The straps felt like an old friend’s hands clapped on his shoulders, though the pack was much lighter than what he’d gotten used to in the service.
After he had what he needed, DJ disembarked Reel Fun, making his way toward land, ignoring blondes giving him looks and pesky kids skipping all around the dock. Eventually, he was street side. With his sat phone, he called for a cab, which arrived about five minutes later—just as the sun was reaching its apex in the sky, scouring him with its harshest glare. He blinked and saw Blunt, then got in the cab.
The cabbie yelled something at him. Or maybe he hadn’t? The world was turning like a capsizing boat.
“I said 99 Calle B, Dorado, Puerto Rico,” DJ heard himself grumble.
Jesus. Did that bartender spike his beer? How many did he have anyway?
Later, the car stopped in a rough-looking neighborhood in a small suburb on the western edge of San Juan, about a mile inland from the north coast.
He opened the door, stood, and took in a lungful of the fresh sea air, laced with burning rubber and frying grease. He stepped onto the sidewalk in front of a little bar and grill, then turned around and slipped the cabbie a fifty for the ride and a tip.
“I’ll keep your number,” DJ said.
“Okay.” The cabbie waved him off.
DJ closed the door and the cab rumbled away. Now, all he had to do was get his head on straight while he waited for the sun to go down.
The water in Bahia de Mulas, cupped by land to the east and west, was as serene as a grandmother’s smile. The wind teased ribbons of Alicia’s blond hair, one of her hands clamped to the crown of her hat, the other cradling Dr. Markel’s laptop in her bag.
Good life I was living, all things considered.
Then, my phone rang in my pocket. I was pulled out of my swaddle of good vibrations. I let go of the dinghy’s throttle to answer. Caller ID showed a number I didn’t recognize, but it was local, so I answered anyway.
“This is Snyder.”
“Hello, Mr. Snyder, how are you?” A young woman’s voice asked. She had an American accent, very proper, like she’d paid for coaching, and it wasn’t cheap.
“Things were going good a few seconds ago.”
Alicia looked at me, bottling up a laugh.
“I’m pleased to hear that. Mr. Snyder, you don’t know me, but my name is Tamara Price. Detective Collat from the PRPB gave me your number.”
Great. Collat was giving my number out. Did he think I needed more work?
“If you’re in a bind, I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything for you right now.”
“I know. You’ve been assisting my friend, Gabriela. I’m sorry to call with bad news, but she doesn’t seem to be adjusting to life in Bayamón.”
My stomach sank. “Is Bayamón a prison here?”
“That’s correct.” Tamara paused a moment. She said part of a word, stopped, then went back to the board and plotted out a new thought. “I know she didn’t murder anyone.”
“That makes two of us.” Actually, five of us, at last count.
“I know who did.”
“Unless you’re calling me to confess, I’m going to have a hard time believing that.”
“Are you familiar with an investigative journalist named Luc Baptiste?”
I tipped to the side, then braced myself against the dinghy’s gunwales. If she knew how Baptiste tied into this, she was closer to answers than I assumed.
“I am,” I said, trying not to give everything away.
“Mr. Baptiste was tapped to help Dr. Markel blow the whistle on some malfeasance at Hildon. I’m not at privilege to give specifics, but the information the two of them planned to reveal would’ve been extremely damaging to certain people in the company.”
“Like who?”
“Rachel Little, the CEO.”
“She killed Luc Baptiste and the Markels?” I asked.
“Not herself,” Tamara answered. “I believe she hired hitmen to do it.”
“Do you have evidence of this?” I found this difficult to believe, but certainly not outside the realm of possibility. The idea of Hildon’s CEO being the guilty party was worth entertaining, at least for a few minutes.
“I do, but I can’t share it with you at this time. Not until you do something for me.”
“So, your help is conditional? Do you think this makes me want to work with you?”
“It poses some difficulty, I’m sure,” she said. “However, I’m part of the management team at Hildon. Unlike Dr. Markel, I have an ethos that precludes me from openly sharing sensitive information. I’m of the opinion that this is best dealt with in-house.”
“Yet you called me.”
“My opinion is you are the right man, in the right place, at the right time, Mr. Snyder. You’re helping my dear friend, Gabriela, and there’s nothing I want more than justice to be done.”
Good God. I could smell it blowing through the phone. I thought people like Tamara Price were trapped in my rearview mirror.
“Let’s be honest. You also want your boss’s job,” I said.
“I won’t try to mislead you. Yes, I want to be CEO of Hildon Pharmaceuticals. Who, in my position, with my pedigree, and my aspirations, wouldn’t?”
“And what aspiration would that be?”
“To be the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company.”
I silently retched. Alicia gave me a puzzled look.
“You’ve got the chops for it,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “Gabriela told me she took a laptop from Dr. Markel’s house. That machine is considered property of Hildon, and contains documents not meant for public consumption. I’ll expect you to return it to me now.”
“Sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t want this to become an adversarial relationship, Mr. Snyder. We can work together.”
“What relationship? I could be looking at you right now, and I wouldn’t know it.”
“I want to get my friend out of prison. She didn’t murder anyone, but so long as that laptop is out of Hildon’s possession, you can be assured they’ll do everything in their power to prosecute her.”
“Now you’re not part of Hildon?”
“I’m not part of legal.”
These people always deflected. Never around to eat the blame, but happy to suck up the credit.
“You remind me of someone I grew up with,” I said. “I didn’t like him.”
She sighed. More for my sake than hers.
“I’ll be in contact, Mr. Snyder. For Gabriela’s sake.”
After Tamara ended the call, Alicia gave me a curious stare.
“Telemarketer,” I said.
“Seemed like an aggressive sales pitch.”
“Some lady named Tamara Price. Said she was a friend of Gabriela’s, but I got the impression she didn’t have Gabriela’s best interests at heart.”
“Think we should tell DJ?”
I shrugged and turned the throttle. The dinghy puttered toward Wayward.
The sun went down over DJ’s right shoulder, but he didn’t notice. The sweat on his T-shirt channeled the cool, evening air to his skin, but it didn’t make him comfortable. He sipped his beer in a chair outside the bar, but it didn’t quench his thirst. The chair was probably meant for the bouncer. In the empty lot across the street, a gecko streaked from a sun-bleached plastic toy car to a wooden box. Birdsong rang out. Wouldn’t be long before one swooped down and snatched the gecko for dinner.
He took another sip of his beer. His duffle slumped over against his leg, and his thigh muscle twitched, ready to get on the move. So, DJ gulped down the rest of his beer. He held the last sip in his mouth, letting the slight aluminum tang settle over his taste buds, then spat it out.
He picked up the duffle bag, slung it over his shoulder and turned his eyes to the empty lot across the road.
“You’re on borrowed time, friend,” he said to the gecko, though he couldn’t see it. “
Make the most of it, while it lasts.”
DJ started down Calle B, walking over the cracked, grass-spackled sidewalk. To all outward appearances he looked like a bum hunting for a good tree to sleep under. The houses he passed were built like shoeboxes and painted like birds of paradise.
He hardly saw a soul. Sure, a pack of kids played soccer in the street, and a plump woman beat the dust out of a rug draped over a fence, but no one gave him a second look. Bums probably weren’t out of place on Calle B.
The street was cracked worse than the sidewalk. More than one house looked abandoned, and more than one car parked street side was up on cinder blocks or a rusted-out jack, waiting for somebody to get a bug up their ass and finish the repairs.
Every boxy house had a security fence—some taller than DJ, most made from wrought iron. A handful were chain link, but others had concrete bases thick enough to shrug off a head-on with an ’84 Chrysler. Front yards were mostly sand, with palm trees providing sparse shade. Gardens popped up in raggedy patches where there was no shade at all.
DJ only noticed the houses because he was scoping the yards for good hiding spots, and at the same time, checking for house 99, which he found about a dozen lots from the intersection at the north end of the street where the bar was.
Like the others, 99 Calle B was a boxy house with a gravel driveway and a picture window on the front of the building, trapped behind steel bars.
Nobody was home. At least to DJ’s eyes. The front window was a black rectangle, and the set of four divots in the gravel said a car would be parked there. Or would be, whenever the right honorable Officer Adrian Dos Santos decided he’d had his fill of hanging fat hippies in their garages.
An image of the rope they’d used to kill Blunt, its strands coming off like split ends, swung through DJ’s head. He blinked it away as he stepped off the sidewalk in front of 99 Calle B and hunted for a place where he could observe the house without being seen.
A single lot northward, he spotted a place that looked abandoned. There was a rusty car in the yard, which was being overtaken by reedy grass. Broken windows. Rusty lock and chain hanging on the front gate. But most promising of all was a thicket of overgrown bushes around an old tree in the abandoned house’s front yard. From there, DJ would have a clear line of sight into Dos Santos’s driveway. All he had to do was get inside the security fence.
As he shuffled slowly northward, DJ kept his eyes ahead and his pace steady. He didn’t want to draw the attention of the kids down the street. The abandoned house’s front gate looked awfully suspect. One good push, and he might snap the chain apart. He had to walk up to it without any kind of cover or concealment and try his luck.
When he came to the house’s front gate, he checked to make sure nobody was looking his way. Satisfied, DJ examined the lock and chain. Now that he’d had a closer look at it, something jumped out at him; the chain rested on a horizontal cross-member at eye level, and there was nothing to stop him from shimmying the chain up the wrought-iron fence and slipping it off the top.
So, working quickly and quietly, he did just that. After he passed through the gate, sure that he was undetected, he put the chain back where it was.
DJ moved about halfway up the driveway, watching the house for any signs of movement inside. Darkness was quickly settling in. All the freaks would be out soon, and he didn’t want to get ambushed by some junkie squatter with a rusty needle.
After giving the place a once-over from the front yard, he went to the southeastern corner of the lot, to the old tree and the overgrown bushes. The bushes were prickly little things, snagging on his jeans and T-shirt, but so long as he protected his eyes, he’d be fine.
Once inside the heaviest part of the thicket, DJ noticed he couldn’t see a damned thing except a wall of green leaves and the dust under his shoes. Unless Dos Santos shouted out his name when he pulled into his driveway, DJ would never know he was there.
The lowest branch of the tree was about six feet from the ground, behind and above DJ. It stretched out over the fence and had plenty of leaves. In the darkness, it’d be hard to spot him, so long as he stayed low. DJ pulled himself up until he was sitting on the branch.
Chin-ups were a damned joke when a guy didn’t have to contend with the weight of half a leg. The titanium prosthetic, even with a sneaker on, didn’t weigh four pounds.
Straddling the tree branch, he could peer through the leaves well enough to see the entry to Dos Santos’s driveway. All he had to do was make sure he didn’t fall out and break his neck.
For the next three hours, DJ sat on that tree branch and sweated out the day’s beer in the dark, watching cars and stray dogs go by. Nobody looked up.
It wasn’t the first time DJ had sat perched in a tree to watch. Most people thought very linearly. They surveyed their surroundings at eye-level or looked down at the ground. So, rooftops and trees made for great observation posts.
Around 9 p.m., a car’s headlights slowed in front of Dos Santos’s house. They lit the front entrance as an electric motor kicked to life, and the gate moved out of the way.
A grim anticipation came over DJ. There was nothing like catching an enemy unaware—especially one who had tormented you.
The headlights disappeared up the driveway. The engine stopped as the gate moved back into place. A single car door slammed. Good. He was probably alone. Dos Santos was humming a little tune to himself, and his footsteps sounded uneven. Apparently, he’d been out drinking. DJ smiled.
When the front door slammed shut, and DJ saw a tattered square of light shining through the leaves, he checked the duffle bag’s strap on his shoulder, then scooted forward on the branch until he’d passed the fence beneath him. Then, he lowered himself down.
Not a soul up or down the street. Perfect.
DJ crouched low and scrambled to the nearest cover—the rear-passenger side of an old Chevy truck with a flat tire. He crouched on the sidewalk, then scouted Dos Santos’s front window once more. Satisfied, he hid again, then slipped the bag off his shoulder and opened the drawstring.
Aside from the money he kept in an outer pocket, a few entry tools, and a single MRE, there was a knit hat, a pair of latex gloves, a box of double-aught buckshot, and a short-barreled Mossberg 500. He brought the gloves and hat out, putting them on. Next came the shotgun and shells. The gun felt good in his hands, like justice waiting to bark out its judgment. He quietly opened the receiver, slipped a shell in, then inserted five more into the tube magazine.
He closed the box of shells, returned it to his bag, then tossed the duffle into the bed of the truck. If the truck’s owner came back, fixed the tire, and took off before DJ could get back to it, oh well. Lucky enough to find the cash, lucky enough to keep it.
Holding the shotgun, he stayed hunched over and went to the back of the truck. Nothing to see through the living room window of Dos Santos’s house. The light had been turned off, which raised the hair on the back of DJ’s neck. He needed eyes on his target. He needed to know if Dos Santos was cracking beers in his kitchen or pulling something out of his gun safe.
Lingering at the back of the truck, DJ watched for movement. No cars had passed for some time. He heard nothing except the tick of the car’s cooling engine across the street, and the faint sound of salsa music shaking through the muggy night air.
A concrete post at the corner of Dos Santos’s neighbor’s yard looked like the perfect entry point for DJ to hop the fence, so he darted across the street, staying low.
He leaned his left shoulder against the post, keeping his shotgun ready to snap upward and fire. Before he brought his eyes around and exposed himself to enemy fire, he listened. Bugs chirped a block or two away, a night bird cackled, and a dog barked far down the street, toward the bar.
When he darted a look around the post, he saw Dos Santos through the wrought iron fence. He stood at the kitchen window on the north side of the house, staring across his driveway at the neighbor’s wall, an empty shot glass in h
is hand.
Dos Santos couldn’t have been more than twenty yards off. An easy shot, even with the short barrel and the wide choke on DJ’s Mossberg. Might not kill the guy, but he’d have a hell of a lot to think about when shards of his kitchen window went flying into his face.
Of course, that’d make it impossible to get information out of him. DJ had a few questions burning in the back of his head.
Unaware that a violent death was just outside his window, Dos Santos boogied away from it, swinging his shoulders, and bobbing his head to music DJ could just hear coming from the house.
DJ couldn’t lose sight of him. He slipped his shotgun through the iron bars of the fence, into Dos Santos’s yard. Then he pulled himself on top of the short concrete post. From there, he had no trouble swinging his legs over and sliding down the vertical bars of the fence.
Once he had his feet under him, DJ picked up his Mossberg and hurried toward Dos Santos’s car—a very nicely kept late model BMW i5.
Snuggled up against the front left tire, D. J. was suddenly aware that the skin under his goatee itched like hell. As he scratched it and smacked his lips, the air took on a copper flavor, and the low thuds of salsa music bleeding through concrete seemed to knock around inside his ears. In that moment, DJ felt his eyes could pierce the darkness, that he could see the birds sleeping in trees and he’d be quick enough to catch a possum with his bare hands.
Been a while since he’d felt like that. Maybe since he’d helped McDermitt pick off those acid-brained cultists. No, there had to be a couple times since then. Maybe Port-Au-Prince.
Mark Antony’s famous phrase popped into his head: “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.” It felt good to be let off the lead. To be the invader. To not have somebody wagging a finger at him while he did the things that took courage to do. It wasn’t DJ’s fault that the world was a violent, chaotic pit full of folks eager to shove their fingers in somebody else’s eye. The only thing that might be his fault was ensuring that anybody who tried to poke his eyes out instead pulled back a bloody stump.
Wayward Sons Page 30
