She could see by his eyes—inflamed along their edges, red flesh surrounding whites that were a little glassy—that he was tired, more though from physical pain than from lack of sleep. Unlike her, he couldn’t take his pill, not now, not yet. His dark hair and beard were wet from the rain, and in the somber morning light the drops repelled by the wool of his dark overcoat, clinging to the fine hairs of the fabric, glistened like winter dew.
“What did Eddie say?” she asked.
“Bechet’s going to meet me.”
“Jesus, Tommy. Where?”
“At a salvage yard in Noyac.”
“That was fast.”
“Eddie called a friend of Bechet’s. Turns out Bechet was on his way over. They set up a meeting.”
“That was . . . lucky.”
“There are certain conditions I have to follow, though.”
“Like what?”
“I have to go alone.”
“Why?”
“Bechet won’t meet me otherwise.”
“Tommy, c’mon.”
“It’s the only way, Kay. There’s no time to argue, okay? I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“I could ride with you, get out before the salvage yard. That way I’d at least be nearby.”
“He’s sending someone to pick me up.”
“When?”
“Right now.”
“I don’t like this, Tommy.”
“Neither do I. But we don’t have much choice. Bechet is all we have.”
Miller quickly emptied the pockets of his jeans. Wallet, a handful of change, keys to his pickup, cell phone. Then he removed his overcoat, laid it on the table. By the way it landed on the wood Barton knew there was something heavy in one of the pockets. Miller ignored the sound, did so in a way that made Barton think he wished he had been more careful laying the coat down and was therefore hiding whatever it was that pocket contained. She looked at the coat but said nothing. Miller, too, was silent. He stepped into his bedroom, was returning with his field jacket, pulling it on fast as he walked, when Barton finally spoke.
“Where are you being picked up?”
“At the station.”
“I could tail you in my car. For all you know, Tommy, this could be a trap.”
“He knows I’m a friend of Eddie’s.”
“You think that’s going to matter?”
Miller ignored the question. “I don’t want to see your car anywhere behind us, Kay, do you understand?”
Barton nodded. “Yeah.”
“Stay here, keep an eye on the tapes. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“And if you’re not?”
Miller apparently couldn’t think of an answer to that.
“Be careful, Tommy.”
“I will.”
Miller walked to the door, went through it and started down the stairs. He was moving slowly because of his knee. Barton returned to the window, watched him walk to the platform again. Once he was there and waiting, she dialed Spadaro’s number on her cell phone as she hurried to Miller’s bedroom, opened his closet and knelt down in front of the footlocker. She searched fast through its contents with one hand as she waited for Spadaro to answer.
He picked up after the third ring. “Hey.”
“I need the name of the salvage yard in Noyac,” Barton said. She knew she sounded a little frantic but didn’t care.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t have time to explain. An auto yard, a junkyard, out in Noyac, do you know of one?”
“Yeah, sure. Scarcella’s.”
“Where is it?”
“What the hell’s going on, Kay?”
“Just tell me where it is, Ricky.”
“It’s the same yard where we have our holding pen for accidents pending an investigation. We went there once, remember?”
“Oh, Jesus, yeah.” She saw it now, saw the way to it. More important, she saw the layout of the place, or the way it had been laid out years ago, when she was taken there. Acres of piled-up wrecks, rows and rows of them, a ridge on one side of the property, a dirt road running along it. She doubted that much about the place at all had changed since then.
“Thanks, Ricky,” she said. “I’ll call you in a little while and explain.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I just need to check something out. I’ll check back in with you in a little bit.”
She flipped the phone shut, pocketed it, had two hands now with which to search. She didn’t find what she was looking for in the footlocker, stood and searched the shelves above. It wasn’t there, either. She stepped out of the closet, surveyed the room. Miller’s bed by the window, a night table, a bureau. On the bed was an open lockbox. Barton went to it, checked it out of curiosity. It was empty. She got down onto her hands and knees, looked under the bed. Nothing. Stepping to the bureau, she pulled open the top drawer. Clothes. The second drawer was only more clothes. As she grabbed the handles of the bottom drawer, she felt that her plan—less of a plan, more of a wild urge—was on the verge of falling apart. But when she opened the drawer, saw that it contained not clothes but more equipment, she felt a rush of hope. Almost right away she could see among the clutter what she was looking for.
A long-distance listening device, laser-sighted, and beside it a pair of binoculars. The eavesdropping device was the kind that allowed one to listen to either a conversation between people standing out in the open or one between people inside a building. A dish, shaped like a satellite antenna and fitted with a microphone, picked up conversations outdoors while the invisible laser, when aimed at a window, detected the vibrations made on the glass by those speaking and bounced the signal back to the receiver, where it was converted into audio. Barton turned the unit on, quick-checked the battery, then grabbed the binoculars and hurried into the living room, emptying her overnight bag of her things and placing the equipment inside. Taking one of the two finished videotapes, she tossed it into the bag as well. Better to have a copy with her, in case someone broke into Miller’s apartment while they were gone. The second finished tape she placed into the empty lockbox in the bedroom, closed the lid, checked that the lock had caught, then tossed the box into the locker at the bottom of the closet, closed and locked that. It was the best she could do, better certainly than doing nothing. Back in the living room she checked on the progress of the third tape. It was still recording, so she left it in the machine. On the table, next to the machine, was Miller’s overcoat. She looked at it for a second, a long second, then picked it up, located in the pocket what Miller had tried to hide from her.
A Colt .45 and two clips.
She removed them from the pocket, checked to see that the Colt was loaded and that the safety was on, then placed the gun and the two clips into the overnight bag. As she laid the coat back down she remembered Miller putting the photos he had found at the cottage into the inside pocket. She wondered if he had taken them out at some point, wasn’t sure exactly why she wondered that, reached into the pocket and found them both there still. She pulled them out, looked at each one. The first one was of Romano and his dark-haired girlfriend. He’d probably taken that in case he needed it to show to someone and ask if either person was someone they knew. The second photo was of Abby and the dark-haired girl, not one of the photos of them kissing, just of them sitting beside each other on the couch. Barton gave her friend credit for not taking one of the more racy photos, but then thought maybe that wasn’t such a good thing, that such discretion was maybe an act of love. She laid the photos on the table beside the coat, looked at Abby once more. Finally, grabbing the keys to Miller’s pickup from the table, Barton returned to the front window.
He was still at the station. She waited for what felt like a long time but was probably only a few minutes. Finally a car approached from North Main, an old sedan that looked like it had probably been a cop car once. Too old, though, to be part of the chief’s fleet still. The sedan parked at the station, and Miller walked
down to it. A man got out from the passenger door. He and Miller nodded to each other, then Miller, as casually as he could, raised his arms. The man—larger even than Miller, in jeans and a nylon pilot’s jacket, his head shaved clean—frisked Miller thoroughly. When he was done, the man nodded toward the back passenger side door. Miller opened it, climbed into the backseat. The man climbed in beside him, pulled the door closed.
Barton bolted then, her overnight bag in her hand. At the bottom of the stairs she opened the street door just enough to watch the sedan coasting down Railroad Plaza. It stopped at the Stop sign, turned right onto North Main, and disappeared from sight. She hurried out into the rainy morning, running to the corner, rounding it and heading down Powell. She ran as fast as she could, her heart throbbing like a fresh wound by the time she reached the street’s end, and got in behind the wheel of Miller’s pickup.
There were two ways to the salvage yard in Noyac, one longer than the other. Barton opted for the longer route; it was more complicated than the first one and she figured whoever was driving Miller wouldn’t take it for that very reason. Her only hope was that the driver would drive as cautiously as Miller had when she and he had made their way to East Hampton. This would maybe allow her to make up the time she had lost by leaving after them, and the time she would further lose by following the roundabout way.
She needed to arrive first, find her spot and get set up. From there, what? She didn’t know, didn’t care. There was an overwhelming sense of purpose running through her now, and she hadn’t felt that, or anything even remotely like it, for a long time.
She trusted it, even if a little blindly.
SALVAGE.
The sign was visible through the bare trees that lined the back road, posted high on a twelve-foot cyclone fence topped with rusted razor wire. The auto yard was an eighty-plus-acre compound in the middle of the north woods, no houses for at least a mile in any direction. A world of its own, all on its own. Barton drove past the main gate, wasn’t sure yet if she had arrived ahead of Miller, strained to get a glimpse beyond the fence as she negotiated the long curve in the road. She didn’t dare slow down, didn’t want the pickup to look like anything other than a vehicle passing, heading somewhere, anywhere. She didn’t see the sedan through the fence, only a three-bay garage with an office attached and, behind that, a large storage shed. The buildings were cinder-block constructions with metal roofs, looked like military barracks. For all Barton knew, the sedan was already inside, parked behind one of the bay doors. And Miller, too, alone and unarmed, at the mercy of these men.
Beyond these buildings were stacks and stacks of vehicles of all kinds, cars and pickups and SUVs, bashed and rusted wrecks in rows for as far as the eye could see. Barton had sped the entire way there, pushing Miller’s pickup into sharp back road turns, pressing the accelerator to the floor whenever there was even the slightest hint of a straightaway ahead, risking, she realized now, adding the very vehicle she was driving to this collection. But she didn’t care about that. Just past the salvage yard, exactly as she had remembered it, was a long ridge, and running along it was a narrow dirt road that made its way up into the vast woods that bordered the yard. A hunter’s road, gutted by the winter’s rain. As Barton turned onto it she was glad she had taken Miller’s pickup and not her Volvo, wouldn’t have gotten far otherwise. Shifting into four-wheel drive, she followed the inclining road, driving as quickly as the uneven terrain allowed till the road veered away from the edge of the ridge suddenly and the truck, heading into the deep woods, was out of sight of the cluster of buildings. Barton parked and grabbed her overnight bag, made her way back on foot through the cold morning rain till she was back at the ridge’s edge. Elevated by a good thirty feet, she had a clear view of the buildings and the gate, all half a football field or so away.
She found a grassy spot under a tree, to keep her out of sight but also to protect her from the rain. She crouched down, removing the listening device from her bag. As she turned it on and slipped the headphones over her ears, the sedan arrived at the gate. Her heart jumped at the sight of it. She’d just made it. The earphones blocked out nearly all the sounds around her; all she could hear was her own breathing. In this surreal void she aimed the binoculars at the gate and watched the driver of the sedan get out—a young guy with a shaved head, dressed and built like the man who had gotten into the backseat with Miller. He unlocked and opened the gate, then got back behind the wheel and drove the sedan into the compound and parked in front of the garage. Climbing out again, he walked back to the gate, was about to close it when a Jeep appeared on the back road. Green, with a black hardtop. The headlights—rectangular, not round—told Barton that it was a ’94 or older. The Jeep pulled into the compound and parked alongside the sedan as the younger of the two men closed and locked the gate.
Miller was now theirs, at their mercy, if these kinds of men even had any.
Miller and the older man, the one who had sat beside him on the ride over from the train station, emerged from the back of the sedan. They took a few steps, then stopped and waited as the driver of the Jeep got out and approached them. This man, wearing a dark jacket over a hooded sweatshirt and jeans that strained against thick legs, was holding over one shoulder a small, military-style backpack. His hair—brown with gray at the temples—was buzzed close to the scalp. He was a big man, not the biggest man there, but bigger still than Miller. Not taller, just bigger. A onetime boxer, that much was obvious by the width of his shoulders and the way he carried himself. So, then, Bechet.
Barton studied him as he approached Miller. The binoculars were equipped with a built-in digital camera, so Barton snapped several photos of him, as well as the others, just to be thorough. Bechet looked older than she had thought he would be, in his late thirties, maybe even early forties. In her mind boxers were young men because young boxers were all she had ever seen. For years she had watched the fights with her father, on TV mostly, though a few times he had taken her to the local arena to experience them firsthand. Bechet, despite the fact that he was older than she had thought he would be, seemed no different at all from the men Barton had seen as a youth. He had the same hard face, wore the same stare as he faced Miller that boxers wore when they stood toe-to-toe with their opponents.
A stare-down, between her friend and this man. Not overtly hostile but not friendly either. Barton’s stomach tightened at the sight of this. Miller was tough, yes, had played football when he was younger, possessed now the innate strength of a natural athlete, the kind of strength that never really goes away, but he had that bad knee, and anyway, he was outnumbered, and by the kind of men who seemingly knew how to hurt, were maybe even themselves impervious to being hurt, as was so often the case with those who caused suffering for gain. To be numb to the pain of another, Barton had learned a long time ago, required one to become, to some degree at least, numb to his or her own pain. A trade-off that was unavoidable.
With all her running around, blindly trusting the sense of purpose driving her like an uncontrollable urge, Barton hadn’t really come up with a specific plan beyond getting to where she needed to be. Seeing now that these men were barely in range of the Colt in her bag, and too close to Miller for her to fire upon them with anything other than a hope to hit someone, she had no choice but to ask herself what exactly would she do should things suddenly turn bad? Not only was the distance between her and Miller an issue, there was a fence between them, one topped with coils of razor wire. She felt now the need to have something in mind beyond lying still and listening, a witness only. Something to do should something more need to be done. Her thoughts edged toward the frantic, and it took all she had to keep them from giving in to all-out chaos. For all her racing thoughts, though, she could think of nothing more that she could do except watch.
She told herself to focus, cleared her head. Miller didn’t seem intimidated by Bechet, returned the onetime boxer’s stare with one of his own. Eventually Bechet said something to Miller, but Bart
on couldn’t hear what, nor could she hear Miller’s response to it. The volume was turned down. She turned it up, watched as Bechet waited a moment, taking his time studying Miller, sizing him up. Finally Bechet nodded and looked over his shoulder toward the older man behind him. Let’s get moving. She heard this. Surrounding Miller with roughly the same formation guards employ to escort a prisoner, these three men guided him toward the garage. Entering through a metal door between the adjoining office and one of the large bay doors, they one by one disappeared from Barton’s sight, leaving once they were gone only the eerie stillness of a junkyard in the moments after dawn. As she looked upon it, Barton felt suddenly, deeply alone, but maybe that was something due to the fact that all there was for her to see now were the countless remains of so many violent crashes stacked in tall rows that spanned the acres below her.
Monuments to uselessness, as it were.
The door swung closed with a dull clack. The sound echoed briefly—Barton could hear it, muffled, through the headphones—then was gone. She removed the Colt from her overnight bag, chambered a round, and laid the weapon upon the exposed root of her sheltering tree, well within reach. It may come to that yet, and she still didn’t know what she would do if it did. But she didn’t think about it now, did instead the only thing she could do, the only task there was at this moment before her.
She shouldered the listening device, aimed its invisible laser at the window nearest to the door through which Miller had been taken. She adjusted the volume until she began to hear sounds. Footsteps, shuffling, indications so far of nothing more than casual movement, everyone getting settled, taking their places.
But no words, not yet.
Motionless, holding her breath, she waited for someone to speak.
The Water's Edge Page 26
