunslingers waiting to draw. The person they looked ready to draw against was Vince McNulty.

  Billy Bob stepped aside. McNulty slowed his breathing. The dust drifted away, leaving the contents of the well clear for all to see. Billy Bob turned to the group. “He wants to put me in the movies.”

  Nobody spoke for a few minutes. McNulty had nothing good to say so he said nothing. Billy Bob grinned. The tall skinny guy second from the left took a step forward, placing him as the leader. He glanced at McNulty’s car then looked at McNulty. He still didn’t speak. McNulty racked his brains for a way out of this. Silence is deadly. It breeds confrontation. Best way to diffuse a situation like this is to start a conversation. People rarely shoot a person they’re talking to.

  “You the panel beater or the panel beater’s boss?”

  The leader took another step forward. “For the dent in the roof you ain’t got?”

  McNulty kept the anger that was building out of his voice. “It’s not my dent I’m asking about.”

  Tall Skinny put his hands on his hips. “Maybe not. But you go poking your nose where it ain’t wanted and dents is what you’re gonna get.”

  The other three men spread out to give McNulty no way to his car. He gave them a cursory once-over and calculated body shape and weight. They were anything but medium height and medium build. Throw in Tall Skinny and Billy Bob, and you had every body shape going except the one McNulty was looking for. There was no red van, either. What had been going on here was much worse. He nodded toward Billy Bob.

  “You don’t see him in the movies then?”

  Tall Skinny tilted his head while he considered McNulty. “My brother might be slow but he ain’t dumb.”

  McNulty could have made an argument for that but kept quiet.

  “He can smell a rat from a thousand paces.”

  McNulty jerked a thumb at the pit. “Not surprised, considering how many you got in there.”

  Tall Skinny came over to the collapsed well and looked over the side. Billy Bob stayed back. The three heavies played defence, blocking McNulty’s escape. McNulty stood beside Tall Skinny and looked into the hole.

  “You boys do a lot of hunting around here do you?”

  The rotting corpses almost filled the pit. Most had been stripped of skin and fur and some were almost skeletons. Bright red blood highlighted the freshest kills. Some of the bodies were still moving. Rats and dogs and some other animals McNulty couldn’t recognise anymore. Tall Skinny waved a hand around the junkyard. “Dump gets lots of rats.”

  McNulty thought about the targets he’d seen pinned up inside the cabin. “Gives you plenty of target practice, does it?”

  Tall Skinny looked at McNulty and smiled. “Hell, no. We don’t shoot ’em. We trap ’em. Any killing, they do themselves.” He shrugged. “Everything’s got to eat.”

  McNulty was about to let out a sigh but sighing entailed taking a deep breath. He’d smelled enough rotting corpses for one day. He was still uncertain what Billy Bob meant about the mattress in the van, but it didn’t look like any of these boys had been involved in the orphanage shooting. He doubted if the man who’d calmly walked in and shot five people would ally himself with such a bunch of losers.

  McNulty stepped back from the edge of the well. “And we’re all going to die. Let’s hope you don’t find out what it’s like to die like that.”

  Tall Skinny got serious. “Oh, I know people who died exactly like that. In the war.”

  He didn’t say which war. McNulty wondered if he had been in the Airborne or the Marines. He knew lots of veterans who fell a long way after coming out of the service. This guy looked to be close to hitting bottom. None of that helped with how McNulty was going to get out of here. He waved a hand toward the concrete overpasses.

  “Yeah, well. You’re pretty safe from drone strikes down here.” He got ready to run. “But you’re a long way from not being filmed.” He smiled and waved at a section of the spaghetti junction where the off ramp swept beneath the main highway. “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera.”

  Everyone looked at the distant traffic cameras. There was a brief moment when nobody was looking at McNulty. He braced himself for the sprint to his car, then Billy Bob laughed.

  “Ain’t no cameras we ain’t already shot out.”

  Tall Skinny reached up and put an arm around his brother. He gave him a friendly squeeze then looked at McNulty. “I told you he weren’t dumb.”

  He smiled and tilted his head again, as if talking to a child. “Was that supposed to be some kind of distraction technique? Get us all looking one way while you make a dash for your car?” He shrugged. “Shit.” And waved the three heavies aside. “Have at it.”

  The three men came over to stand with Billy Bob, throwing play punches and messing around like a bunch of schoolboys. Billy Bob laughed and punched one of them too hard, dropping him to the ground. The other two picked him up and complained about the simple giant being too rough. Tall Skinny told them to stop messing about then turned back to McNulty. He jerked a thumb at McNulty’s car.

  “Unless you really want to try for that dent in the roof.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  McNulty had a lot to think about on his way back to the set. It was mid-afternoon and he reckoned he’d taken enough of the slack that Larry had allowed him to conduct his own investigations. Slack was mostly being given because Larry wanted Titanic Productions kept out of the story as much as possible. The main reason Larry had employed McNulty was that McNulty still thought of himself as a cop, a fact that weighed heavily on the ex-cop’s mind as he drove toward the Cambridge Reservoir shooting location.

  The encounter at the junkyard had rattled him. Up until then he’d never thought of such excursions as putting himself in danger. Just asking a few questions. Making routine inquiries. That was just normal police stuff that he could do in his sleep. Of course, when he wa
s still with the police, there was the safety net of personal protective equipment and a radio. The radio had been the main protection. People didn’t mess with you when you could call for backup at any time.

  There had been no backup at the junkyard. And that shook him up.

  What had he been thinking? Putting himself in that situation. Five men with a gun locker and a rat pit in a secluded location under the highway cloverleaf. They could have killed him and dumped the body and nobody would ever have found him after the rats had feasted on his bones. And for what? What had he learned? Nothing. There was no evidence linking those men to the red panel van. The mattress suggestion had only been in response to McNulty’s tree-trunk comment. Even if they had a van with a mattress, it didn’t tie them to the shooting, and it was only McNulty’s past experiences that made him think about the orphanage. On top of that, none of the men looked even remotely like the shooter, and certainly none of them had displayed the cold-blooded calm the gunman had shown at the courthouse set.

  Maybe he should leave it to the real police. Detective Harris seemed competent enough. The grey van would have been circulated after the shooting and the motel CCTV would have given an indication that it might now be red. There was nothing McNulty could do that the Waltham PD didn’t have the resources to do better.

  No, the van was a lost cause. It was the Zapruder film he should be concentrating on. The film, the cameraman, and the dummy CCTV on the courtroom set. That’s what he was thinking about when he pulled into the parking lot at Fresenius Medical Care, before he had to get back into technical adviser mode.

  “But they aren’t going to really hit me, right?”

  “D’you think they really hit John Wayne?”

  “I don’t know. He was a big guy.”