"Roger that, big man."
"If he keeps westbound to I-95 you'll fit in with the rest of the traffic heading that way. I'll stay back a couple of blocks."
"We got this one, Max. Not a problem."
Christ, I thought. I'm partnered with Colin O'Shea. I could only hope he wouldn't hold to form and somehow screw this one up.
Morrison stopped at the light. It was difficult to see his silhouette through the dark glass of his back window in the daylight. The advantage to police cars in Florida was that they almost all had tinted windows so they were obscured from the outside. The treatments used to scare the shit out of us as patrol officers, pulling over some van or tricked out ghetto cruiser when you couldn't see if some banger inside was sighting up a shotgun at the window. Now law enforcement had followed the trend themselves. I again leaned into my driver's door behind the strut, hung my elbow out of the open window like I was a tired worker going home for the evening. I didn't think Morrison could have gotten much of a look at me when he slipped out of Kim's that first time I glimpsed him, but I was trying not to underestimate the guy.
He took a left at the light change as I expected and I followed but fell back. We were heading into a setting sun, the flare of orange spraying strong up into the clouds, and there was enough white light left to cause everyone to drop their visors a couple of inches. It was past commuter time, but South Florida traffic never seemed to ease. It was good for cover, bad if Morrison got nervous and made any quick moves.
"I'm in behind him coming up on the Sears curve," O'Shea reported over the Nextel.
"I'm three blocks back," I answered.
I had to think that Morrison would believe most of what Marci had reported to him. I wasn't exactly going out on a limb with this but maybe we could get lucky. If he wasn't our guy, he'd go home, or to the station, or to some poker game for all I knew. But if he was our guy, I was betting the mention of somehow finding a woman's body in the Glades would spook him. He wouldn't believe it, but the thought of it would get into his head and twist it. If he was as careful as we made him out to be, he would have to confirm it. I was betting on the Glades. Marci had just added to it with her description of someplace off Alligator Alley. Dumping bodies in the Everglades was a tradition in South Florida. The Indians had done it to early explorers, the ruthless farm bosses to slave labor. The mob had done it with their enemies in the twenties and the myriad criminals from dope runners to child abductors had done it in the modern era. Two and a half million acres of open land, shifting water, canals and sawgrass and plenty of reptiles to eliminate all traces: a perfect disposal site. I figured he'd head straight for the Alley and use the failing daylight to his advantage.
But maybe I thought wrong.
"Freeman, I'm losing him up here," O'Shea snapped into the Nextel. "Some asshole is trying to make a left over two lanes and I'm trapped and your boy just put his blue lights on and went up around everybody in the right lane."
I immediately pushed up my speed and moved to the right, passing through a crosswalk, forcing a hulking black man with a shopping cart to yank his load back and spit a string of tobacco at my pickup. I was sitting high enough in my cab to see the flashes of blue from Morrison's light bar and kept pushing. I cut off another driver moving too slow over the railroad tracks and gained another half a block. I saw O'Shea twisting his wheel and cursing out to my left as I went by and gave him a hand sign that I was chasing now.
I blew a red light at Ninth Avenue by barely a second and picked up Morrison's cruiser a block and a half in front. I sped up to get in the same traffic herd so we wouldn't get separated by another light, and exhaled. No big deal. This was why you did two-mans. It was the old way before every metro P.D. had helicopters and the undercover guys hid locators in their cell phones.
I was watching Morrison's light bar and was anticipating his shift into the left lane when he suddenly went right without a signal onto Thirteenth heading north. Shit. Where the hell was he going? An SUV and a sedan made the same turn and I swung behind them and watched the squad car making distance on me and I punched up O'Shea.
"Our guy just took a north route on Thirteenth. If he makes a couple more turns he's going to make me," I said.
"I'll cut up on Twelfth and try to catch him parallel," O'Shea answered.
I was trying to keep my speed but the sun was now on the left side of my face, glancing off my hood, and before I could adjust my focus I realized Morrison had slowed, and when the fat SUV between us swerved around him into the left lane, only the small car was a buffer. The squad car kept its speed and rolled on and I was too far back to see if Morrison was checking his side mirrors. We were on our way up to Oakland Park and I started thinking about what we could do if he simply went home. I was prepared to just sit on him. But tailing him out to some spot in the Glades would be even tougher at night. Out there in the flat expanse you could see headlights for more than a mile. I was grinding and watching the next traffic light burn green when Morrison's car slowed a little more than normal and then suddenly cut over to the far left and took a hard turn into the sun. I had to make a decision: O'Shea was still east, he wouldn't be able to tag on and Morrison was heading west, the direction I'd wanted him to go. Should I call it off or take a chance?
"He's going west on Twenty-eighth," I barked into the Nextel and I went left, caught a horn from an oncoming taxi driver, cussed under my breath and was then partially blinded by the streaming light of sunset.
I caught a glimpse of the police lettering on Morrison's back bumper as he cut another left turn and when I hooked onto the same street I slammed on the brakes. There were two patrol cars parked nose-to-nose blocking the street and Morrison's brake lights beyond them. When I stopped I took a futile look into my rearview and another cruiser was crossing the T behind me. The Nextel tweeted.
"Sorry brother, you know I can't take a chance gettin' into that beehive," O'Shea said from somewhere back there. "Call me when you can. Out."
I tossed the cell under the seat like you might roll an empty beer bottle after getting pulled over. If they wanted to find it bad enough, they would. The three officers in front seemed to climb out of their cars at the same time, like it was choreographed. The fourth, behind me, stayed behind the wheel. Classic drug stop. Don't ever try to tail a cop without installing a police scanner, I thought. You miss that call for backup, you're screwed.
CHAPTER 26
When she called him, he didn't know for sure whether she'd learned her lesson, or she was fucking with him somehow. All he knew for sure was that he didn't feel right. Maybe he should have just done her when he had the chance and moved on.
"Hi, Kyle. Hey, I'm at work, baby, and you know that big tall guy who came in the other day with the blonde cop? He was back in here today, asking me questions and it scared me, you know, what you said, about you getting into trouble by hanging out here?"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Marci," he'd said, trying to calm her, though there was something in her voice that sounded more like she was acting spooked instead of being afraid. And he knew her well enough now to know she didn't scare easily. Hell, she wasn't even scared the other night. She might have been pissed. She might have even known that if she hadn't done what he wanted he would have killed her right there like the rest of them. But she didn't come off scared. He liked that in a woman.
"OK, listen. What the hell did the guy say?" he asked.
"He was talking about missing bartenders," she said. "Girls that had worked at a bunch of places, up on OPB and down off Seventeenth Street and even here that that blonde cop thinks were kidnapped."