Body Guard (22 page)

“Not while I been with him. Anybody like who?”

“Like Tony.”

“Tony? Oh—the one who … .” The phone went silent. “I hope not. I hope to shit not.”

“Okay, Vinny. I’ll catch your act on Thursday.”

“Hey, wait a minute! What’s going down, man? I mean, what you going to be doing that I better know about?”

“We’ll handle it. Don’t worry.”

“Yeah. Right. You clowns, and I shouldn’t worry. Just remember, you don’t know me, right? You pull any bust or something, you fucking well do not know me at all. Right?”

“That’s exactly the way we want it.”

“Well, just remember! All’s I need’s this Tony whosis on my ass for being a snitch.”

Although the next few trips were uneventful, Humphries’ escort service had lost its sense of the routine. Humphries had insisted on an armored car to ride in, but it would take at least a week to ship one up from Texas. In the meantime, they varied the vehicles’ drivers. Once, Peterson led in the Mercedes and kept an eye on the rearview mirror that showed—through the newly replaced back window—Humphries crouched over the steering wheel of the Dodge. Another time, Bunch drove a convoy car and Peterson was in the cover car. But aside from a couple of nervous moments when an unmarked panel truck tailed them for a few miles before turning off, Humphries was delivered safely to work and home. Though the extent of his safety at home was problematic, Bunch told Devlin.

“You know what that Mitsuko broad said to me, Dev?” Bunch settled into the desk chair and stretched out legs whose thighs mashed against the chair’s arm braces.

“That she’s madly in love with you and wants to be your sex slave.”

“I mean besides that. You know when Humphries got shot at? She says she made him screw her half the night. Says she couldn’t keep her hands or whatever off him because of the idea that might be the last piece either of them got.”

“Why’d she tell you that?”

Bunch stretched and yawned and on the back of his eyelids could still see the woman’s slightly puffy face framed by loose, straight hair. A bedroom face. And her eyes—black, shiny with still-unslaked lust—staring at him hungrily. “She thought it would sex me up. Did, too.”

“Hey, you didn’t—”

“Naw. God knows I wanted it. She did too—you know that smell broads get when they’re fuck-happy?”

Kirk didn’t, but he nodded.

“All over her. But aside from not screwing the clientele, I just don’t need to be tangled up with a nut case.” He heaved himself up in the chair and reached for the telephone. “Maybe the Japanese way of loving is a bit different. She’s always talking about showing me her geisha prints. Or maybe she’s a hundred percent certifiable. Either way, I don’t want to slip my dong into that mess.” He punched a series of buttons and, when someone answered, asked for Detective Miller. “Time to bring in Vice and Narcotics,” he said to Kirk, his hand over the mouthpiece.

“Dave? This is Bunchcroft. Remember that sample you let us borrow? Yeah—it’s all right. We got it locked up… . No, it paid off… . Yeah—”

Kirk half listened as Bunch explained about the expected shipment. His own job was to draft an operations and equipment sheet to make certain nothing went wrong.

“Okay, Dev. Miller says he’ll be standing by with a backup team when we leave the plant.”

Reznick might not have been happy that the police were called in, but neither Bunch nor Devlin wanted to pull any kind of citizen’s arrest without the cops around. In fact, the preferred way for most parties concerned was to let the police make the bust. Reznick would order a locker room shakedown on Thursday, and that way, Martin’s tipster in the plant security force would warn him about it. That, Kirk hoped, would force Martin and company to take the drugs off Advantage property and into police jurisdiction. The idea was to trace Martin to wherever the divvy took place, and then call Miller in for the arrest. The only time the Advantage Corporation’s name would make the news would be if the defendants went to trial. And given the popularity of plea bargaining or even—in good cases—a guilty plea to some lesser charge, the means of shipping the drugs might never be publicized. Besides, they’d promised Miller the glory, and that would make up for the quarter-ounce or so missing from the sample.

They went over the details one more time, checking the plan against eventualities, and then drove south to baby-sit Humphries again.

V
INNY SQUAWKED ABOUT
wearing a wire to work.

“What you do, Vinny, is make sure Martin doesn’t put his hands all over you. Why the hell are you letting him feel you up anyway?”

“He doesn’t feel me up, Homer! But you goddamn well know he could spot it. I’ll be wearing the thing all fucking day.”

Bunch finished taping the transmitter to the inside of Vinny’s skinny shin and started dropping the microphone wire down his shirt collar. “He won’t spot it. His mind’s on bigger things. Just keep your pants leg pulled down.”

Vinny studied his profile in the washroom mirror. “These things never work anyway.”

“Sure they do. Besides, if you have to call for help, you want someone to hear, don’t you?”

That gave him food for thought and provided Bunch and Devlin with a couple minutes’ relief. Bunch pinned the tiny microphone inside Vinny’s T-shirt and plugged the other end of the wire into the AR-8 transmitter on his shin. Vinny, sweating about someone coming into the gas station toilet where they were working, tugged his shirt back on and urged Bunch to hurry up. “If I’m late, Scotty’s going to nose something, Homer. Finish up!”

Vinny was right about the limitations of body transmitters. They could only work on line of sight and at a maximum distance of two hundred feet. And they picked up every sound: Vinny’s excited breathing, the static of his shirt rubbing across the mike, background noises. Moreover, it wasn’t unknown for a transmission to be broadcast over a neighboring television set, much to the embarrassment of the undercover agent. But Vinny was assured that this unit checked out, and that Bunch and Devlin would be close enough to catch his transmissions. Then they sent him on his way into the morning traffic while Bunch and Devlin followed in the rental van.

“I screened the tap on Arnie’s phone last night, Dev. Vinny hasn’t called him yet.”

“Well, he won’t have anything to sell Minz anyway.”

“Yeah. The little shit.” Then, “Good thing we didn’t tell Miller about that. Now he won’t be disappointed.”

“Right.”

They pulled into the visitor’s lot just after the day shift punched in. Reznick waited for them in the warehouse manager’s small office, which looked down through a series of windows into the cavernous warehouse. Bunch slid open one of the windows to make radio transmission a little easier for Vinny’s body pack; Devlin turned on the manager’s desk lamp to make the place seem normal. Then he and Reznick moved back into the shadows away from the glass while Bunch set up a chair as a rest for his telephoto lens and peeked over the lower sill into the dim alleys of cartons and dark gray, barrel-like canisters. Hague, the warehouse manager, tried to work at his desk as if nothing were going on.

“This is really the payoff?” Reznick’s excitement showed in his tense whisper and the way his fingers fidgeted continually with the monogrammed pewter buttons on his blazer.

“It’ll be a while yet, Mr. Reznick. These things get pretty boring before they get exciting.”

Reznick laughed nervously and tried to settle back into the folding chair Hague had bustled around to find for him. The warehouse manager had been both surprised and worried when Reznick led them in, and the man’s eager compliance was meant to show he had nothing to do with whatever it was the three men were investigating. He also made it clear that he had noticed nothing out of the ordinary or he would have reported it.

“It’s all right, Hague,” said Reznick. “None of us noticed.”

On the floor beside Bunch, the receiver popped into static and mechanical noises. The open-reel tape recorder began turning slowly. Bunch quickly damped the volume to a murmur and scanned the warehouse floor with his binoculars.

“That’s Vinny. He’s driving the forklift.”

The morning dragged into noon, then through the lunch hour. They saw Vinny cross the parking lot to his car in the long, sun-glinted rows of vehicles. Then he came back. The radio was silent. Reznick’s early enthusiasm shifted into bored yawns, and finally he said he had work piling up in his office and told Hague to call him the moment something happened. Bunch and Devlin were glad to see the man go.

“Roast beef or ham?” Bunch lifted cellophane-covered sandwiches from cardboard boxes and tossed one to Devlin. He had enough photographs of Martin and Atencio for identification purposes, and only occasionally now did he follow the men through the binoculars. Vinny’s conversations with the suspects revealed nothing except that Atencio liked blondes with big tits and Martin had a thing for girls with short hair and tight buns.

“Christ, it’s getting near quitting time, Dev. You think that little fart had the wrong scoop?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.” And it wouldn’t be the first time a surveillance failed to pay off.

Hague’s telephone rang and he covered the mouthpiece. “It’s Mr. Reznick again. What should I tell him?”

“Tell him we’re still waiting—hold it …” Bunch leaned to the tape recorder and turned up the sound. Vinny’s voice came faint but clear: “How do you know which one it is?”

A second voice answered, “Got a stenciled code on it.”

Bunch, straining through the binoculars, muttered, “There they are. They’re going down aisle four.”

Devlin crept to his side and peered through the lenses while Bunch set up the camera. Aisle 4 was lined with shipping drums stacked three high toward the dim ceiling. Each unit was six feet tall, and the towering walls broke up Vinny’s transmission as he tried to pump Martin about the method of identifying the right drum.

“Don’t worry about it, Vinny. I know what to look for. You just—” The transmission faded again. Then came the clatter of something hard banging on the microphone and muffled grunting and static. “Okay, Johnny. Here.”

Through the binoculars, Devlin saw the three men wrestle one of the drums toward an empty corner of the quiet warehouse. Behind him, the door opened quickly and Reznick’s hot breath stirred against the back of his neck.

“Is this it? Are they getting it?”

“They’re taking it out now.” Bunch’s camera clicked rapidly. “There goes Atencio.”

They watched the man stroll casually down a cross aisle to act as a lookout.

“How many kilos we got, Scotty?” It was Vinny’s voice.

“Twenty, man.”

“Jesus!”

“I told you it’d be a big mother. But don’t get excited—it ain’t all ours. We hold five; the rest gets shipped out later.”

“Where we stashing it?”

“We stash it where I say, so don’t worry about that, man.”

A third voice said, “All clear. You ready?”

“Yeah.”

Vinny, equally casual, walked toward the door leading off to the locker rooms. His voice came softly over the receiver. “I hope you can hear me, Kirk. It’s twenty kilos. The drum’s number is 488244-88220. We’re taking the stuff out after work. I’m the mule. Scotty wouldn’t—” A door cut his voice off. A couple minutes later, Atencio wandered toward the doorway. They came back for their next load from Martin, who stood guard by the drum.

“What do we do now?” asked Reznick.

“Wait,” Devlin said. “When they punch out after work, I’ll secure the canister. Bunch will wait for me outside and we’ll follow them.”

“Can they escape?”

“Not likely,” said Bunch. “I put a bumper bug on Vinny’s car. We can sit a mile off and know where he is.”

An electric bell rang the end of the workday and almost immediately men started for their cars. Hague and Devlin trotted down the metal stairs to the warehouse floor while Bunch packed the electronics gear. The drum had been moved into a line of other empties but it wasn’t hard to locate. It was the last in the row and had an additional line of digits in white paint below the stenciled invoice codes.

“I’ll be damned,” said Hague. “I never noticed something like that. Somebody looking for it would see it, maybe. But nobody else.”

“That’s the idea,” said Kirk.

He and Hague tipped the barrel on edge and rolled it aside. He wrote his initials on its lip and asked Hague to lock it in a safe place. Then he found Bunch waiting in the van, engine idling, as he tuned the locater on the receiver.

“Got him?”

“Yeah. He’s still waiting to clear the gate.”

“You think they had Vinny carry it because he’s the new man?”

“Makes sense—if somebody gets popped, it won’t be them. But you can bet your grandma’s teeth they’re following him.”

They fell into the traffic that slowly drained from the parking lot onto the streets surrounding the plant. Ahead, Vinny’s car was only one of many roofs edging forward, and somewhere on each side of him the automobiles of Atencio and Martin must be standing guard. Bunch, his borrowed GE radio pack on the prearranged police channel, asked, “Dave, can you read me?”

“Four by four,” came the terse answer. Miller and his people would join them when they passed through the gate. Devlin operated the locater and they were finally off and running.

The small convoy led west on I1-70 and then north on the Valley Highway a short distance to the Forty-ninth Avenue exit.

“Where’s he at, Dev?”

“He turned again. South—must be heading for Forty-eighth.” That was one of the few streets that crossed the Valley Highway. “Yeah. Going west now. Has to be Forty-eighth.”

Bunch relayed the information to Miller, and in the side mirror Devlin saw an unmarked car slowly turn to follow them.

“He’s stopping, Bunch.”

Heavy traffic choked the artery as Bunch slowed. They saw two cars on the shoulder: Vinny’s Chevy and Martin’s metallic-blue Pontiac Firebird.

“Drop off, Dave. They’ve stopped to check for tails. We’ll pass them and stop down the block.”

“Ten-four.”

Devlin stared straight ahead into traffic as the van rolled past the two parked cars. Atencio’s dented Mustang was missing. “Keep going, Bunch. I think they’re leapfrogging.”