by Mike Lawson
‘Like was the vehicle going up and down hills?’
‘Sometimes,’ Danny said, ‘but not big ones.’
‘There’s a train track on this edge of the property,’ she said, tapping the map. ‘Did you hear a train? Or other cars, like you might have been near a road?’
‘No. No noises. It was quiet, like we were deep in the woods.’
‘This is hopeless,’ DeMarco said. ‘Maybe we can set up a delivery right away and get Pugh when he delivers the dope.’
‘That won’t work,’ Hall said. ‘Jubal won’t be de livering anything. All we’ll get is some mule who won’t talk.’
‘There was one thing,’ Danny said.
‘Yeah, what was that?’ Hall said, obviously not expecting much.
‘Right before we stopped, maybe five minutes before, we drove over something that went bumpitty-bump, bumpitty-bump.’
‘Bumpitty-bump?’ DeMarco said.
‘Yeah, like we were going over logs or one of those whaddaya-call’em – cattle guards. It happened twice, right before we stopped. Bumpitty-bump, bumpitty-bump, then a couple minutes later, bumpitty-bump, bumpitty-bump again. Then, a couple minutes after that, we stopped.’
Hall studied the map. ‘Here,’ she said, pointing. ‘This could be it. There’re two creeks running through his place, small ones, no more than two or three feet wide. If I remember right … Wait a minute.’ She went to the file cabinet again, the one from which she’d taken the map. She pulled out an accordion file folder and came back to the table. From the folder she pulled a stack of eight by ten black-and-white photographs.
‘We did one aerial surveillance of Pugh’s farm. I tried to get ’em to park a satellite over his place for a week, but they laughed me off.’ She flipped through the photos, then stopped and studied one.
‘Here. You see that? A little bridge made from logs, and here, about two hundred yards away, is another one. The two bridges are where these two creeks come close to each other and run parallel for a while. So if you’re right about the time it took you to get from the second bridge to the lab, the lab’s probably someplace within a quarter mile of the second bridge.’
‘But which one’s the second bridge?’ DeMarco asked.
‘Were you going uphill or downhill when you came to the second bridge?’ Hall asked Danny.
‘Uh … downhill,’ Danny said.
‘Then this is the second bridge,’ Hall said, stabbing a finger at the topographical map. She looked directly at Danny, her eyes bright, and said, ‘You’re going to have to go in there tonight and find that lab.’
‘Bullshit!’ Danny said.
55
DeMarco put on the night-vision goggles. The trees in the woods were clearly visible, everything a greenish color. He’d never worn night-vision goggles before – or a military camouflage suit, combat boots, and a bulletproof vest either. And he wished he wasn’t wearing any of those things right now.
Hall said she couldn’t search for the lab with them. She and her guys – a bunch of DEA cowboys who knew how to shoot and sneak through the woods – couldn’t go onto Pugh’s property without a warrant, and they didn’t have sufficient justification to get one. If Danny had been positive he’d been on Pugh’s property it would have been different, but since he’d been blindfolded and didn’t have a clue as to how far he’d traveled, it was impossible to state with certainty where the lab was. Then toss in the fact that the judge would have to accept the word of a convicted felon regarding its whereabouts, and there was no way Hall was going to get a warrant.
So DeMarco and his cousin were on their own. DeMarco didn’t want to go with Danny to search Pugh’s farm, but he didn’t trust his flake of a cousin; he couldn’t put the unveiling of a national conspiracy in the hands of a mafia fence.
Hall and another agent had driven them to the northern boundary of Pugh’s four hundred acres in a black Jeep Cherokee. To reach that spot it had been necessary to go through two pieces of property not owned by Pugh, and Hall had to cut through two barbed-wire fences on the way. Cutting the fences didn’t seem to bother her a bit, DeMarco noted.
‘You’re sure you know how to use a GPS?’ Hall asked Danny a second time.
‘Yeah, I’m positive. I got my hands on one once …’
This meant, DeMarco suspected, that one of Tony Benedetto’s crews had stolen a crate of the instruments.
‘… and I played with the thing for a couple of days,’ Danny said. ‘I know how to use it.’
‘Okay,’ Hall said, and she showed him and DeMarco the GPS unit she was holding in her hand. ‘Here’s the waypoint for where we are now, and here’s the waypoint for the second bridge. When you get to the bridge, start looking for a trail or a path.
Look for tire tracks made by ATVs, places where the grass has been beaten down. Understand?’
‘Sure,’ Danny said.
Sure, my ass, DeMarco thought. Like his cousin was Davy Crockett instead of some fuckin’ New York wiseguy who could barely find his way through Central Park.
Hall pulled a pistol in a clip-on holster out of one of the pockets of the black ski jacket she was wearing and handed it to DeMarco. ‘That’s a forty-caliber automatic. There’re eight bullets in the clip. You shoot somebody, even in the arm, it’ll put him down. Have you ever used a gun?’
‘Yeah,’ DeMarco said. And that was the truth. He’d once killed a man with a revolver. The man had shot at him and DeMarco had pulled the trigger of the gun he’d been holding out of sheer fright and amazingly hit the guy. But the total amount of time he’d spent with a pistol in his hands could be measured in minutes, and the number of times he’d fired one at another person was exactly once. He didn’t bother to tell Hall this. He did ask, ‘Is the safety on or off?’
The agent with Hall muttered, ‘Oh, great.’
Hall shot a shut-up look at the agent and said to DeMarco, ‘Give it to me.’ He handed her the weapon, and she did something to it and handed it back. ‘Now the safety’s off and there’s a bullet in the chamber. If you have to take it out of the holster, don’t shoot yourself in the leg.
‘Oh, and one other thing,’ she said. ‘There might be people working in the lab.’
‘What?’ DeMarco and his cousin said at the same time.
‘Pugh’s cookers work at night, but we don’t think they work every night.’
‘You don’t think?’ DeMarco said.
‘That’s right. Every couple of weeks Pugh buses in a bunch of people to do things around his place: clear brush, prune trees, whatever. These guys will stay on his property overnight in his barn, sometimes for a couple of nights. What we think is that five or six of the workers are really Pugh’s cookers. They sneak off to the lab in the dark and stay there for a couple of nights and brew his meth, then they leave on the bus with the real workers when they’re done. Anyway, Pugh had a bunch of guys come in a few days ago and they left the day before yesterday, so we’re pretty sure they’re not in the lab now. But be careful.’
Be careful, DeMarco thought. That was just great fuckin’ advice. But he didn’t say anything.
‘So I guess that’s it,’ Hall said. ‘We’ll wait here for you. If you haven’t found the place by dawn, come back here and we’ll try again tomorrow night. And good luck.’
‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Danny said. ‘Aren’t you gonna give me a gun too? I mean, if there’re guys in that lab—’
‘No way,’ Hall said. ‘I shouldn’t even be giving one to your cousin. The DEA’s not supposed to go around arming civilians, and I’m sure as hell not giving one to a guy that’s still under indictment for murder.’
‘But—’ Danny said.
‘No,’ Hall said, eyes like flint. ‘If you’re in danger, call on the radio and we’ll come in and get you. But I hope we don’t have to do that, because that’ll really screw up our chances of getting Pugh.’ Then she laughed and said, ‘Unless he personally kills one of you.’
Yeah, that was real funny, DeMar
co thought.
They didn’t make bad time. The good thing about the woods on Pugh’s property was that there wasn’t a lot of brush or ground cover. They had to veer around thickets of trees a couple of times, but Danny, who was in the lead, brought them back on course. Maybe he really did know how to use the GPS.
It took them twenty minutes to reach the log bridge. The bridge spanned a creek that was two feet wide and had carved a shallow gully into the landscape. Leading to and away from the bridge was a trail created by vehicle tires.
‘Which way,’ DeMarco whispered.
Danny pointed.
‘How do you know it’s not the other way?’ DeMarco asked.
‘The GPS. The other little bridge, the first one we crossed over when I was blindfolded, is behind us. It’s that way. So we go this way.’
DeMarco took off the night-vision goggles and looked around. There was no moon, maybe a dozen stars overhead that weren’t obscured by clouds, and it was so damn dark without the goggles he felt like he was standing inside a closet. He didn’t have any idea how the goggles worked, but he was damn glad they did, because if Pugh had someone standing guard, the guard wouldn’t be able to see them unless he was similarly equipped.
‘Okay,’ he said, putting the magic goggles back on. ‘Let’s go.’
They walked down the trail about seventy-five yards and the trail forked.
‘Aw, shit,’ Danny said. ‘Now what? You wanna split up or stay together?’
If Danny had been right about the time, the lab had to be within a hundred yards of the fork in the road. They had radios so if they split up and if one of them found the lab, he could let the other guy know. Nah, forget that, he thought; he didn’t want Danny doing anything by himself.
‘We’ll stay together,’ DeMarco said. ‘We’ll go that way a hundred yards or so and look around for an hour; if we don’t find it, we’ll come back here and go up the other road.’
‘You’re the boss,’ Danny said.
They walked for a couple of minutes. Then DeMarco said, ‘Okay, what are we looking for?’
‘Well, shit, Joe, I don’t know. There’s a door in the ground around here somewhere, I think, and there’s bushes or something coverin’ the door. Probably the best thing to do is just walk around and sniff. The place I was in stunk to high heaven.’
DeMarco went left and Danny went right, noses probing the air like a couple of Italian beagles. He searched for any anomaly on the ground, anything that didn’t look natural. There was nothing. He wondered if he should take off the night-vision goggles and use a flashlight, thinking it might be easier to spot something with the flashlight as opposed to the green color he was seeing through the goggles. They were at least half a mile from Pugh’s house and he didn’t think a flashlight beam would be visible from that distance. He was still thinking about using the flashlight when the walkie-talkie on his belt squawked, a burst of static that scared the crap out of him.
‘What?’ he hissed into the radio. Then he remembered and said, ‘Over.’
‘I found something. Over,’ Danny said.
DeMarco looked around. He could see Danny fifty yards away and he jogged over to him.
‘Look,’ Danny said, pointing to the ground.
Cigarette butts, a lot of them, in an area underneath a good-sized oak. Most of the butts were contained in a rough three-foot circle of ground and DeMarco guessed that the guys who worked in the lab came out here to smoke so they wouldn’t blow themselves up. They’d sit under the oak, puff their cigarettes, squash the butts out near the tree, and then go back to work. So the lab had to be fairly close, probably no more than fifty feet away, but DeMarco still couldn’t see anything with the night-vision goggles other than a fluorescent green forest.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna use a flashlight.’
‘You sure?’ Danny said.
‘No,’ DeMarco said, and took off the goggles and turned on the flashlight. He walked around searching the ground with the flashlight for five minutes but still didn’t see anything that looked like a door. Then he noticed something. The cigarette butts made a trail, a little Hansel and Gretel trail. The guys would be almost done smoking their cigarettes and they’d start back toward the lab, and on the way they’d drop their cigarette butts on the ground and grind them out with their feet. They couldn’t just flick the butts away because they might start a forest fire. So DeMarco followed the butt trail, sweeping his flashlight back and forth, and then he saw it: a little ridge of dirt about four feet long, about an inch high, and the ridge was absolutely straight. There aren’t many perfectly straight things out in the woods. He walked over and knelt down next to the little ridge and ran his hand along it.
‘Here it is,’ he said to his cousin.
They rubbed their hands along the line in the dirt, came to another intersecting line, and finally understood what they were dealing with. It was a piece of wood, four feet square. A half sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood. On top of the plywood was a shallow layer of dirt and three small shrubs. DeMarco couldn’t figure out how the plants could grow in so little soil until he touched the leaves: they were artificial plants and they were glued to the piece of wood. On two parallel sides of the plywood sheet were small rope handles that had been covered with dirt. All you had to do was pick up the piece of plywood and move it to one side.
Hall had said the meth cookers worked at night. During the day, the door to the lab would be almost invisible, just another square of forest, a small plot of dirt and shrubs. From the air it would be completely invisible. The nights when Pugh’s men manufactured the meth, they would simply remove the hatch covering the lab’s entrance; maybe they’d just leave it off to provide ventilation for the space, or maybe a couple of men would put the hatch back in place after the cookers had entered the lab and those guys would stand guard and periodically remove the cover when it was time for the cookers to take a smoke break. When they finished working for the night, they’d put the cover back in place and hide the edges with a layer of dirt. The cover was simple, easy to remove, and, most important, almost impossible to spot unless you were right on top of it. DeMarco would never have found it if it hadn’t been for the cigarette butts.
‘Let’s get this thing out of the way,’ DeMarco said.
‘What if there’s somebody inside the lab?’ Danny said.
‘Then either we would have heard them or they would have heard us, all the damn noise you’re making. Pick it up.’ Danny and DeMarco took hold of the rope handles, raised the door, and saw the steps going down into an underground bunker.
‘Hurry up,’ DeMarco said. ‘Get the pictures.’
Danny hustled down the steps. Using a digital camera, he snapped off half a dozen pictures of the equipment inside the lab, shoved the camera back into one of the leg pockets in his camo pants, and came back up the stairs.
‘Let’s boogie,’ Danny said.
‘We gotta put the cover back or they’ll know somebody’s been here. And if that happens they’ll remove all the drugs and the equipment.’
‘Right,’ Danny said.
Master fuckin’ criminal, DeMarco thought.
They put the cover back in place and brushed dirt over the edges.
‘Now let’s get out of here,’ DeMarco said.
‘You assholes hold it right there,’ a voice said. ‘You move and I’ll put deer slugs into both of you.’
Aw, Christ.
DeMarco watched as a man stepped out of the woods, a tall guy with an enormous gut and a beard. Like DeMarco and his cousin, the guy was wearing night-vision goggles – and he was holding a shotgun. There must have been some sort of alarm system protecting the lab. Maybe the plywood sheet covering the lab’s entrance had been alarmed, but DeMarco didn’t think so. He hadn’t seen any wires or contacts, and it had taken them less than five minutes to take the pictures and put the cover back in place. The man couldn’t have gotten to the lab from Pugh’s place that fast. No, more likely they’d
tripped some sort of perimeter alarm, maybe motion detectors or cameras that could see in the dark. Whatever the case, this wasn’t good.
‘Now unzip them jackets real slow and hold ’em open. I wanna see if you’re strapped.’
Shit. The gun Patsy Hall had given him was on his belt, on his right hip, and the guy saw it as soon as DeMarco opened his jacket. Seeing DeMarco’s gun, the man said to Danny, ‘Where’s yours?’
‘Don’t have one,’ Danny said.
‘I pat you down and find one, bud, I’m gonna put a hurt on you.’
Danny didn’t respond.
‘Okay,’ he said to DeMarco, ‘toss the gun into the woods. Use your left hand, just your thumb and one finger. You point it at me and I’ll blow your ass away.’
DeMarco did as he was told. He pulled the gun slowly from the holster and threw it away underhanded, and when he did the fat guy’s head turned momentarily as his eyes followed the arc of the gun – and just at that moment, DeMarco saw Danny’s arm move in his peripheral vision. Pugh’s man, unfortunately, saw Danny move as well. Without any hesitation, he swung the shotgun barrel toward Danny and pulled the trigger. The shotgun blast was horrendous in the quiet night, and Danny was blown backward by the slug striking his chest.
‘Jesus Christ!’ DeMarco screamed. His cousin was lying on his back, not moving. DeMarco didn’t see any blood, but with the night-vision goggles maybe blood wouldn’t be visible. ‘Goddammit, what in the hell did you shoot him for?’ he said.
‘He put his hand in his pocket. He was goin’ for his piece.’
‘He didn’t have a fuckin’ piece!’ DeMarco yelled.
‘Shut the hell up.’
DeMarco looked down at his cousin again. Like DeMarco, Danny had been wearing a bulletproof vest underneath his shirt but DeMarco didn’t know what a deer slug was, much less how much penetrating power one had. But it apparently had enough: Danny still hadn’t moved, and one leg was twisted under him in an unnatural position.
‘Now who the hell are you?’ the man said.
There was no point saying that he and Danny were a couple of guys who’d just gotten lost in the woods, not dressed the way they were. So DeMarco tried another tack.
