Body Guard (24 page)

“Yeah.”

The man shook his head. “Company dicks. You ain’t got a chance.”

The trick would be to grab Tony before he slid away. Martin would help them do that, though he didn’t know it yet.

The Pensacola team was made up of three people. One was a man Martin did time with in Menard, Illinois—the one who had brought him in on the deal, Stan Schuler. The second was somebody who worked with Schuler in the Pensacola plant, but Martin didn’t know his name. The third was Tony, who had the contacts in Colombia or Panama and who ran the organization. “He’s got three falls, so he stays behind things. But it’s his scam, you know? His contacts and all.”

“What about the dope on this end? Where do you send it?” Devlin asked.

Martin chewed at his lip. “You people haven’t given me the Miranda, you know? You can’t use none of this.”

“I told you, we’re not cops. But you help us, we help you. You don’t help us, only God can help you.” Bunch let a drop of spit fall to the concrete between his large shoes. “And He don’t really give a shit, does He?”

“What do you do with the dope?” Devlin asked again.

“Take our cut and ship the rest on. We get ten percent of everything we sell, split it with Johnny and Vinny. Johnny gets three, Vinny gets two because he’s the new guy. I keep five. We send the rest of the money back to Tony, and the rest of the dope we ship out to other Advantage docks. You know, the distribution points.”

“You put it in canisters and send it that way?”

“Yeah.”

“To who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on!”

“I don’t. The only one who knows the whole layout is Tony. He set it up that way for security. He don’t want nobody asking questions about the operation. I don’t know who gets it. They don’t know who sends it. All they know is a barrel comes in with the mark, they got a shipment in the bracing.”

“What mark?”

“A number code. An extra line of numbers we stencil on the canister. They block it out when they get it and the canister goes back to Pensacola or wherever.”

“How many points do you ship to?”

“Five docks. The number code I get tells me how to divide it up. Each dock has a number too, and however many times the number shows up, that’s how many kilos I send.”

Bunch looked at his notebook. “Dock eight gets four kilos from this load?”

Martin looked too. “Eight. A double number means double the kilos.”

“Where’s dock eight?”

“San Jose.”

Devlin asked, “Are you the only people doing this?”

“Working for Tony, you mean? Yeah. There’s only one shipping crew in the warehouse. Nobody else handles the canisters.”

Bunch propped a foot on the metal bench. “The vice dicks’ll want to have the names of the people you sell to around here. We don’t give a damn, but they’ll want them. You’ll help your case by telling Miller all about them. Hear me?”

“I hear.”

He heard something else, too: what would happen to him if he in any way tried to warn the people in Pensacola about Devlin and Bunch. Then they turned him over to Dave Miller for the paperwork and stopped at the Brewery Bar for dinner and a couple beers. And to talk over who would make the trip to Pensacola.

It was Devlin. Bunch’s job was to sit on Martin and make certain he did his part. Besides, he had Humphries and Mitsuko to watch over, too. Dave Miller gave Kirk a contact in the Pensacola Police Department’s vice and narcotics section if he needed it, and Devlin telephoned Reznick at home to bring him up to date. The manager was happy to hear that Martin had been taken out. But he wanted to be certain the company name didn’t get splashed in the press. “You’ll be working undercover in Pensacola, too?”

“No. We don’t have time for that.” Even if Martin kept quiet, the word on his bust would get there in a few days at most.

“Well, listen, Kirk. Stewart’s adamant that none of this reflect ill on the company—”

“I understand. I’ll try to pick them up off company property. Just as we did with Martin.”

Reznick told Devlin the name of the plant director—Malcolm Colby—and offered to call first thing in the morning to tell him that Kirk was on his way.

Bunch explained to Miller what he wanted Martin to do. The cop wasn’t all that eager to let Bunch violate procedures with his prize catch, but finally agreed on condition that Martin wasn’t to go anywhere without a guard. “I can fix it with the chief,” Miller said. “But you got to give me a couple hours’ lead.”

“I won’t be able to, Dave. Kirk’s on the other end and he’ll set up the call for whenever he can. It’s not like he’ll be calling the shots. You know that.”

Miller leaned back and looked at Bunch across the glass top of his gray metal desk. Its surface hadn’t been wiped in a long time, and circles of old coffee stains and shreds of eraser and cigarette ash showed up against the family photographs, lists of telephone numbers, and emergency procedures pressed flat by the glass. “You want to keep him the full seventy-two, that it?”

“Hey, it’ll save the county money.” Bunch added, “And this is a big operation. You saw that. Twenty kilos of pure every shipment, maybe more. You know and I know the chief’ll want to break something like that.”

Miller stared at his desk and then nodded. The pink scalp on top of his head showed through his lank blond hair. He’d already asked Bunch if his hair looked thinner since the last time they talked. Bunch lied and said no and asked him who wanted fat hair anyway. “We still have to use an escort. I know Chief Pozner’s going to insist on that.”

“No problem. That way, I can take care of my other chores.”

The result was that Martin was moved into his own apartment under guard, sleeping on a couch shoved against one wall of the tiny living room where they could keep an eye on him. Any of the small rooms he went into, he went accompanied. And when he went to the bathroom, the door was always open to the sound of his stream or to his pink, bony knees. He ate things that came out of cardboard boxes.

If Scotty wasn’t happy, neither were the cops who rotated every eight hours to guard the prisoner while they waited for Devlin’s telephone call from Florida. At least everyone was equally unhappy, and what was more democratic than that? Bunch was reminded of when he had worn a uniform and guarded prisoners and had wondered what the difference really was between the restraint the criminals were under and that of the cop. The answer once again reinforced his decision to leave the department.

The “other chores” Bunch had mentioned to Miller included sporadic surveillance on Truman and protection for Humphries. The Truman case had to wait—along with the cramped Subaru—because there were only so many slices of himself to go around. Besides, it might be better to let that foxy lady think they’d dropped the case. Humphries, on the other hand, wouldn’t wait. Miss Watanabe called the next morning.

“I don’t know how he got so close to the house, Mr. Bunchcroft. It came through the front room window. I called Roland and he told me to lock myself in the bathroom and call you right away. He wants you to please come right now.”

“Do you have your revolver?”

“Yes.” She added in a small voice, “I’m afraid, Mr. Bunchcroft.”

“Call 911 and tell the police what happened. I’m on my way out.”

He gave the officer guarding Martin his mobile phone number in case he needed it. Scotty asked if Bunch would bring back a TV Guide so he could keep up with what was happening on the tube. “I mean, at least in jail they got a dayroom with a newspaper and maybe People magazine. Here it’s just the goddamn TV, and all I can find is reruns.”

“You want a woman, too?”

“Hey, I’m trying to help you people out. A lousy magazine ain’t too much to ask, you know!”

“You’re trying to help yourself out, Martin. I’ll see if I remember.”

The day officer, leather belts creaking with boredom, added, “Try hard.”

When Bunch sidled cautiously through the front door of Humphries’ house, he listened for any sounds. There was the faint warble of a meadowlark beyond the tree line and the sigh of wind through the screened windows. He called out Mitsuko’s name but got no answer. With weapon drawn, he inspected the rooms until he came to the master bedroom. He knocked on the closed bathroom door. “Mitsuko? It’s me—Bunch.”

The door clicked and, clutching the pistol in the white fingers of both hands, she came out. “Is he here?”

“Nobody’s here, Mitsi. The sheriffs officers haven’t come yet?”

“No.”

Bunch carefully set the pistol aside and called in to cancel the 911 alert. “Show me what happened.”

She took him to the living room. A trail of glass led from the broken window and glistened across the long white couch and onto the carpet with its raised geometrical border and Chinese characters carved in the center. A smooth rock about the size of a fist lay near the characters. It had scratched the leg of the low coffee table when it hit. Aiming back through the window, Bunch could see the thicket of pine where the man could have stood to throw it.

“The sensor field wasn’t on?”

“No. Roland only turns it on at night.”

“And you didn’t see anyone?”

“No. I was in the kitchen and heard the noise. I came out here and saw the broken window and the rock. I ran to the bedroom and got the pistol and locked myself in the bathroom.”

“Did you hear any noises? Prowler?”

“No. Only when you came.” She held out a wrinkled piece of paper. “This was with the rock.”

Bunch opened it up. “It’s Japanese. I can’t read it.”

“It says, ‘Do what is right before it is too late for you.’ “

He looked at the small woman, whose eyes were still on the slightly grimy slip of paper. “What’s it mean?”

She shrugged. “I am to go back to Japan. Or be killed.”

“It’s from the yojimbo?”

“Oh yes.”

“Your father wants you to come back or he’s going to have you killed, that it?”

“Yes. My father.”

“And despite that, you don’t want to go back.”

“No.”

“What happens when Humphries gets tired of all this?”

Her head shook once, almost a spasmodic twitch, and she took a deep breath and straightened up. “He’s not tired of me yet.”

“I wish I knew what your game was.”

“As I told you before—to stay alive.”

A
S THE PLANE’S
ventilation system started pumping local air and the passengers crowded the aisle to disembark, an unfamiliar humidity wrapped around Kirk like flannel. Outside the aircraft, too, the air felt sticky under a sun that had nothing of autumn or high altitude in it. But Kirk’s strongest impression was of the flat earth paralleling the horizons, a lush, gently rolling green to the north, and on the south the line of the Gulf against a sky burned pale with glare. While the plane circled for its landing Devlin had made out strips of barrier islands off the Gulf shore and a stubby freighter riding at anchor in the brown water of Pensacola Bay. But now there was little chance to rubberneck. The traffic surrounding the airport was heavy, and the roads he’d marked on the Triple A map turned out to be a lot easier to follow on paper than they were in fact. Twelfth Avenue to Fairfield to Pace. Then south a few miles to the industrial area near the shipyards. When he finally turned the rental car into the grid of short streets serving the factories and chemical tanks, his shirt was damp with sweat despite the car’s air conditioning, and the industrial fumes that stung his sinuses seemed to leave an oily film on his skin.

This Advantage plant was a series of sharp roof peaks marching like a saw blade across half a city block. A railroad spur holding a line of tank cars ran down the foot of the corrugated steel walls. A large pair of smokestacks rose toward spongy cumulus clouds whose shadow occasionally lifted the weight of sun but carried the heft of rain. Mr. Colby’s office was in a corner of the third and topmost floor and had a view across a point of pine-and oak-shaded houses to the bay and Santa Rosa Island. Out over the Gulf, the sky was dotted with airplanes from the Naval Air Station. If he craned to look past Colby, Kirk could make out the massive gray shadow of an aircraft carrier looming over pale yellow buildings on another point of land.

“I have the employment records of the man Mr. Reznick mentioned, Mr. Kirk. I find it extremely hard to believe this sort of thing is going on in my plant.”

“Three people at the other end were arrested yesterday afternoon, Mr. Colby. That’s the name one of them gave us.”

“Yes, of course. There’s no arguing with that fact. Still, my plant security …” Colby stood taller than Kirk but weighed only half as much. His head seemed mostly bony jaw and large nose. Devlin took a few seconds to realize that the man’s blue eyes goggled not from surprise but because of the thick lenses in his horn-rimmed glasses. “What do you propose to do about all this?”

“You can have him arrested on a warrant from Colorado. That, however, involves the police and a lot of legal paperwork and might bring the company name into the papers—something I’ve been instructed to avoid if at all possible.”

“Yes. Certainly. We don’t want that.” His long fingers played with an ornate medallion which served as a paperweight and said something about a Fiesta of Five Flags Award. A row of photographs reminded him that he had a wife and four children.

“The quietest way would be to fire him,” said Devlin.

“Would that be punishment enough? After all, Schuler is a criminal.”

Kirk agreed. “I suspect he and his partner have a good-size nest egg tucked away. So losing their jobs wouldn’t hurt them. It would protect you, however.”

“Well, it just doesn’t seem right to almost condone …” Colby’s eyes glanced at the photographs and he said earnestly, “Drugs are a very serious problem for the youth of this nation, Mr. Kirk.”

Tell me about it, thought Kirk. “Why don’t you let me pick up Schuler and his partner and talk to them off company grounds? I’ll try to find out if they’re working alone or if there’s a larger organization behind them. Then we can turn them over to the Drug Enforcement Agency. That way, we can find out what we need to know, and even if there’s not enough for a case against them, they’ll have a record with the feds. Frankly, Mr. Colby, I think that’s the best we’ll be able to do and still keep the company name out of the press.”