by Robb T White
Charley mapped out an itinerary after closing up tonight. A fiberglass plant and a cardboard box manufacturer on the west side of town in a depressed area might be receptive to break-time shifts. He had licenses secured under a new alias and a used-car lot leased him a tan Honda Civic.
Cops walked in pairs or stood on corners talking. They never gave his truck a second look. One stopped for coffee yesterday but didn’t speak other than to say, ‘Coffee, black.’
He checked his watch; another hour, and he’d begin the clean-up tasks. A rock band had begun playing up the street in the parking lot across from the Goodwill building. He had a tentative candidate in mind. The man had a business on the street, but Wöissell was unable to tell what his profession was. He was a man with an eye for the ladies. He saw him in conversation several times with girls over the course of the three-day festival. A good-looking, nattily dressed type, eclectic in tastes judging from the mix of college-aged girls, older women and a sprinkling of hatched-faced street types with tattoos and studs adorning eyebrows, noses, and ears.
He had to hit the road to Providence soon, like it or not. The garage in town repaired the tire but the mechanic convinced him he wasn’t going far on the other three. Breaking down on the road without money was exactly the worst thing that could happen. No more Pittsburgh missteps, no more Buffalo fiascos.
The new set depleted his stock of back-up money. But there was another, bigger reason: he knew something was afoot back home. It nagged at him the day he left town. Fred couldn’t mask his joy. No jibes or ridicule this time. He was pleased to see him go. He’d called Min from a rest stop phone to see if he could winkle some information out of her but she was too eager to tell him otherwise—‘Fred’s just being Fred.’ He couldn’t read his stepmother but he knew any cabal her stepchildren were involved in wouldn’t be rejected if she had a big enough slice.
He wiped down counters, stored the food in plastic containers, cleaned the fryolator, and emptied the coffee pot. He set the paperback aside when ‘Dapper Man,’ with his trimmed, salt-and-pepper beard, suddenly hove into view; he was across the street from the lift bridge’s warning gate. Not unusual for him, he seemed to be cajoling a pair of girls. Wöissell couldn’t hear their giggles but the body language was universal. Like fresh ponies. He couldn’t hear a word being said except for the high-pitched squeals rising above the crowd’s din and guitar riffs of rock music.
Wöissell stared so hard at his potential target he didn’t see the customer.
‘Hey, man, what’s up? Can I get a lemonade?’
‘I don’t know. Can you?’
‘Asshole,’ the man muttered and wandered off.
Charley had something else in mind just then, besides selling watery coffee.
Chapter 29
SHE’D CALLED EVERY SERVICE plaza on the Ohio Turnpike and every gas station off the exits of the Dewey Thruway until she started to stutter from having said the same thing so many times: ‘Has your station serviced a white canteen truck with a flat tire in the last forty-eight hours?’
By her count that morning, she had made seventy-two phone calls, been put on hold twenty-seven times, misdirected fifteen, and made to listen to a hideous number of on-hold tunes that ranged from Velveeta-smooth jazz through instrumental renditions of ‘Unchained Melody’ to thumping deep house mixes.
The Youngstown office had been the best choice for centralizing information coming in from Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Fayetteville, various police substations and major precincts that included CID Bureaus from two states and trooper headquarters in three.
‘It’s the job,’ her Quantico instructors all said. ‘Basic grunt work, little things lead to big things.’
Right then, her patience maxed out; she felt the sandwich man slipping away. One of those lines out there would get a nibble eventually, but what if he decided to bury the truck in some storage facility and disappear? He was compelled to kill by his own clock, not some warped fantasy. She’d requested highway patrol and police departments from Cleveland south to Columbus, east to Erie, Pennsylvania and Rochester, New York for a hot-stop on the license, BOLOs for every major artery crisscrossing New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. If nothing hit soon, she’d widen the search eastward to include Connecticut and Massachusetts, westward to Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia.
Magicians made elephants disappear with mirrors, but how did you make a white truck disappear with so many eyes on alert?
She’d had enough of waiting. She informed the Youngstown SAC she was heading north to Ashtabula to catch the last few hours of its festival.
‘We’ve made requests there, too, Agent Hui,’ he said. ‘Both Jefferson Sheriff’s and Ashtabula PD.’
‘I know, sir. When these things shut down, people scatter, nobody remembers anything.’
‘Sorby’s wife is having a baby. He’s at the hospital now. I’ll have Silva go with you when he gets back.’
‘I’d like to go myself, sir. As it is, I’ll be lucky to get there on time.’
‘Protocol, Agent Hui. I’m not saying it because you’re a woman. Make sure Rohan has your cell numbers. He’s on duty tonight.’
The drive north up Route 11 was a fifty mile stretch of farms bisected by overpasses, spavined barns with holes in the roof, some pasture land with Holsteins grazing, and not much else. Being from Chicago, she wasn’t used to so much open space. Silva, a recent transfer from Austin, had worked everything from cattle rustling to narcotrafficking on the El Paso side. He looked out the window and said, ‘There’s nothing but a barbed-wire fence and a lobo wolf out here.’
They talked cases, mentioned names and SACs they had or knew by reputation.
‘How close do you think you are to this creep?’ Silva asked her.
‘Close,’ she replied. ‘But Lockport PD spooked him. They didn’t wait for HRT to get there. Now he’s running with whatever cash he has on him. US Marshals are assisting, too.’
‘You don’t sound pleased,’ Silva replied.
That wasn’t what worried her. Buffalo field office was banking on the plate match and proximity of his last sighting.
‘Seems weird,’ Silva mused.
‘What does?’
‘Feed ’em a sandwich,’ he said, ‘then take an eyeball out. Make any sense to you?’
‘Basic Sciences thinks he’s disorganized.’
‘You don’t,’ Silva said.
‘I think … he’s different,’ was all she managed to come up with.
She was heading to one end of the United States just then; across Ashtabula lay the narrowest portion of Lake Erie, some thirty-five nautical miles, lay Canada.
She had regrets but driving was helping ease the knot in her shoulders from all the phone work. She insisted on doing as much of it herself as she could. She was grateful Gilker had called the Youngstown supervisor for assistance. He might not be a true believer, she thought, but he was no longer obstructing her investigation.
As a teenager, she had walked the Bund in Shanghai with her father, marveling at the sights and sounds of the harbor. That spring he would be rounded up in the Tiananmen Square Protest and imprisoned in a government prison in one of the ring roads surrounding Beijing, where she learned he died three years later.
It didn’t look like a place where a monster could hide easily, yet this one had. Just across the bascule bridge, the road was blocked and traffic was diverted up one of the brick roads paralleling the river. The public spaces near the riverfront were solid with cars, so she drove on and saw a few scattered houses overlooking the docks and the recreational boat marinas. Some were packed with cars out front on their lawns. She drove on until she saw a house atop the hill where one local entrepreneur was sitting in his picnic chair adorned with Chief Wahoo’s grinning visage next to a sign that said Parking $7.
She pulled in and paid the man who nodded at her behind a straw hat and sunglasses.
‘Drinking on the job, I see,’ she said and nodded at the empty beer b
ottles under his chair.
‘When you’re the boss,’ he said, ‘you can’t be fired.’
The red brick ended and the gravel at this end was steep enough that she felt the tension in both calf muscles bunching. She wore tennis shoes and beige slacks. Her light jacket was solely to cover the Glock on her hip. Silva was dressed like the FBI ethics instructor he once was: no facial hair, military buzzcut, bonewhite shirt, plain tie, and a double-breasted Navy blue suit coat.
From their vantage coming down the hill, they saw many people heading for their cars. They passed a tent where a band had been performing earlier; the instruments still on the plywood box of a stage.
Down at street level, they mingled with the thinning crowds and looked about for the canteen trucks. There were several on each side of the street. One was a converted school bus selling candy apples, snow cones, and three-colored cotton candy. She passed a couple of bars and heard loud music coming from inside. One place had a live band performing music with a female vocalist that sounded like eighties’ music.
Another food truck loomed; this one was two-toned white over blue. She got in line and waited for someone to appear. A woman with gray hair and glasses walked to the window; she smiled at her, shook her head and walked on. She saw another white truck and strolled toward it. This one sold sugar waffles shaped like wagon wheels: $.75 apiece or three for $5.00. The young couple nodded to her as she passed. The male was stocky, too young.
She could see a few stalls up ahead. She crossed the street and headed back toward the riverfront. Silva worked the other side of the street where fewer canteen trucks were parked.
She counted four on this side, but only one was full-sized; the others were concession trailers or pop-up style campers. All the wrong color, not that he couldn’t have managed a fast spray-paint job somewhere.
She passed them and looked inside, one by one. All wrong: wrong gender, wrong age or sizes. She wasn’t disappointed, merely glad to be doing something besides ride a chair. Nearly all the concession stands were packing up now. She looked for a walleye stand. She imagined a speckled fish with a long snout and sharp teeth—or was that a pike?
She reached the end of the street where the traffic was blocked, saw nothing but the shops on both sides still doing business.
Then she noticed Silva standing at the intersection staring right at her. She headed toward him on cue; he nodded over his shoulder toward a pair of trucks close together on the marina side of the river. Off the beaten path—mainly the boat crowd down there to cater to.
The concession owners, or hired help, serving customers, came from a variety of ethnicities, both genders, all age groups. You couldn’t stereotype them. Males were the minority.
Above the fried grease wafting over the street, she picked up the scent of the river with its peculiar mix of decay, diesel fumes from the outboards chugging back and forth beneath the bridge at intervals. Every half hour, a siren sounded and the warning gates clattered down. Beyond the muddy-brown river, she saw a breakwall and the harbor open to Lake Erie. LED blue lights of the lift bridge glowed from one end of the span to the other. A stream of incoming boats entered, seeking their marinas for the evening.
‘Worth a look?’ Silva asked her.
‘Why not?’
They’d stroll like a couple. He’d check out the bigger truck first while she hung back a few yards and watched his back. Walking casually, she approached the pedestrian walkway and waited for a few others to cross the street. The group they blended into spread itself out into thirds with one portion heading to the car lot behind the bandstand, another drifted toward the water’s edge where benches were placed for views of the passing boats. Their group walked farther on in a direction that would take them past the two trucks. They casually peeled off from them as they came abreast of the trucks, the second almost obscured by the back end of the first.
The bigger one was a Freightliner model, worth a couple hundred grand, that reminded her of a SWAT truck. Inside would be an array of refrigerators, multiple ovens, smokers, steamers, and grills. From her distance, she noticed its serving window was shut and the front wheels chocked. The smaller one was worth much less, more the working mule of these kinds of festivals with a grill window, a single griddle, water tank, a hood system for venting and a smaller refrigeration unit. Next to the gleaming white truck beside it, she could tell its white paint had dimmed to a shade below eggshell.
Silva tapped on the boarded service window. Just below it, a decal of a fish breaching and the words Sandusky Seafood and Bulk Service Co. A sound inside, movement. She tensed, knowing the back door was directly facing her. Then it opened and a man looked out; he was in his sixties.
‘Can I help you?’
‘My husband and I were wondering if it’s too late to get a fish sandwich,’ she said.
Silva was approaching cautiously from the man’s blind side. She flashed him an OK sign with her hand without taking her eyes off the man in the door frame.
‘Can’t help you, ma’am,’ the man said. ‘We do bulk hauling. We brought in the walleye. We don’t do individual sandwiches.’
Jade laughed. Silly me.
‘Do you know if the operator of the truck next to you is still in business?’
‘Got no idea, ma’am,’ he said. ‘He just pulled in next to us. He ain’t done much business where he is. Had a few customers today. Then he left about twenty, thirty minutes ago, out that back door. I seen him. Took off that way, down by the water yonder.’
Nothing to see, really, but she walked around it and stopped just as she reached the hood. No sounds from either truck except for the hum of the Freightliner’s generator. The smell of the river was much stronger here.
She approached the window and tapped on the plexiglass. Nothing happened after a full minute, so she ambled toward the back and looked at the rear door. She continued to sip the straw of her lemonade drink in case the proprietor of the Freightliner appeared.
She made a slow turn toward the smaller truck as if she had a sudden urge for something to eat and wanted her husband to wait for the truck owner to come back. Tulio Murio’s Food & Canteen Service, Ltd was painted on the side in block lettering. The white paint of the truck overlay old lettering but she couldn’t make it out. Someone larded on a thick coat of white over it and wasn’t too careful about the look. Just the merest outline of a fancy L.
She stared at the menu board with its neat lettering but her eyes behind sunglasses were scoping the interior through the glare of the setting sun. The tires were new. The hair of her head prickled with the charge running through her. It was like someone fretting strings in her chest; air shot back into lungs with a deep pull.
Slowly, slowly. How to play it? Silva reacted to her head nod and deadpan expression with professional calm.
The lock had been smashed and hastily repaired with a nylon rope. Scratch marks and dents showed where the breakage had occurred and the scratches were recent from the absence of rust. Trucks are broken into all the time. This isn’t proof.
Looking the disappointed customer in case she was being watched, she strolled back to Silva and looped her arm through his. ‘Down to the river,’ she said, ‘take that bench.’
In a whisper, brief sentence, she told him what she’d seen.
Silva nodded, raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Lockport?’
‘Right here,’ she said without raising her voice. ‘The bastard’s right here—somewhere close.’
She called Rohan, informed him she needed agent assistance immediately and to alert the supervisor. She gave him the license plate, told him what she needed to see done.
‘How many?’ Silva asked.
‘Youngstown’s sending us two agents. I confirm visually. We watch and follow. We’ll take him once he tries to enter a freeway entrance or wherever we get a clear line at him.’
‘What about locals?’
‘Rohan is contacting PD, Sheriff’s. I told Rohan to make that the last call.�
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‘Want me to tell the fish truck to move it?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You should head back to the car. You’re not dressed for undercover surveillance. He’ll spot the gun bulge and, sorry, but you look like a cop.’
‘You’re the boss,’ Silva said. ‘I’ll be parked across the street in front of the Goodwill store.’ He stood up, stretched, and sauntered off. A tourist in no hurry.
She took out her cell, lay the ear buds over her shoulders, a prop, and crossed one leg over the other. A tourist watching the boats pass while her brain clicked away behind the shades. Water lapped against the pilings from passing craft. Girls in skimpy two-pieces and men in long trucks waved to people ashore: See us all tanned and half-drunk, we’re coming home after a great time on the lake all day …
She smiled and waved back. If the boaters could have penetrated through her shade to detect the micro-expressions of face, mouth, and eyebrow, they’d have seen something interesting, an evolutionary morphology of coding eons in the making—in short, a fighter getting ready for combat.
She knew she could never make it sitting at a desk in Great Falls looking at ledgers.
Chapter 30
WHILE SPECIAL AGENT JADE HUI was dangling her foot to soundless music, and waving at passing boats, Wöissell was twenty yards behind Dapper Man and the young woman he’d picked up in the Wyandotte Bar & Grill. His facial expressions were similar to the FBI agent a couple of hundred yards behind him. Wöissell understood his body’s reactions to every kind of stimuli and especially those that involved his kind of predation. It was erotic.
The amygdala—that marvelous, walnut-shaped cluster of nuclei—churned out its enzymes for his work ahead. The moments before closing—a cheetah on the veldt felt in its pounding heart and claws creeping up on a feeding springbok.
