“No problem, no problem,” he said to the Taurus. “Do what you need to do.”
When Hal did detective work, on important jobs, two tail cars was the minimum. Three cars were better, if the client would pay for that sort of thing. The more cars the better. One car would be on the tail awhile, then drop back and another one would pick it up. The extra cars would be on the radio, following along on parallel streets. On the highway, they’d drop waaaaay back, or they’d speed up and get out ahead. Whatever. Keep dropping in and out of the tail, give them different looks, that way the target wouldn’t catch on. Leapfrogging, they used to call it.
But one car. That was an art. You had to play it real cool.
You had to lose touch sometimes. You couldn't give them any reason to suspect you. If they did, if they made you, then they’d bolt. They’d blow red lights. They’d drive the wrong way on one way streets. They’d make U-turns at police speed traps on the highway. They made a move like that, then you were lost. You blew it. You couldn’t follow.
Hal had a hunch here. It buzzed in his head like electricity. These guys weren’t going to blow any red lights. They weren’t going to try to shake a tail. There was something happening, and they couldn’t risk getting busted by a traffic cop – not with a couple of prisoners in the trunk.
In the trunk! He couldn’t fucking believe it. Man, this beat everything. This was like the movies. This was better. This was real. Totally awesome. Goddamn! They had walked right into some kind of full-blown hostage drama.
Hostages. Sure. These bastards had taken the girls hostage.
In some sense, hadn’t he and Darren done the same from time to time?
“Make a right,” Cruz said. “Right here, take this right.”
Moss took a long looping right past a fried chicken take out and onto a main drag, Washington Avenue. It was long, nearly deserted, a big old warehouse or factory passing by on their right. The highway entrance was at the end of this strip.
Cruz found himself sulking as they drove along. It hadn’t gone as he intended. Nothing on this whole trip had gone as he intended. That fucking taillight. He didn’t like that at all. Trouble was, he wasn’t sure that it hadn’t been broken in the first place. Fingers would know, but Fingers was dead.
Why would Fingers steal a car with a broken taillight?
He wouldn’t, that’s why.
“Now! Make this left!”
Moss veered in front of an oncoming car and made the left. They cruised down a steep hill, a side street with run down houses climbing the hill. At the bottom, there were low-slung garden apartment style housing projects. From an unlit basketball court, dark black faces peered at them as they passed.
“I’m telling you, son. I’ve been in this game a little while now. There ain’t nobody back there. It was a kid that broke the taillight.”
“Why ours?”
“Why the fuck not? You paranoid, Cruz? That the problem?”
Cruz didn’t like it. The variables were piling up. Two girls in a trunk. A broken taillight. It was supposed to be a quick snatch, and then a return drive to New York. Goodbye, Smoke Dugan O’Malley, you worry about your problems, I’ll worry about mine. Instead, two people were already dead, and this Lola girl would have to go when all was said and done. She would have to go just as surely as the skinny girl, her roommate, would have to go.
And all the while, Cruz thinking about getting out. Face it. He was no good for this business anymore.
Moss cruised the side streets, moving slow, making random rights and lefts, stopping at all stop signs. They passed a parked police car. The cop was inside, writing something in his book. He didn’t look up.
“We done out here? You mind if I get back and get on the highway now? That’s all we need, a porky little pig try to pull us over for a broken light,” Moss said.
“That’d be one dead pig,” Cruz said absently. He meant it. No matter what trouble he himself was having, he knew Moss would drop a cop without giving it much thought.
He checked in back of them one last time. No one back there. Just dead, deserted streets.
“Yeah, go for it,” he said. “Make a left here.”
Moss made a left and climbed back up toward Washington Avenue.
“I think you’re losing your focus, son. We got the girl, like we said we were gonna do. Okay. The man’ll either give it up or he won’t. If he don’t, then we got problems. But in the meantime, we got this extra girl back there. And that’s a problem right now. She’s baggage back there. I can’t have that and neither can you. It’s bad for business.”
“I see what you mean,” Cruz said. To Moss, his decision to spare the roommate must have looked like weakness. To Moss, this entire job must have looked like weakness.
“I hope you do,” Moss said.
They were back on Washington Avenue, right near the chicken takeout again. A group of dark-skinned men sat out on plastic lawn chairs in front of another eatery, this one with no sign on it at all. The whole long strip of the avenue was darkened and nearly deserted. As they headed down the street, a few people loitered here and there in the gloom, standing around in ones and twos.
“Let me see your phone,” Cruz said.
“Son, you need to stop giving orders. Your big shot orders got my little buddy killed earlier today.”
Cruz and Moss crossed eyes like swords. Now was not the time for the show down with Moss. Or was it? Cruz pictured whipping out his gun and blowing Moss away right here in the car. It was one measure of how far he had fallen that Moss would say these things to him. The deeper measure, however, was that Moss was still alive. He couldn’t fight the man – Moss was too big, too strong. In the old days, Cruz would have just killed him instead.
“Lend me your cell phone, will you?” he said. “I want to call Dugan so that we can save this job before it goes all the way down the shithole.”
“That’s better,” Moss said. “I thought you didn’t use cell phones.”
“In an emergency, I’ll make an exception.”
Moss handed him the phone, a small black number with a lot of meaningless features. Cruz scrutinized it for what he needed, the green SEND button for one. He fished in his pocket for the girl’s home number, straight from the dossier.
“What’s the story with this phone?” he said. He hated cell phones. He didn’t even like to look at them. Cops could snatch these conversations right out of the air. Cops could trace back these phone calls. Somebody dies, and then what? The cops check the phone records, right? And here’s this cell phone number. Hell, maybe it’s right there on the caller ID. Shit, he hated these things. Lazy people used cell phones.
Moss shrugged. “It’s clean.”
“How clean?”
“It’s PCS. Completely digital. Encryption codes make it almost impossible to intercept the call.”
To Cruz, it sounded like so much mumbo-jumbo. “What about trace-backs?”
“The phone belongs to a gentleman from Fresno, California. He paid the whole contract, a whole year, up front. He likes to travel a lot, this gentleman. He’s got coverage everywhere in the great forty-eight. Anybody traces back a call, they’ll find out this gentleman made that call.”
“Who is he?”
Moss smiled, showing the gap in his front teeth. “Someone who don’t exist anymore.”
Hal leaned up against a telephone pole in the dim light along Washington Avenue.
Thirty yards away, the Cadillac was parked in the lot of the old bread factory. Now it was an office building, a low-rent warren filled with the offices of low-budget social service organizations. Hal glanced at the Caddy. Darren was hunched down low, probably wondering what the hell he was doing out here.
“Come on,” Hal said under his breath. “You know you want me.”