Pellam opened his mouth to make excuses, but then he said, “As long as I don’t have to get up too early, Stace.”
“Oh, no, sir. Film’s over. We’re on vacation now.”
THE BASKETBALL COURT on Leonard Street in Maddox is closed most of the time. It’s part of a school playground but because of budget cutbacks, the Department of Education can’t afford to keep it open when school’s not in session, and the gate is locked at 5:00 P.M. Not that it matters much; the local kids have pried apart enough chain link gate to slip through for pickup games any time they want.
The court is asphalt. There’s a lot of graffiti on the brick walls surrounding it—names of kids and gangs and some of those flashy, three-dimensional block letters and drawings that the talented punks do. But the asphalt itself is clean as black marble in a church. Nobody messes with foul lines.
Tonight, a mild, humid night in December, two men are at the fence. The opening in the gate would be big enough for them to pass through if one of the men weren’t in a wheelchair. It’s a small chair, gunmetal blue and sporty, with wheels tilted; at the top, they’re closer together than at the bottom. The man who is standing looks around and takes a geared, carbon-tempered bolt cutter from a large, cylindrical canvas sports bag. He props one long handle on his hip and, using both hands on the other handle, severs one side of a link of chain, then the other.
They enter the court. The man in the chair speeds forward under the thrusts of his powerful arms, which are dark with hair.
Pellam says, “Go easy with an old man, huh?”
It takes a while for Donnie Buffett to get used to dribbling but he’s played good offense for years and knows how to keep the ball away from his body while controlling it. He does have a problem, though, because he can only coast in for a shot: If he uses his arm to move forward, he goes in circles. What he does is, he sets the ball on his lap and speeds in for the lay-up.
Pellam whistles loudly through his teeth and cries, “Traveling.”
“So what’re you back in town for?” Buffett asks him after sinking the shot. “That Missouri River movie?”
“Nope. That’s in post production now. July release date. I’m suing the director for my fee and credit.”
“That’s a hassle.”
“Goes with the territory. I just came back to do some scouting for another script.”
“What’s this one called?”
“Central Standard Time.”
“Sounds boring. Who’s going to be in it? You should cast Geena Davis. I really like her. Or Shelley Long. You ever watch Cheers?”
“Nobody’s in it. Nobody’s even making it yet. When I was here I saw some locations that looked pretty good. I wanted to check them out this time of year. That’s when the story takes place. Winter.”
“That’s pretty wild. Two movies in one year. Maybe Maddox’ll be the new Hollywood.”
“Hollywood started out as a desert,” Pellam tells him.
“How long you here for?”
“A week or two. Then I’m heading on to my mother’s place, upstate New York, for the holidays.”
Buffett usually makes his shots, which Pellam finds extremely frustrating. Pellam has been watching the Lakers all season. He tries to fly up to the basket and stuff the ball in, but he comes nowhere close. He is a terrible player. The Nocona cowboy boots don’t help much.
Buffett gets the rebound away from Pellam and sinks another.
“Hell with this,” Pellam says. “Let’s see a slam-dunk.”
They play for a half hour and take a break for beer.
In response to a question Buffett tells Pellam he isn’t seeing Nina anymore. “That’s over with. It was just a fluke thing. I never knew what to make of her. She was moody a lot. It was like she had some big secret or something.”
“I picked that up, too.” Pellam wipes his mouth with his sleeve and thinks they’re crazy to be drinking beer in December.
And crazy to be playing basketball now, too.
“Did I tell you?” Buffett asks.
“What?”
“Penny’s moved out. We’re getting a divorce.”
“You’re going to what?”
“A divorce. Get one.”
“God,” Pellam says.
“Well—”
“I think that’s awful.”
Buffett looks away, inordinately embarrassed, and swallows a lot of beer. “It happens.”
“Did she find out about Nina?”
“No. She still doesn’t know.”
Pellam shakes his head and starts to wave his arm at Buffett’s legs but changes the motion to encompass the entire court. “All this and she decides to leave you?”
“No, Pellam. Uh-uh. I’m the one getting the divorce. It’s my idea. She’s going to live with her parents.”
“Oh.” This, too, Pellam thinks is crazy. He looks at Buffett for a moment. “All this and you leave her?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“You were over to the house. You really have to ask?”
“But you’ll be living by yourself?”
Buffett shrugs. “I guess, yeah.”
Pellam gives him a more-power-to-you shrug and practices dribbling. The ball gets away from him. He hops in front and stops it, then asks, “You see Dr. Wendy lately?”
“Th’other day.”
“So?”
“Nothing new. Same old prognosis.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“No.”
They drink beer for a few minutes, talking about the Knicks and the Lakers. Then Buffett says, “They’ve tried these new drugs on me. They don’t have any effect.”
“You gonna kill yourself?”
“I don’t think so. Someday maybe.” Buffett is neither joking nor serious when he says this.
“I just thought of something. You play poker?”
Buffett laughs at the idiocy of the question. “Of course I play poker.”
“You like chili?”
“No. I hate chili.”
A breeze comes up and it’s too cold to sit still and drink beer so they head back toward the basket and begin to play again. Pellam comes up fast and gets the ball away from Buffett. He dribbles fiercely and lobs a long one, a three-pointer, which he knows isn’t going to go in, but it hits the rim, reverberates back and forth madly and finally drops through the rusty metal hoop into Buffett’s waiting hands.
EDGE
JEFFERY DEAVER
Available in hardcover from Simon & Schuster
Turn the page for a preview of Edge. . . .
JUNE 2004
The Rules of Play
THE MAN WHO wanted to kill the young woman sitting beside me was three-quarters of a mile behind us, as we drove through a pastoral setting of tobacco and cotton fields this humid morning.
A glance in the rearview mirror revealed a sliver of car, moving at a comfortable pace with the traffic, piloted by a man who by all appearances seemed hardly different from any one of a hundred drivers on this recently resurfaced divided highway.
“Officer Fallow?” Alissa began. Then, as I’d been urging her for the past week: “Abe?”
“Yes.”
“Is he still there?” She’d seen my gaze.
“Yes. And so’s our tail,” I added for reassurance. My protégé was behind the killer, two or three car lengths. He was not the only person from our organization on the job.
“Okay,” Alissa whispered. The woman, in her midthirties, was a whistle-blower against a government contractor that did a lot of work for the army. The company was adamant that it had done nothing wrong and claimed it welcomed an investigation. But there’d been an attempt on Alissa’s life a week ago and—since I’d been in the army with one of the senior commanders at Bragg—Defense had called me in to guard her. As head of the organization I don’t do much fieldwork any longer but I was glad to get out, to tell the truth. My typical day was ten hours at my desk in our Alexandria o
ffice. And in the past month it had been closer to twelve or fourteen, as we coordinated the protection of five high-level organized crime informants, before handing them over to Witness Protection for their face-lifts.
It was good to be back in the saddle, if only for a week or so.
I hit a speed dial button, calling my protégé.
“It’s Abe,” I said into my hands-free. “Where is he now?”
“Make it a half mile. Moving up slowly.”
The hitter, whose identity we didn’t know, was in a nondescript Hyundai sedan, gray.
I was behind an eighteen-foot truck, CAROLINA POULTRY PROCESSING COMPANY painted on the side. It was empty and being driven by one of our transport people. In front of that was a car identical to the one I was driving.
“We’ve got two miles till the swap,” I said.
Four voices acknowledged this over four very encrypted com devices.
I disconnected.
Without looking at her, I said to Alissa, “It’s going to be fine.”
“I just . . .” she said in a whisper. “I don’t know.” She fell silent and stared into the side-view mirror
as if the man who wanted to kill her were right behind us.
“It’s all going just like we planned.”
When innocent people find themselves in situations that require the presence and protection of people like me, their reaction more often than not is as much bewilderment as fear. Mortality is tough to process.
But keeping people safe, keeping people alive, is a business like any other. I frequently told this to my protégé and the others in the office, probably irritating them to no end with both the repetition and the stodgy tone. But I kept on saying it because you can’t forget, ever. It’s a business, with rigid procedures that we study the way surgeons learn to slice flesh precisely and pilots learn to keep tons of metal safely aloft. These techniques have been honed over the years and they worked.
Business . . .
Of course, it was also true that the hitter who was behind us at the moment, intent on killing the woman next to me, treated his job as a business too. I knew this sure as steel. He was just as serious as I was, had studied procedures as diligently as I had, was smart, IQ-wise and streetwise, and he had advantages over me: His rules were unencumbered by my constraints—the Constitution and the laws promulgated thereunder.
Still, I believe there is an advantage in being in the right. In all my years of doing this work I’d never lost a principal. And I wasn’t going to lose Alissa.
A business . . . which meant remaining calm as a surgeon, calm as a pilot.
Alissa was not calm, of course. She was breathing hard, worrying her cuff as she stared at a sprawling magnolia tree we were passing, an outrider of a chestnut forest, bordering a huge cotton field, the tufts bursting. She was uneasily spinning a thin diamond bracelet—a treat to herself on a recent birthday. She now glanced at the jewelry and then her palms, which were sweating, and placed her hands on her navy blue skirt. Under my care, Alissa had worn dark clothing exclusively. It was camouflage but not because she was the target of a professional killer; it was about her weight, which she’d wrestled with since adolescence. I knew this because we’d shared meals and I’d seen the battle up close. She’d also talked quite a bit about her struggle with weight. Some principals don’t need or want camaraderie. Others, like Alissa, need us to be friends. I don’t do well in that role but I try and can generally pull it off.
We passed a sign. The exit was a mile and a half away.
A business requires simple, smart planning. You can’t be reactive in this line of work and though I hate the word “proactive” (as opposed to what, antiactive?), the concept is vital to what we do. In this instance, to deliver Alissa safe and sound to the prosecutor for her depositions, I needed to keep the hitter in play. Since my protégé had been following him for hours, we knew where he was and could have taken him at any moment. But if we’d done that, whoever had hired him would simply call somebody else to finish the job. I wanted to keep him on the road for the better part of the day—long enough for Alissa to get into the U.S. Attorney’s office and give him sufficient information via deposition so that she would no longer be at risk. Once the testimony’s down, the hitter has no incentive to eliminate a witness.
The plan I’d devised, with my protégé’s help, was for me to pass the Carolina Poultry truck and pull in front of it. The hitter would speed up to keep us in sight but before he got close the truck and I would exit simultaneously. Because of the curve in the road and the ramp I’d picked, the hitter wouldn’t be able to see my car but would spot the decoy. Alissa and I would then take a complicated route to a hotel in Raleigh, where the prosecutor awaited, while the decoy would eventually end up at the courthouse in Charlotte, three hours away. By the time the hitter realized that he’d been following a bogus target, it would be too late. He’d call his primary—his employer—and most likely the hit would be called off. We’d move in, arrest the hitter and try to trace him back to the primary.
About a mile ahead was the turnoff. The chicken truck was about thirty feet ahead.
I regarded Alissa, now playing with a gold and amethyst necklace. Her mother had given it to her on her seventeenth birthday, more expensive than the family could afford but an unspoken consolation prize for the absence of an invitation to the prom. People tend to share quite a lot with those who are saving their lives.
My phone buzzed. “Yes?” I asked my protégé.
“The subject’s moved up a bit. About two hundred yards behind the truck.”
“We’re almost there,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I passed the poultry truck quickly and pulled in behind the decoy—a tight fit. It was driven by a man from our organization; the passenger was an FBI agent who resembled Alissa. There’d been some fun in the office when we picked somebody to play the role of me. I have a round head and ears that protrude a fraction of an inch more than I would like. I’ve got wiry red hair and I’m not tall. So in the office they apparently spent an hour or two in an impromptu contest to find the most elf-like officer to impersonate me.
“Status?” I asked into the phone.
“He’s changed lanes and is accelerating a little.”
He wouldn’t like not seeing me, I reflected.
I heard, “Hold on . . . hold on.”
I would remember to tell my protégé to mind the unnecessary verbal filler; while the words were scrambled by our phones, the fact there’d been a transmission could be detected. He’d learn the lesson fast and retain it.
“I’m coming up on the exit. . . . Okay. Here we go.”
Still doing about sixty, I eased into the exit lane and swung around the curve, which was surrounded by thick trees. The chicken truck was right on my bumper.
My protégé reported, “Good. Subject didn’t even look your way. He’s got the decoy in sight and the speed’s dropping back to the limit.”
I paused at the red light where the ramp fed into Route 18, then turned right. The poultry truck turned left.
“Subject is continuing on the route,” came my protégé’s voice. “Seems to be working fine.” His voice was cool. I’m pretty detached about operations but he does me one better. He rarely smiles, never jokes and in truth I don’t know much about him, though we’ve worked together, often closely, for several years. I’d like to change that about him—his somberness—not for the sake of the job, since he really is very, very good, but simply because I wish he took more pleasure in what we do. The endeavor of keeping people safe can be satisfying, even joyous. Especially when it comes to protecting families, which we do with some frequency.
I told him to keep me updated and we disconnected.
“So,” Alissa asked, “we’re safe?”
“We’re safe,” I told her, hiking the speed up to fifty in a forty-five zone. In fifteen minutes we were meandering along a route that would take us to the outskirts of Raleigh, where we’d meet the p
rosecutor for the depositions.
The sky was overcast and the scenery was probably what it had been for dozens of years: bungalow farmhouses, shacks, trailers and motor vehicles in terminal condition but still functioning if the nursing and luck were right. A gas station offering a brand I’d never heard of. Dogs toothing at fleas lazily. Women in stressed jeans, overseeing their broods. Men with beer-lean faces and expanding guts, sitting on porches, waiting for nothing. Most likely wondering at our car—containing the sort of people you don’t see much in this neighborhood: a man in a white shirt, dark suit and tie and a woman with a business haircut.
Then we were past the residences and on a road bisecting more fields. I noted the cotton plants, shedding their growth like popcorn, and I thought of how this same land 150 years ago would have been carpeted with an identical crop; the Civil War, and the people for whom it was fought, were never far from one’s mind when you were in the South.
My phone rang and I answered.
My protégé’s voice was urgent. “Abe.”
Shoulders tensed, I asked, “Has he turned off the highway?” I wasn’t too concerned; we’d exited over a half hour ago. The hitter would be forty miles away by now.
“No, still following the decoy. But something just happened. He made a call on his mobile. When he disconnected, it was odd: He was wiping his face. I moved up two car lengths. It looked like he’d been crying.”
My breath came quickly as I considered possible reasons for this. Finally one credible, disturbing scenario rose to the top: What if the hitter had suspected we’d try a decoy and had used one of his own? He’d forced somebody who resembled him—just like the elfin man in our decoy car—to follow us. The call my protégé had just witnessed might have been between the driver and the real perp, who was perhaps holding the man’s wife or child hostage.
But this, then, meant that the real hitter could be somewhere else and—
Bloody River Blues: A Location Scout Mystery Page 28
