"I think we would call you someone who shouldn't allow her boyfriend to give her black eyes," Scoby said seriously.
"Yes, you are right. It was stupid of me to let him do that," Carine Mueller nodded, glancing back at Scoby again. "Sometimes we hybrids are foolish about our men. But did I not convince you to come here to take my boyfriend and his friends away so that I can have the cabin all to myself? So maybe I am not so stupid after all, yes?" With that, she turned her attention back to the trail.
After about five minutes of hiking through the dense woods, they came to a small clearing alongside the riverbank.
"Over there," Mueller said, pointing to the opposite side of the clearing. "See those shacks? The one on the right is where he stores the paws and the gallbladders until they're dried. The one in the middle is their processing shed. And the larger one on the left, the one with the chimney, is where they drink and have their poker parties."
"How many people usually work here?"
"Usually it is my boyfriend and his three partners. But sometimes there are one or two others when they decide to play cards."
"But you're sure none of them are here now?" Scoby asked as he scanned the wooden structures with his binoculars.
"I am very sure they are not here. If they were, we would have seen one of their cars back at the cabin, or one of their boats tied up at the riverbank."
"Is that how they come here, by boat?"
"The buyers always arrive by boat, but then they go away somewhere else to make the exchange," Carine Mueller told him. "Do you think you can follow them to the place where they do that?"
"I'm sure we can come up with something," Carl Scoby smiled. "Shall we take a look at the galls and the burial site?"
"Oh, yes, of course," she nodded. "But first I wanted to ask you something. How will you prove that they are doing something illegal if you don't actually see them killing the animals?"
"When we make arrangements to buy wildlife parts or products from a suspect, sometimes we can get them to brag about how they're outsmarting all the law-enforcement people," Scoby explained as they walked to the storage shed. "If there happens to be a hidden tape recorder nearby, we can always play the tape back to a judge or a jury."
"Would you do something like that?"
"It depends on the situation," Scoby said as he surveyed the three shacks.
"I think it is so strange that a person like you could do something like that."
"Oh, really? Why's that?" Scoby asked as he moved cautiously up to the side of a door, slipping his left hand inside his vest and releasing the safety strap on his shoulder holster.
"Because you look so much like a policeman."
"Yeah, I know," Scoby nodded as he reached for the door with his right hand. "A lot of people tell me that."
"Which I find fascinating, because I hate policemen so much," Carine Mueller said softly as she stepped forward into a semicrouched position with a. 357 Magnum revolver she had withdrawn from her jacket extended out in two steady hands.
"What?" Scoby said, starting to come around when the first of six semijacketed hollow-points caught him square in the center of his chest.
As Scoby crumpled backward, Mueller continued to follow him with her sight pattern, smoothly triggering off five more high-velocity rounds into the rib-cage area of the agent's falling body.
None of the six bullets had actually penetrated Carl Scoby's Kevlar vest, but the sledgehammer-like impacts of the mushrooming. 357 Magnum projectiles had cracked or broken at least half of his ribs, and the agonizing pain made it almost impossible for him to draw the heavy SIG-Sauer automatic from his shoulder holster.
Stunned and nearly unconscious, Carl Scoby might have given up then. But the sight of Carine Mueller calmly dumping the expended brass out of. 357 Magnum, then reaching into her pack for one of her speed-loaders, gave him all the incentive he needed.
Functioning on instinct and training alone, Scoby had just brought his heavy automatic to bear on the blurry figure and was starting to squeeze the trigger when Kiro Nakamura stepped out of the shack and fired a single. 357 round right into the side of his exposed head.
"I can't believe it," Marie Pascalaura whispered as she slid her head up against Henry Lightstone's shoulder and closed her eyes.
"What don't you believe?" Lightstone mumbled, nearly asleep because they'd been up half the night before, packing and chasing each other around the bedroom.
"That you and I are actually flying to Alaska to see if we want to live there," she whispered against his ear. "And that you're willing to give up undercover work so that we can live almost like normal people."
"And we're going to get married?" Lightstone mumbled drowsily.
"Nope. After you get those transfer papers signed, and after you've worked for McNulty as a senior resident agent for a few months, then we can get married," Marie Pascalaura said firmly. "Until then, you're just going to have to get used to being shacked up."
"Nice trusting attitude," Lightstone said as he moved his head around to give her a gentle kiss.
"Attitude nothing," Marie Pascalaura smiled. "I just want to be sure you can do it."
"Do what, leave undercover work?"
"Uh-huh."
"You really don't think I can?" Lightstone asked, lifting his head and staring into the beautiful dark eyes of his girlfriend.
"I have my doubts."
"Well, I'll tell you what," he said as he settled his head down against the soft, aromatic mass of her long, dark hair. "I'll probably miss Scoby, and Paxton, and Stoner, and maybe even that crazy Takahara, but I don't think I'm going to miss the work at all."
At eleven-fifteen that morning, Special Agent-Pilot Larry Paxton was cruising over the Everglades National Park, looking for baited ponds and illegal shooters, when a scratchy voice broke in over his scrambled radio system.
"Super Cub November Two-Two-Seven-Four, do you read me?"
"This is Super Cub Two-Two-Seven-Four," Paxton acknowledged into his helmet mike. "Go ahead."
"Two-Two-Seven-Four, this is Florida State Fish and Game Officer A1 Cousins. You that new federal agent-pilot we heard about?"
"I guess that depends," Paxton replied. "What'd you hear about him?"
"Well, to tell you the truth, we heard a lot of things," the voice chuckled. "But ol' Brian Jacobs seems to think that the guy just might be okay anyway, if he's really as good with that airplane as he's supposed to be."
Paxton nodded and smiled. Brian Jacobs was the senior resident agent assigned to the Miami office, and also the man that Paxton was going to have to impress if he wanted to stay assigned to that office. But it wasn't going to be easy. Paxton had a lot of ground to make up.
Predictably, the idea of a black agent getting the Miami slot over the long-standing transfer requests of five other agents with higher seniority had not pleased the rest of the Southern Florida law-enforcement staff. Paxton knew he would have felt the same way if he'd been shoved aside by a political appointee with less seniority, regardless of the underlying reasons.
"Uh, did Brian happen to mention anything about how I ended up getting this assignment?"
"Yep, sure did. Told us a real interesting story about how you guys got bushwhacked and broken up by some hotshot political types. Course, to tell you the truth, nobody down here was all that surprised. We kinda expect that sort of thing out of the federal government."
"Well, maybe you can understand why I wouldn't mind getting the chance to show my stuff with this bird," Paxton said after a moment's pause. "Think you might have a target I could play with for a while?"