"You want me to work for you?"
"I think it would not be so much work as perhaps pleasure," Chareaux said. "After all, I am told that your aim is true. You are healthy and strong, the woman is sexy and beautiful, and it is clear that my foolish client has already made her angry for some reason. Who is to say that she would not be more impressed by you than by him?"
"What exactly would I have to do?" Lightstone asked, trying to convince himself that the woman had nothing to do with this.
"Carry a heavy pack. Help my brother to drive the animals. Be there with your rifle if a shot is missed and any of them are in danger. Assist me in cleaning and transporting their trophies. Be available as a distraction if the need should arise." Chareaux shrugged again. "It is not so much."
Only everything that I need to put you away, Lightstone thought, wondering if he was pushing his Henry Allen Lightner role too far.
"It is up to you," Chareaux said. "If you are agreeable, I can go ask him right now."
Lightstone hesitated for one last time, determined to make it look right, because he would never again have a chance like this with Alex Chareaux. Especially not if "transporting their trophies" meant what he thought it meant-that he would be allowed to help deliver the illegally killed animals to the Chareauxs' illegal taxidermist.
Wait until McNulty hears about this, he thought.
"I'm agreeable," he finally said. "Go ahead and ask."
Chapter Twelve
Henry Lightstone watched the door to Room 102 close behind Alex Chareaux's back.
Then, for a few long moments, he just stood there, alone in the parking lot, and thought very seriously about getting back into the Bronco and simply fading away.
He figured that he had five minutes for sure, maybe fifteen at the outside. For that length of time, the fade would still be a viable option. All he had to do was to toss the rifle case and duffel bags in the back of the rented vehicle, get into the front seat, start up the engine, drive right on out of the parking lot, turn left at the intersection, and that would be it.
No more Chareaux brothers, and no more Henry Allen Lightner. Just Marie, and whatever else he could find to amuse himself with until MeNulty came up with another suitable project for the wild-card member of his respected covert team.
Just like the old times.
Hey, man, heard you did the Fade on ol' Papa-Q last night.
Yeah, that's the way it went. One minute I'm right in there, all set to do the deed, and the next minute, wham, I'm gone. Just like that. Never even saw it coming.]ust up and walked away.
The gut always knows, man. You gotta listen to it. That Papa-Q's a stone freak from way back. You just let him slide for a while. We'll take him down another day.
The Fade.
That was what they called it when he was buying narcotics in back alleys from crack-crazed freaks. The sudden, unconscious decision to walk away from the deal at the last second because some gut-level instinct didn't like what it saw, or sensed, or heard.
Henry Lightstone was perfectly aware that he was working a wildlife case that had little if anything to do with dope, but that didn't matter, because he knew that Alex Chareaux and Papa-Q were kindred souls… amoral creatures who would think nothing of killing a man for the simple pleasure of watching him die.
The Fade. He knew that he could do it. All he had to do was to turn around and walk away. He could do that, and nobody on the Special Operations team-not Paxton, or Stoner, or Scoby, or Takahara, not even MeNulty-would ever second-guess his decision, because they understood that it wasn't a question of giving in to fear.
Covert operators, or at least the good ones, knew, understood, and respected fear for what it was: an ancient early warning system that kept the Stone Age hunters alert and wary and alive in situations where most sophisticated thought processes were simply too slow. In effect, a mental trip wire that might just give that hunter a second chance to survive if he was alert, and cautious, and paid careful attention to his instincts.
But it wasn't fear alone that was making Henry Lightstone consider the Fade. And it wasn't the unexpected appearance of Alex Chareaux's three new clients, who had certainly added a dangerous complication to his carefully worked-out game plan. It was the sudden realization that the pace of the entire operation had accelerated to the point where he no longer had any control over its direction or its timing.
When the door to Alex Chareaux's motel room finally opened fifteen minutes later, Lightstone was still standing there, trying to convince himself that he was ready to face just about anything.
Which, as it turned out, wasn't true at all. Nothing had even remotely prepared Henry Lightstone for the sudden rhythmic thunder of rotor blades as the glistening helicopter swooped down over the Best Western parking lot and then came around in a tight, tail-sweeping turn to hover in a dust-swirling position over the nearby field.
"Tell me, Henry," Chareaux said as he leaned over and patted Lightstone's shoulder, "is this not an incredible surprise?"
"What?" Lightstone rasped, trying not to move his head lest he lose what little equilibrium he had somehow managed to retain. He was trying to decide if tingling arms and legs, clammy skin, and a rapid pulse meant that he was about to faint, or about to be airsick.
"Here, you need your headset on, so we can talk," Chareaux said, reaching up and removing Lightstone's headset from the overhead clip, then helping him adjust the cord and earphones around his throbbing head.
"I said, are you not surprised by all of this?" Chareaux repeated, keying the switch for the cabin intercom on the headset cord as he spoke into the small mouthpiece speaker.
"Yeah, that's the word for it, Alex, no doubt about it," Lightstone nodded weakly.
"Here, we must use this intercom switch if we wish to talk among ourselves," Chareaux said, showing Lightstone how to go back and forth between the helicopter's cabin and pilot intercom systems.
Lightstone wanted Chareaux to take his cheerful little surprises, and the headset that was already starting to hurt his ears, and his goddamned intercom switches, and stuff them right up there along with his "special hunt." But he couldn't say so because, he figured, it would probably start a fight.
He could blame McNulty and Scoby right off for this, Lightstone told himself, since there had been absolutely nothing in any of the team's extensive intelligence reports to suggest that the Chareaux brothers had ever used any transportation equipment more sophisticated than a four-wheel-drive Jeep.
The background report on Alex Chareaux's illegal guiding operation had been over three hundred pages long. And among other things, it had listed in great detail the methods that Chareaux and his brothers had used during the past three years to take at least twenty-three subjects on a total of eighty-seven illegal hunts.
The information had also included the date and duration of each hunt, the state and county where the hunts took place, the number of species wounded or taken, types and calibers of weapons used, the makes and models of the suspect vehicles, license-plate numbers, types of clothing worn, game tags used or altered, access routes, meeting points, contacts with game wardens, and details of previous hunts discussed over evening camp fires.
Everything that an investigating wildlife officer could possibly want, except for current photographs of Butch and Sonny Chareaux, and the name and location of the taxidermist that the Chareauxs used for mounting their clients' illegal trophies, which was why McNulty had sent Lightstone in on the Chareaux brothers in the first place.
The thing was, Lightstone told himself, if there had been as much as a single instance in which the Chareaux brothers had even talked about using a helicopter in one of their illegal hunts, there would have been at least a half dozen cross-indexed references to that fact in the report.