“Let’s talk later. Is your house safe?”
Galvin sighed loudly. “As we agreed. I’ve hired private security.”
“Just outside the house?”
“The perimeter as well. The entire property. What happened?”
“Later,” Danny said, and he disconnected the call.
66
He got to the South Bay Center twenty minutes early. The giant parking lot swarmed with cars pulling in and out and circling and jousting for spaces. It was rush hour, and this was a shopping center of big, busy chain stores: Bed Bath & Beyond, T.J.Maxx, OfficeMax, Old Navy, Marshalls, Target, Best Buy, Stop & Shop. Home Depot. The good old Home Despot. An Applebee’s and an Olive Garden. Pretty much Danny’s idea of hell. That and shopping at Whole Foods late on Sunday afternoon.
He found a spot a few traffic aisles away from Home Depot, closer to Old Navy, fifteen rows back. He sat in his car and awaited further instructions: a call or a text. They’d said only the Home Depot parking lot. But it was a big parking lot and he had no idea whether they’d be on foot or in some vehicle.
Under the front seat he’d stashed the Beretta Galvin had given him.
In his pocket, his iPhone.
He took a few deep breaths. Tried to steady his nerves. He’d asked for this meeting before he’d discovered the truth about them. Or if not the truth, at least he’d discovered the lie about them: that they weren’t working for the DEA.
But who were they, and what were they after?
The best theory was that they were ex-DEA agents running some sort of long con. They’d been fired in Mexico on grounds of corruption. Then maybe they’d tried to cash in. They’d run across the name of a cartel money man while working for the DEA, but instead of reeling Tom Galvin in, maybe they’d decided to scam him.
Or maybe they were working for another cartel.
Whatever they might be up to, there was only one way to shut them down: Bring the FBI down on them.
Jay Poskanzer knew people at a high enough level to make this happen. But he needed something tangible, he’d said. “Get me something on them we can give the FBI,” Poskanzer said. “A place. A location where these two grifters can be confronted and questioned and apprehended by FBI. Once we’ve got something, we hand it over to the FBI and let them go to work.”
He knew what he was about to do was risky. Maybe extremely so. He tried to relax, calm himself.
What he was about to do required thinking and acting on a whole new level.
He checked his phone for text messages, just in case he hadn’t heard the secure-text alert. Nothing. He switched off the ringer and slipped the phone back into his pocket.
He waited.
Then it came, that unusual, electronic plinking sound of ChatSecure. Rear lot, row 5 white van, the message read.
At the back of the parking lot, at the end of an aisle that ran perpendicular to Home Depot, he spotted a white van labeled INTERSTATE FOOD & BEVERAGE. Sitting behind the wheel was Slocum, the wiry rat-faced one with the shoe-polish-black hair. He glanced at Danny briefly, scowled, and glanced away. Danny heard a door open, and Yeager, the bald squat one, came around the hood of the van.
He beckoned Danny to follow him, then went to the rear and opened the swing-out doors. Danny hopped up inside. Cargo racks lined the walls of the interior. Gray powder-coated steel modular shelves. Apart from a few toolboxes and an extension cord, most of the shelves were empty. It smelled of machine oil and old cigarettes.
“All right,” Yeager said, “just stand still a moment.”
He took some oblong black object from a shelf, the size of an old-model cell phone, switched it on, pulled out a telescoping antenna, and began waving the thing up and down against Danny’s sides. It emitted a tinny squeal like a metal detector, its high-pitched tone swooping low to high, soft to loud.
This he hadn’t expected. Something had made them suspicious of him. Almost as if they knew, somehow, what he was up to. But that wasn’t possible, was it?
“What’s this about?” Danny said.
Yeager ignored the question, tapped the outside of Danny’s left front pants pocket.
“That a cell phone?”
Danny felt his insides seize. He shrugged with feigned casualness. “Good guess.”
Yeager lay his hand out flat. As in: Hand it over.
But the iPhone had been set to record, a big fat red RECORD button on the home screen. As soon as Yeager saw it, Danny would be busted.
There was nothing to do but give it to Yeager. Danny pulled the phone out and placed it, with an impatient sigh, facedown on Yeager’s beefy palm. When Yeager flipped it over, Danny’s heart clanged.
The screen had gone dark.
Without another thought, Yeager set it on a shelf next to a black plastic DeWalt drill case and resumed running the bug detector along Danny’s lower back, over the seat of his pants, down to his shoes, back up to his wristwatch. He nodded. There was nothing else.
“You forget something?” he said.
Danny just blinked.
“The pictures from Aspen. Where the hell are they?”
Danny shook his head. “I got nothing for you.”
Yeager looked momentarily surprised, but his expression quickly turned into grim amusement. “That’s a real shame,” he said, beginning to massage the fist of his right hand.
“That’s why I wanted to talk. They grabbed the camera.”
“They? Who?”
“How do I know? Whoever Galvin’s working with. His security guy.”
“You didn’t make a backup?”
“Did you not hear me? They took my camera. There wasn’t anything to back up. I didn’t have a chance. They caught me trying to take pictures on the mountain at Aspen.”
“What do you mean, ‘caught’ you?”
“Someone knocked me out. Literally, like”-Danny pantomimed a sap clocking his own head-“bam.”
“And you couldn’t tell us this via e-mail?”
“I got caught, you get it? That means Galvin’s onto me. They’re onto me.”
Yeager stopped rubbing his knuckles. “How’d you play it?”
“When I came to? Like I was just skiing.”
“And the camera?”
“No one said anything one way or another. It was just gone. I assume they took it.”
Yeager shook his head. “With no questions, like why did you have a camera with you when you were skiing?”
Danny shook his head. “Right. No questions, nothing.”
“And you’re sure there weren’t any pictures on the camera?”
“Like I told you.”
“Then maybe you were just Wildlife Cameraman, taking artsy pictures of the snow and the trees. Well, we’re just going to have to figure out another way for you to get what we need-”
“Actually,” Danny said, cutting him off, “no.”
Yeager laughed. “No?” He cast a glance at Slocum, in the driver’s seat way up front. “You believe this guy? ‘No’?”
“This turns out to be a dangerous job, and the rules are changing. Now I’m going to require hazard pay.”
Yeager had opened his mouth to speak, maybe to scoff, but he stopped midsyllable. “You’re a funny guy.”
Danny leaned back against the wall of the van. “No joke. I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to do, and the smart thing for me to do is to walk away. But I’m willing to try again. If I get compensated for my efforts.”
“The DEA doesn’t pay informants.”
Danny smiled. “Come on, Glenn, you think I don’t do research? You underestimate me. DEA pays, and sometimes you pay really well. I read about a Guatemalan drug dealer the US government paid nine million bucks as a source. But you’re in luck this morning. I’m willing to offer you a deal. A special low low price.”
“In your dreams.”
“Thing is, I have something you want pretty desperately. And I’m willing to get it for you. On my terms.”