Every Day Above Ground Page 10

  The loading bays gave way to the shorter side of the L-shaped building. In a more successful shipping business, the space next to the bays might have been used for packaging or cargo storage. Instead, the room was some sort of oversized employee lounge area. A big wooden cable drum had been set on its side to make a table and rickety chairs. Two open cans of Pabst and a thousand stains decorated the surface of the round table. One fridge, a water cooler so dry there might have been dust inside, and an emergency exit beside the building’s fuse box. If I worked in this dismal place, I would be tempted to run straight out that exit every single damn day.

  Time for me to leave. The hunters might show up at any time to see what had happened to their disabled camera. Maybe they were here already. Instead of retracing my steps out the front gate, I ran to the back fence and climbed over it in a spot where the razor wire hung uselessly low.

  Working my way through the bramble bushes lining the railroad tracks, I came out on the far side of the block of buildings that included the MMA gym. The road looked clear. I looped around the building and angled toward where I had left my truck.

  Before crossing the road, I hesitated for a long moment at the corner, where the light shining on the painted sign for the gym made shadows deep enough to hunch down and watch for any movement nearby. The branch was still draped over the camera, high on its support pillar. No new cars had appeared. I took another last glance at the gym, then ran to the truck.

  It was close to two o’clock in the morning. Over three hours until sunrise. Plenty of time, if the hunters wanted the cover of darkness.

  Of course, that was only my guess. Maybe they had stopped using the camera weeks ago. Maybe the camera had nothing to do with the hunters, and it had been installed by Claudette or her silent partner as some sort of security measure. Shit, maybe I was even wrong about there being a camera in the damn box.

  If no one showed tonight, tomorrow I would buy a tall enough ladder to let me verify my guess. But for now, I would have to go with my gut.

  Stakeouts were tedious. I’d done my share of guard duty as an enlisted man, and more than a few reconnaissance missions in the Rangers that had amounted to little more than lying in the brush and waiting for something to happen. There was no way around the monotony except to keep your eyes and brain both moving.

  I thought about the smuggling operation at Pacific Pearl. Mick O’Hasson’s infirmary attendant had told him that the gold in the hidden safe had been bought with the profits from drug running up and down the West Coast. At least part of that story looked to be true. O’Hasson had mentioned a name. Karl Ekby, that was it. A power player, back in the day. I wondered whether Claudette Simms had any connection with a dead kingpin.

  As the digital clock in the truck ticked 4:07 a.m., headlights appeared at the far end of the road. A large white truck. It cruised steadily down the street, slowed, and turned to stop right under the support post with the camera.

  My first thought was Bingo.

  My second was What the hell?

  Because the truck wasn’t a civilian vehicle. It was a full-sized service rig from the Viridian cable company, including a row of storage lockers and even a damn cherry-picker lift folded over the top. The green-and-orange Viridian logo made a neon splash across the passenger door.

  Had I made a mistake? Was the box on the support pillar some sort of legitimate cable company installation?

  As I watched, the driver got out and came around the truck. A woman, dressed in what looked like company-issue dull brown work togs. Her matching cap shielded her face from my view, but couldn’t tame a mass of brown curls that fairly exploded out from the back. She had fair skin and stood maybe five and a half feet, in her sneakers. Moving like she was in a hurry, the woman opened the passenger door and slung a tool belt around her hips.

  Could she be one of the hunters? The truck was real, and given how fast the woman had gotten here—and how quickly she was releasing the safety locks on the cherry picker—I had to assume she was a real Viridian company employee. It wasn’t impossible for her to be both.

  By the time she had climbed into the cherry-picker bucket and started the machine lifting her upward, I had decided something was off about the woman and her sudden visit here. She had kept all illumination to a minimum. No headlights, no blinking hazards. She hadn’t even shone a flashlight toward the camera box to examine it from the ground.

  And besides, what kind of cable repair reacted instantly in the dead of night to an unreported outage? Viridian ran my apartment wireless. I was lucky if they responded within a week.

  I could stick with the plan. Follow her wherever she led. But the odds of her driving the cable truck to wherever O’Hasson was held seemed like the longest of shots. Maybe there was another approach.

  The woman had reached the camera box. She tossed the branch aside to fall to the ground, and began examining the box with a pencil flashlight. I left the truck and made my silent way along the line of support posts, toward the Viridian truck. Someone had tossed a trash bag out of their car to burst open against one of the posts. I fished an unbroken beer bottle from the refuse, and as I neared the truck, I put a little stagger-swagger into my walk.

  “Hey,” I half yelled. “Whayou doin’?”

  The woman nearly jumped out of the bucket. She looked down at me, where I listed precariously against the rear of her truck.

  “Sir?” she said.

  “I see you,” I replied. “Not supposed.” I sat down on the bumper.

  “I’m on a service call, sir,” she said. This close, I could see that she was in her twenties. And edgy. “Please don’t sit on the truck.”

  “Middle of the nigh’. Sleeping.”

  “I’m sorry if I woke you. I’ll be gone in a few minutes.” She looked around, trying to see where I might have emerged from. Or if my noise was attracting anyone else.

  “’Erz your work order?” I said as if I hadn’t heard her. “Gotta have work order.”

  “Sir, if you’ll just let me fix this, I’ll be on my way.”

  “Call’n the cops on you,” I said, taking my phone from my pocket. I feigned obliviousness, but I was watching the woman very closely. If she were with the hunters who had ruthlessly grabbed O’Hasson, it wasn’t a big leap to imagine her putting a round through my heart before letting me make that call. The cover of the big truck was only a step away, if her hand dipped out of sight.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t have to. I’ll leave right now.” And the cherry picker started to lower.

  A real worker, on a real call, would have welcomed the cops rousting the large, aggressive drunk. She was willing to risk coming down to street level with me rather than have the authorities around.

  Gotcha, sister.

  “So what is it?” I said, abandoning the act. “The thing in the box?”

  The cherry picker stopped. The bottom of the bucket was about eight feet off the ground.

  She looked at me, more uncertain than ever. “It’s—just a base station. For cell phones.”

  I shook my head. “Try again.”

  “Sir, I don’t know what you want from me, but—”

  “I want to know what that box is. I want to know who hired you to put it there, and why. I want you to tell me all of that in the next five minutes, or I will call the SPD and tell them everything I saw tonight. Pictures included.” I showed her my phone, at the ready. “You want to keep bluffing?”

  She didn’t. Her face might have been pretty when it wasn’t tight with anxiety.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “The guy asking the questions. Talk.”

  “It’s only a camera,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “For who?”

  “I don’t know.” Off my disbelieving expression she said hastily, “I was hired over the phone. A man. He knew I had done some other work, and he told me what he wanted, and I picked up the camera from baggage storage at Union Station the same day.”

/>   “When was this?”

  “Start of May, I guess.”

  Right about when the building had been sold, after Claudette Simms’s death. “What other work? How did he learn about you?”

  “Look, I don’t know anyth—What are you doing?”

  My camera’s flash captured the Viridian truck vivid and clear. “You can be in the next one. Want a selfie?”

  “Stop. Please. I hire out sometimes. To private security firms. P.I.s. Stuff like that. He wouldn’t say who referred him to me. That’s happened before.”

  “Wiretapping,” I said. “Bugging places. Those kind of jobs?”

  She squirmed. “It’s mostly just companies trying to get an edge on the competition. Just information.” She glanced around. “We can’t stay here.”

  “How does your deal with him work?”

  “Come on. It’s a blind job. I never see him.”

  “Fix the camera. And keep talking.”

  Now she was the one who looked skeptical. “Why do you—”

  “You’re the one who wants to leave. Get to it.”

  She stared for another moment, and then the cherry picker began to rise. While she started removing the side of the metal housing with a power screwdriver, I checked the front of the truck. Her purse and a laptop in a carrying sleeve were stashed between the seats.

  “Hey,” she said, noticing where I was.

  “You were telling me how the camera works,” I said while I went through her purse.

  “It—it sends a picture every few seconds.”

  “Sends it where?”

  “To me,” she said. “I go through the pictures every day and send any photos of people working here to a shared website in the cloud. The man gave me the password.” Now that she was absorbed in repairing the camera’s antenna, she seemed to be losing her nervousness about speaking. Or maybe she’d just given up. “The camera’s very high resolution. It shows faces very clearly.”

  The hunters could afford the best. I already knew that.

  Juniper Adair. That was the name on her license. She was twenty-eight and lived in the Ravenna area. Her Viridian company ID read Sr. FiOS Technician under her name and smiling photograph. There were other photos in the purse, snapshots of her and a boy of about four with the same mop of curly brown hair.

  “So he wants pictures of people,” I prompted. “Every day. How many pictures is that?”

  “I have to look through hundreds. But he only wants one or two of each person. Unless there’s anyone new. Then he wants me to send him everything I have.”

  Looking for someone specific. That jibed with the trap at the safe. Their hunt wasn’t about gold, not entirely. And if Juniper was still sending the pictures, then they hadn’t found their prey yet.

  “Have you spoken with him since he hired you?” I asked.

  “No.” Juniper finished with the antenna and began reattaching the housing plate to the box. “I just send the pictures and he wires me payment.”

  “How much? And how do you know when to stop?”

  “I stop when he says so, I guess.” She started lowering the cherry picker.

  “And the money?”

  Juniper wouldn’t meet my eye as she climbed out of the bucket. Knowing I was going to put the bite on her. “It’s fifty a day.”

  I figured she was lying, so that if I demanded half or even all of her daily rate, she’d still come out ahead. But it didn’t matter.

  “Here’s the new deal,” I said. “You keep sending your guy the pictures. You keep getting paid. Same as usual, with two new steps. The first is that you’re going to give me every face you’ve given him. I want to know everyone who’s gone near Pacific Pearl since that camera started clicking. Right?”

  Juniper nodded hesitantly. If this wasn’t an extortion squeeze, she was back on uncertain ground.

  “Next, you don’t send your guy anyone new. If anybody shows up that you haven’t seen before, you will call me. Immediately.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Wait, no. That’s too much. If he finds out—”

  “He’s not what you should worry about, Juniper. I have evidence of you working in the dead of night on an unknown box placed on a support column of city infrastructure. Imagine what kind of hell Homeland Security will rain on you if they learn that. The fact that it’s just a camera in the box won’t mean shit. You’ll be lucky to see your kid before he graduates college.”

  “Please,” she said. “No.”

  “Then do what I say. No one needs to know you were ever here.”

  She nodded, first slowly, then with increasing vigor. Committed.

  She had the pictures on her laptop, and I snapped shots of each face with my phone. There were only a dozen or so individuals. One was the huge Latino thug who had chased after Cyndra O’Hasson. I was not overly surprised to see him. There had to be some connection between the gold in the safe at Pacific Pearl’s business office and the two men who’d tried to kidnap the daughter of the burglar sent to steal that same gold. I didn’t know exactly what that link was, but now I had one more clue.

  I gave Juniper Adair the number of my burner phone. She nodded again, glumly. She’d hardly said a word while I’d scanned through the faces and she locked the cherry picker back into place.

  The sun was coming up. I handed Juniper back her laptop. I’d wiped my fingerprints. “Keep your head down. This will be over soon.”

  “What are you doing here?” she said. “Can I at least ask that?”

  I walked away. Behind me, I heard the Viridian truck start up and drive away, not slowing a hair at the stop sign. Desperate to get some distance from me.

  Brutal, I knew. I could justify coercing Juniper with custody of her kid. Tell myself that if she did find the person the hunters were looking for, the technician might unwittingly step from illicit surveillance to accessory to murder.

  But that would be a lie. I saw the woman’s jelly spot, and I used it. I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. Even if I didn’t like myself much in the moment.

  On the way back to the Dodge, I took one more moment to examine the martial arts gym down the road from Pacific Pearl. I owed Juniper Adair at least one thing: I might never have taken a close look at the western side of the place without her little side occupation.

  The gym used to be a warehouse, I guessed. Corrugated walls, with black paint faded enough that the rust that bled from each metal bolt looked almost artful. The glass entrance doors were up a short flight of wooden stairs, and above the doors was a sign. sledge city gym, it read in caps. Below that: home of champions—mma—boxing—thai.

  The letter i in city was dead center on the sign, large and red and distinctive.

  A clenched fist, on top of an axe handle.

  The tattoo on the thug who’d tried to kidnap Cyndra.

  Twelve

  The morning was warm and the rain, if anything, warmer still. A rare enough event that Corcoran and Hollis and I sat out on Corcoran’s small balcony, under the shelter of the overhang, feeling the air while we sipped at lemongrass iced tea, a glass bottle of which Corcoran’s wife, Nakri, had left for us. I placed the highball glass idly against my lips, less drinking than absorbing. I was too deep into my head to be concerned with taste or other senses.

  “I think Mickey O’Hasson might be alive,” I said.

  “So where is the prick?” said Corcoran.

  “Stuck in a room without any windows, most likely.” I tapped the glass, watching the amber liquid ripple.

  They exchanged glances. Hollis’s frown almost matched Corcoran’s.

  “Who would want the man, lad? He’s got nothing.”

  I shook my head. “He’s got value. Just by continuing to exist. Because to his prison buddy, it looks like O’Hasson ran off with the gold.”

  “You make less sense than my kids on that energy drink crap,” Corcoran said. His wife and high-school-age children had gone out for the evening. Thinking of Jimmy Corcoran as a family man, even by
a late-in-life marriage, was one of those pieces of reality too dissonant to be conceivable.

  “I’ve had to stack some guesses on top of what I know for sure,” I said. “A woman named Claudette Simms ran a small freight company called Pacific Pearl. The company was—maybe still is—a front for smuggling of some kind. Over time, Claudette bought gold kilobars and stashed them in her hidden safe. O’Hasson’s attendant had told him the gold came from drug running. That might be true.

  “Around two months ago, Claudette had a heart attack and drowned in her tub. It might have been random chance. Or someone could have killed her and made it look like an accident. Either way, her death set things in motion. Very soon after, the building with her office is bought and gutted. Another group—the hunters—was laying a trap with Claudette’s safe as the bait.”

  “A trap for who?” Hollis asked. “The woman’s dead.”

  “I’m assuming Claudette Simms had a partner in Pacific Pearl. A partner who might know or suspect she had gold squirreled away in the safe. The hunters were hoping that the partner would show up to take it. Instead, they got O’Hasson. And me.”

  Corcoran sucked at his teeth. “Two morons for the price of one.”

  I ignored him. “O’Hasson’s attendant in the prison infirmary was the one who sold Mick on the story of the fortune in gold. He said that the gold was abandoned long ago. That part, at least, was a lie.”

  “Mick O’Hasson is an even bigger sap than you, Shaw,” Corcoran said.

  “No,” Hollis said, realizing. “He’s a burglar. Who’s dying, and maybe desperate for money. He’s a patsy.”

  I nodded. “In Iraq, the locals would rub sticks with rotten meat, and throw the sticks into fields where they suspected mines were buried. The scent would attract wild dogs.”

  “Boom.” Corcoran grinned. A sight even scarcer than warm rain, and a lot less pleasant.

  “Mick O’Hasson is somebody’s minefield dog. Sent in to find out if Claudette’s office was dangerous,” I said.

  “’Cept it was the building that blew up.”