Chandler knocked his hand away. “I get it, so you can use someone else for your strangulation demo. You said two choices. Who’s the other?”
Jack stared out the windshield. “Jay.”
“What? Isn’t he the guy we’re doing this for? He wasn’t even in the park.”
“We only have Jay’s word for that. And…he had met Stacy.”
“Say what?” Chandler did a double take.
“Jay delivered furniture to the Shaws’ house.”
“No way. So he knew Stacy.”
“He met her,” Jack said. “He was in her house. And H. T. Wells is only two blocks down from where he works.”
“That doesn’t look too good,” Chandler said. “Still, I think the cops should be looking at Vlad.”
“So you’ve said. And call him Alex.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I know, it’s just…” Jack shrugged. “He kinda gave me the whole Ghost of Christmas Future type of thing. You know? Like, under the right circumstances, if the right things happened to me, could I end up just like him? Could that be me? Listen, if something were to happen, you know, to one of us—”
“Nothing’s gonna happen,” Chandler said. “I’ve got your back. Don’t talk about stuff like that.” In an obvious effort to change the subject, he added, “So how long are we supposed to sit here and wait for Michael Shaw?”
“As long as it takes, I guess.”
Chandler groaned.
“Do you know what the Army’s gonna be like?” Jack reminded him. “Job one is hurry up and wait. Same thing with being a cop. I have the patience for it. You’re like a bad doctor—no patients.”
“That is the lamest joke I’ve ever heard. There’s no way I’m going to sit in this sardine can all afternoon pretending to be a cop. Especially if you keep telling jokes like that.”
“It’s good prep,” Jack said. “My dad’s made me read every book in the library on police work—and I’m talking interlibrary loan, too. And now that we’re going into the Army, I think he cleared the library out of books on military strategy and survival. You’re reading those books he gave you too, right?”
“They’re going to cover all that stuff in basic.”
“Some of it. Some they won’t. They can’t cover everything.”
“It’s the teacher in him,” Chandler said.
“And the overprotective dad. Thanks, by the way.”
“For what?”
“Coming with me. Having my back.”
Chandler’s expression changed. He looked serious. “What if they don’t let us serve together? I thought they kept family separated.”
“They won’t know we’re foster brothers. On paper, you and I are as different as yin and yang.”
“In looks, too,” Chandler said.
“But back to back. I’ve got you covered.” Jack held up his fist to knuckle-bump Chandler’s. “Besides, I could never show my face again if something did happen to you.”
“Hey!” Chandler sat up so quickly the whole car rocked.
“What did you see?” Jack stared down the road.
“No, not that.” Chandler waved his hand dismissively. “This is a stakeout, right?”
“Kinda.”
“Is it or isn’t it?”
Jack didn’t know where the question was leading, but he figured Chandler was up to something. “Is.”
“Great!” Chandler reached for the door handle.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting some doughnuts. This place has Krispy Kremes!”
“Stay in the car,” Jack snapped. “You just ate.”
“Come on.” Chandler’s outstretched hand almost hit the driver-side window, his reach was so long. “You said we need to do what cops do.”
Jack laughed. “They don’t sit there eating doughnuts.”
“I would.”
Jack laughed again.
Chandler’s smile vanished. “Incoming.” He pointed.
Jack looked down the road and saw Michael in his silver Toyota, then quickly looked away. “Just act cool.”
“Always do.” Chandler grinned.
The Toyota passed them.
Jack put the compact car into drive. As the gears tumbled into place, something inside Jack shifted too. He felt the warm glow of adrenaline rush through his veins, and a determined grin spread across his face. He pulled out onto the road and accelerated. The compact’s little engine whined in protest.
“Speed up,” Chandler said.
Jack broke into his best Scottish accent. “I’m givin’ her all she’s got, Cap’n.”
“What’s this car have under the hood for power? Hamsters?” Chandler scoffed. “Stop fooling around; you’re going to lose him.”
Jack looked down at the red-lined tachometer on the dashboard. “The lawnmower engine in this thing is about to blow a rod. My foot’s flat on the floor. Unless I strap a rocket on the roof, this is it.”
It took three blocks of weaving in and out of traffic, but they finally caught up with the Toyota. They followed it west, out of Fairfield.
“I think he’s going to the highway,” Jack said.
“Are you too close?”
“I don’t know.” Jack slowed down.
“No! You’ll lose him.”
Jack sped up again.
“Don’t get right behind him,” Chandler cautioned. “You’re supposed to leave a car or two between us and him.”
“You’re driving me crazy. You’re the worst backseat driver ever.”
The Toyota took the ramp onto the highway.
“He’s hitting the highway.” Chandler’s big hand swept up and thwacked the ceiling. “This thing will have a hard time at fifty.”
Jack stepped on the gas, and they zipped up the ramp. Traffic was light, but the other cars obscured their view of the Toyota.
“You lost him.” Chandler craned his neck and peered ahead.
“It’s a highway. He can only go straight. I’ll find him.” Jack kept his foot pinned to the floor and glared at the speedometer.
“I should get out and push,” Chandler grumbled.
Jack moved into the far left lane of the three-lane highway in order to pass a slow-moving tractor-trailer in the center lane—apparently the only vehicle on the road that was slower than they were. “I still don’t see him,” he said. “But the next exit isn’t for, like, ten miles.”
“It’ll take us that long to catch him,” Chandler said. “Oh, man!”
They’d passed the tractor-trailer and the silver Toyota was right beside them, in the far-right lane. Chandler turned his head down and away, pretending to fiddle with the radio.
Jack sped up.
“What are you doing?” Chandler hunched up his shoulders. “You’re not supposed to pass him.”
“I got this.”
The little car shook as it strained to go faster.
Chandler looked around. “I think the wheels are going to come off this thing.”
“Trust me.” Jack looked in the rearview mirror. Michael was still on the far right, and the middle lane was clear. Jack slowed down.
A minivan behind him flashed its lights to signal Jack to move out of the left lane. Jack just slowed even more, and the minivan pulled into the middle lane to pass them. Jack used the minivan to block their car from the view of the Toyota, then switched over to the far-right lane, a couple of cars behind Shaw.
“See.” Jack held his hand out as if he had just served up the Toyota on a platter.
“Sweet, but don’t get us jammed up.”
“I won’t.”
“One call to the cops and we’re screwed. The Army doesn’t want troublemakers.”
“You sound like Aunt Haddie.”
Chandler smacked his arm. “Yeah, just this morning she said that to me.” He cleared his throat and broke into his best Aunt Haddie impression: “Now, Chandler, you need to stay out of trouble or you’re screwed.” He stretched
the word out.
Jack laughed. “I meant ‘troublemakers’ sounds like Aunt Haddie. But fine, you sound like my mom. Okay?”
“Like your mom has ever said ‘screwed’ either.” Chandler held up his index finger. “Listen, I’m one hundred and ten percent as serious as a heart attack. I cannot, and will not, get jacked up in this. The Army’s my ticket to college.”
“You won’t.”
They followed the Toyota for the next ten miles. Chandler shook his head. “This guy’s probably just running an errand. Getting a TV fixed or his tires rotated.”
Just when Jack started to wonder whether Chandler was right and they were wasting valuable time following this guy around, the Toyota’s right turn signal started blinking.
Chandler pointed. “He’s going to Darrington.”
The Toyota took the off ramp and Jack followed, with a van between them. At the end of the ramp, both the Toyota and the van took a right, and Jack rolled through after them.
“Can you see him?” Jack craned his neck and drifted toward the middle of the road.
The Toyota and the van both took a right.
“The stupid van is going everywhere Michael is,” Chandler said.
The Toyota took a hard left. So did the van.
Suddenly, the Toyota slammed to a stop. The van skidded up right behind it, turned a little to the left to avoid a collision. Jack jammed both feet down on the brake pedal to keep from rear-ending it. Everything on the front seat shot forward and onto the floor, while Chandler braced himself against the dashboard.
Chandler whispered, “Wow, that was close.” They looked at each other and said in unison, “Amen!” as Aunt Haddie had taught them to do in narrow escapes. Of which there had been quite a few over the years.
Jack leaned over and looked out the window to see Michael storming over to the driver’s side of the van.
“What the hell! Are you following me?” Michael yelled.
“What? You just stop,” the van driver said in a thick Spanish accent.
“What’s your problem?” Jack wasn’t listening to the words so much as he was trying to read Shaw’s body language, but it wasn’t hard to read the classic signs of aggression and testosterone, with maybe some paranoia mixed in: he was leaning into the driver’s window and shouting, “Why are you following me?”
“No. I no follow you! We working there.” He pointed just ahead, to a house on the right.
Michael screamed at the van driver for a while, and then the passenger door of the van opened and it turned out there had been a second man in the van all the time, rather powerfully built and wearing a scowl that would strip paint. When he got out and started walking around the front of the van, Michael stomped back to his car.
Chandler craned his neck, but he couldn’t see both sides of the action. “What’s Shaw doing?”
“Getting back in his car.”
Michael yanked the door open and jumped in. As he drove away, the van didn’t move.
Jack laid on the horn.
“Don’t beep! He’ll see us.”
“We’re losing him.”
The van driver flipped Jack off and drove away.
“Now Michael knows we’re following him!” Chandler said.
“No, he doesn’t. You need to act normal if you’re undercover. And blowing your horn at someone stopped in the road is normal.”
“Normal people cut someone slack after a crazy guy gives them a brake job then goes all psycho on them. That’s what normal people do.”
“Whatever. But you’re right, Michael did go psycho.”
Chandler said in Aunt Haddie’s voice again, “Oh, yes, child, that man’s got temper issues.”
Now that the van was out of the way, Jack followed Michael at a distance. It was past noon and the traffic was heavy as the two cars wound closer to downtown Darrington. Jack’s knuckles were white and sweat ran down his back as he tried to keep Michael’s car in sight, but not too close, while at the same time navigating through traffic.
Finally, the Toyota pulled onto a side street and stopped in a parking lot behind a white two-story colonial.
“What is it?” Chandler asked. “A house, or a business?”
“I’ll drive around and see if there’s a sign,” Jack said.
Jack circled around the block. Sure enough, mounted on two white posts was a large green sign with gold letters: Tate, Wolfe and Rice. Experts in Civil Litigation.
Jack parked in a lot across the street where they could see Michael’s car. Fifteen minutes later, Michael hurried out of the law office, smiling, and got back in the Toyota.
“Wow, quick change,” Chandler noted as Jack pulled out and followed Michael again. “Now he looks all happy.”
“Yeah. Why?”
They continued to follow the Toyota, but always kept at least one car between them. It looked like Michael might get back on the highway, but he drove right past the entrance.
“I guess he’s got someplace else to go,” Jack said.
When they reached the downtown business district, the Toyota pulled into a parking space by the curb with no open spaces around it.
Jack slowed down. “What do I do now?”
“Just keep going,” Chandler said.
They drove past the Toyota, and Jack saw a space farther down the street.
“Do I park?” Jack asked.
“Er…”
“Do I park?”
“Ummm…”
“Do I park?” Jack nearly shouted.
“How do I know?” Chandler blurted.
Jack zipped into the parking space and put the car in park. He glared at Chandler. “If I ask something, you need to answer me.”
“What if I don’t know the answer? You want me to make something up? Ask me again.”
“What?”
“Ask me again.” Chandler lifted his chin.
Jack rolled his eyes. “Do I park?”
“Blue.”
“What?”
“See. My answer makes no sense because I don’t know the answer.”
“Then tell me that,” Jack said.
“I did. I said I didn’t know if you should park.”
“You didn’t say I don’t know. You just went, ah… um… errr…”
“So what if I did?” Chandler’s finger poked the dashboard.
“Sorry. Look, I’m not trying to be a jerk, but we need to get our communication down. Pretty soon we’re not going to be asking where a parking spot is, we’ll be asking where the guy who’s trying to shoot us is.”
“That’s a good point,” Chandler admitted.
Jack glanced in the rearview mirror. “Here he comes.”
They both lowered their heads as Michael walked down the sidewalk and past the car.
“Where’s he going? What should we do?” Chandler asked.
Jack thought for only a moment. “We follow him.”
“So you did hear my whole don’t-get-us-arrested speech? The guy flipped out once already. And why are we following him anyway? For all we know, this is nothing more than a wild goose chase.”
Jack ignored the question and got out of the car. “You wait here.”
“What?” Chandler said.
“You don’t blend in. You’re a giant.”
“But you’re the one he’s seen already.”
“He saw you too,” Jack said.
“Not as well. I stayed in the car, remember?” Chandler pointed at himself. “I should go.”
“I don’t want you to get jammed up,” Jack said.
“Back to back. It’s settled.”
“Okay. You follow him, and I’ll follow both of you from the other side of the street. If he gets someplace and starts coming back, we’ll switch sides.”
Chandler nodded. He got out of the car and followed Michael down the sidewalk. Jack crossed the street and kept pace.
The lunchtime rush was in full swing. Office workers rushed down the street and darted into restaurants
in the daily scramble called “lunch hour”—though it was only a half hour for many of them. Like contestants on some warped game show, they had to race out of the office, find a place to eat, order, scarf it down, and then scurry back to servitude.
Even in the lunch crowd, because of his size, it was easy to keep an eye on Chandler as he moved down the sidewalk. Jack kept his head tipped slightly down and tried to walk casually.
Michael, and then Chandler, passed by a busy bistro. The outside tables were packed; Michael had to slow down considerably and Chandler was getting too close to Michael.
Jack was about to try to signal Chandler to back off when Chandler knelt and tied his shoelace. The people behind him looked irritated by his sudden stop. They moved around him and looked down with a scowl as they passed.
Michael picked up his pace, got to the next corner, and stopped at the crosswalk light, which was red. Then, suddenly, he turned around.
Jack’s breath caught in his throat. Chandler was still walking, heading straight toward Michael.
Damn. If he recognizes Chandler…
Michael stood with his hands at his sides, staring back down the sidewalk in Chandler’s direction. Chandler walked right up beside him, as casual as could be, and waited for the light to change. Jack stood on the other side of the street, holding his breath.
Michael started to walk again—back the way he had come.
The crosswalk signal turned green, and the herd of people who had bunched up on the corners began walking, including Chandler and Jack. When they passed each other in the middle of the crosswalk, Chandler wiggled his eyebrows. “Close one,” he muttered.
Jack nodded and continued across the intersection.
Michael was already a good distance away, moving back toward his car. As Jack followed, Michael approached the bistro again. He slowed down and kept his head turned toward the tables. It seemed to Jack like he was looking for someone, scanning the diners.
As Jack watched, Michael homed in on one table where two women were sitting, a blonde and a brunette. The brunette was talking animatedly, her back to Michael. But as Michael walked past, the blonde glanced in his direction.
Detective Jack Stratton Box Set Page 71
