Eventually, I drifted off and dreamed I stood in the doorway of a house off in the desert somewhere. A wounded dog limped toward me through the moonlit chaparral. As it drew close, I looked into its eyes, and saw my son looking back at me.
The next thing, the phone was ringing.
It was Rooney. “I don’t know what to say, Nick. Apple-bee’s got hit this morning, 8 o’clock.” Some throat-clearing. “Just like you said.”
I rubbed my face, checked my watch. 8:30. “How much?”
“Twelve grand.”
Hardly a take worth risking your freedom for, I thought. But this wasn’t just about money. I wondered if Mike had driven back alone, or if he’d dragged Rhonda along with him again. And maybe she didn’t feel bullied at all. Maybe, for the first time in a long, long while, she felt married.
“We’re never gonna catch this guy without a wire.” I was laying out my case to John Tally, the county attorney. “He’s getting cocky—cocky crooks get sloppy and that’s when people get hurt.”
Tally tented his hands, rocking in his chair, sunlight flaring in the windows behind him. An ASU man, politician to the bone, he was tan and fit, pompous, cutthroat. “I’ll approve a wire,” he said finally. “And a task force, but I want hard numbers on bodies.”
“Phoenix and Tempe’ll pony up ten men apiece,” I said, guessing. “Scottsdale and Mesa half that each, an even thirty.”
“You’re lead agent,” he said pointedly. “Team up with Tom Kolchek for the wire affidavit. And don’t be fooled by his looks. He’s the smartest guy I’ve got.”
I stood up to leave. “I want to call off the surveillance, make the target think he’s in the clear.”
Tally glanced up, like I’d already become a bother. “I told you,” he said. “You’re lead agent.”
Tally was right, Kolchek looked like your Uncle Monty—thick all over with thinning hair and sad-sack eyes—but he was one of the sharpest cops I ever worked with. The affidavit came to a hundred pages and was airtight, detailing every job, how Mike came to be our suspect, the ensuing surveillance, the continuing robberies, everything. We argued that, given Rhonda’s new accomplice role, phone communications between the house and the restaurant could prove fruitful. The judge granted us thirty days for the wire, with a re-up possible for another thirty if the need arose, which would carry us through the holidays. But if we didn’t have results by then, tough. We’d have to bag up and go home.
We notified the phone company of our target lines and anticipated start date, so they could build the parallel circuits for the wiretap. Two days later, they called back to tell us Mike had disconnected his home phone. He’d done it the same day we submitted the affidavit.
Kolchek hung up and sat there, thinking it through. Finally, in an oddly sunny voice, he said, “We’ll bug his house.”
“You don’t get it,” I told him.
“I get it,” Kolchek said. “So? We tighten the circle of who knows what, rewrite the affidavit, wire up his house. Maybe we’ll get lucky. You get any better ideas, let me know.”
I didn’t get any better ideas, of course. And every time I tried to imagine who might be tipping Mike off, I could never convince myself I had the right man. Cavanaugh was the first and obvious choice, given how long he’d stuck up for Mike, but he was a hard cop and I’d seen the betrayal in his face before the Applebee’s job. Besides, like he’d said, fifty cops would vouch for Mike in a heartbeat—any one of them could be our leak.
Kolchek and I reworked the affidavit, kept the wire on the restaurant phone, and asked for three transmitters for the residence—one in the living room, one in the dining room, one in the bedroom—sensitive enough, at ten thousand dollars a pop, to catch voices throughout the house. The judge signed off and Kolchek introduced me to a tech for the county attorney’s office named Pritchard, who’d go in and actually set things up.
“I’ll go with,” I told Kolchek.
“No, I will,” he said. “I’m a pretty good lock pick and we only need two men inside.”
“What about the dog?”
Kolchek cocked his head. “Dog?”
“A white shepherd,” I said. “It’s in the surveillance reports.”
“Right. I remember. What’s your point?”
“I used to work canine. The white ones are unpredictable, you don’t want to go in there alone.” That was mostly crap, but there was no way I wasn’t going with them. I wanted a look inside that house.
The next day, when Mike and Rhonda were at the restaurant, Kolchek headed up their front walk and took a Polaroid, then went to the hardware store, bought an identical door, and set it up in his office, practicing till it took only forty-five seconds to pop both locks.
Meanwhile, I scoped the neighborhood for the best spot to place the undercover van. Mike and Rhonda lived in a mazelike community of town houses grouped in quads, and the geometry of the place was all wrong; there was nowhere within a hundred yards of their unit to park the van and not stand out. Then I saw there was a unit for rent one quad over. We could set up the wire room in there, as long as we kept a low profile.
I hit up Tally’s office for the rent and two days later, when Mike and Rhonda and most of the neighbors were off to work, we moved our guys in. Me, Kolchek, and Pritchard headed over for our entry to plant the bugs, while a ram car took up position on the street to force a fender bender, stall for time, if Mike or Rhonda came back while we were still inside the house.
When we got to the front porch, though, we found a brand-new security gate with two additional locks, barring access to the door. Kolchek just stood there, staring, holding his lockpick tools. “This isn’t happening.” He glanced at his watch and swallowed hard. Inside, the dog was barking like the place was on fire.
I started heading for the back of the house. “Bet you’re glad you brought me along now.”
There was a privacy wall around the patio in back and I scaled it, dropping down onto the pavers. A sliding Arcadia door led inside, with an insert for a doggy door. I got down on the ground, reached through, and flicked aside the dowel lodging the door in place. The dog realized what was happening then, and as I slipped inside he turned a corner and charged toward me, hackles raised, fangs bared.
I reached frantically in my pocket for the syringe of Iso-forane I’d brought along to knock him out, only to sink my thumb into the needle. “Goddamnmotherfuck!” I played air banjo with my hand for a second, then, glancing up, saw I wasn’t the only one to miscalculate. As his paws hit linoleum, the dog lost traction, sliding toward me helplessly. Stepping forward, I caught him under the jaw with a kick so fierce he cartwheeled backwards.
“Get in the goddamn bathroom!”
The dog sulked off, mewling, as I checked my thumb, hoping adrenalin would ward off any grogginess. Suddenly, I remembered my dream from weeks before—the lonely house, the wounded dog. A chirp from my radio broke the spell.
I clicked on. “Yeah?”
“We heard that, detective.” It was one of my guys in the wire room. In the background, laughter. “Punt the pooch—that what they teach you in canine?”
I switched off my radio and searched out the front door. When I got there I found out the security gate was locked from inside, requiring a key. “This nails it,” I told Kolchek through the grating. “Somebody’s tipping this guy off.”