I parked in the lot, on higher ground, a full hundred yards away. Killed the engine, got my night binoculars from under the seat. Rolled my window down. Hector got out and started toward a Toyota 4Runner parked one space over from the Cube. It was a dark, older vehicle and I wrote the plate numbers in my notebook.
The Toyota driver’s window was halfway down. A stand of eucalyptus trees bordering the lot blocked the moonlight. As Hector approached I could just make out the shape of someone behind the wheel. A pale face in a dark interior.
They talked, Hector saying little, nodding. The window rose and Hector went to the rear, opened the 4Runner’s lift gate, and let it rise. Then back to his Cube, where he swung open the rear cargo door.
20
He looked around briefly, reached in and hefted out by its handle a green metal canister. I knew what it was instantly. I knew it to be rectangular, just under twelve inches long, six inches across, and seven high. With a fold-down metal handle, heavy lid, hard-to-open latch plates that lock tight to defeat sand, moisture, time itself. I’d seen more than a few of those during my days as a Marine. I glassed the yellow print:
42 °CARTRIDGES
5.56MM
M16
LOT WRA 22416
Hector lugged it with both hands to the 4Runner, set it in the cargo area, pushed it forward. The driver, still locked in darkness, didn’t appear to move. Hector clap-dusted his hands on his way back to the Cube.
Repeated the activity.
Four trips.
Which meant sixteen hundred and eighty rounds.
Or, accounted another way, two and a half minutes of fully automatic fire through an M16. Although M16 barrels melt at around two hundred straight rounds.
Rumiyah says to rest your gun. Which is fine, because you need to reload anyway. You have to stop firing to step over bodies. Which is good, because it lets the barrel cool. Why not post some video? Show the world what a badass you are, and what you’re doing to make it a better place? By then, you’re good to go again.
If you kill only one person with every ten rounds, you’ve taken one hundred and sixty-eight lives in your two and a half minutes of fully automatic glory.
Add an accomplice and the numbers can double.
A case of four hundred and twenty M16 rounds will cost you about what I paid for my GPU vehicle tracker — around two hundred dollars. Best deals are online. Shipping is sometimes free.
I glassed the SUV driver again, sitting very still in the dark interior. Him or her? Young or old? Something in the vague shape of the face said young and male. My night-vision binoculars couldn’t illuminate, but they enhanced my eerie phantom and his surroundings in counter-natural green.
Hector wasn’t finished. From the front passenger side of the Cube he pulled out his fashionable Gallerie Monfil shopping bag, rummaged through the red tissue paper, and removed one of the knives. Walked it over to the 4Runner and held it up to the half-open window. Nodded, said something, shrugged, returned to the Cube. Standing by the open door, he drew out the blade and slashed the air around him, his free hand out for balance, which he nearly lost.
Then back to work.
Four more trips, four more ammunition canisters. I saw that these contained nine-millimeter cartridges, usually used in handguns. Smaller shells. One thousand rounds per canister. Hector was breathing deeply by the time he shoved in the fourth case and slammed the 4Runner’s lift gate shut.
Dusting off his hands again, he approached the driver’s window. The driver turned. And in the moment before Hector blocked my view, I saw that he was indeed a lean-faced young man, wearing a dark watch cap and a dark plaid shirt buttoned to his chin. It looked heavy, maybe flannel, against the cold. A tremor of recognition rattled through me as I pictured the Kenny Bryce surveillance video. Surfer. Boarder. In the brief moment I saw him, he gave Hector a blank stare. Splinters of light for eyes.
A moment later Hector backed away from the 4Runner. The driver’s window was already up and white exhaust coughed from the muffler. No interior lights, but the headlights came on and the 4Runner pulled out. Hector tried to follow, realized his rear doors were still open, got out and slammed them shut, then hustled back behind the wheel.
I watched them go. In the shopping center lights I could see that the 4Runner was dark gray. Fell in behind them as Hector’s location registered on my phone. Backtracked to Via de la Valle, to Interstate 5. The Toyota hit the southbound on-ramp fast, blowing past the one-car-per-green light, heading for traffic. Hector chugged along behind him and of course stopped at the red light. My heart sinking and racing at the same time. An eternal red light. The Cube rolled away, my turn next. I ran the light, swept around Hector’s left and barreled past him, taking the middle lane and hitting the gas. I knew my chances were poor: too fast and he’d know something was wrong, too slow and I’d never catch up with him.
But I had good lines of sight from the middle lane. Stayed right there and gunned it. Eighty miles per hour, a hair faster than most of the flow. Eyes steady, breath even, high on hope. It was a wide freeway, two lanes on either side of me, traffic fast but light enough to give me a good view of the 4Runner.
But no 4Runner by the time I came to Del Mar Heights Road. Highway Patrol stopped on the right shoulder behind a Corvette, so I slowed down. Model citizen.
And no 4Runner by the next exit sign, either. That sinking feeling. But I regained my eighty miles an hour, blinders on for everything but what I wanted to see. And maybe because of that, I passed the Carmel Valley Road off-ramp just as I saw the dark gray Toyota climbing that ramp toward a very lucky green light that would take it over the freeway, then back onto it, heading in the opposite direction — north.
Disappointed and not a little pissed off, I sped the long half-mile south to Sorrento Valley Road. I knew that by the time I’d reached it, my mark would mostly likely be on his happy way northbound, doing the speed limit with nearly six thousand rounds of ammunition in the back, chalking up the miles between us. And almost impossible to find.
I exited at Sorrento Valley, pulled over when I could, called an old San Diego Sheriff’s Department friend who might be willing to run the 4Runner’s plates for me. I got a firm maybe.
Then Taucher. Who, when I told her about the ammunition, hissed a string of profanities. “We can rattle Hector’s cage first thing in the morning,” she said. “Friendly little knock and talk.”
“You might rethink that,” I said.
I told her I’d put the tracker on Hector’s car, that we knew his address and work schedule, and if left unmolested, odd Hector just might lead us somewhere even better than a knife buy and an ammunition transfer. But if we let him see our shadow, he’d go down his hole. And whoever was the receiver of said ammunition — maybe even Caliphornia himself — would go down his hole, too.
Taucher liked that. Then she was gone.
I stepped outside and had a smoke. Heavy breeze from the Pacific. Moon caught in the marine layer. Watched the cars speed by below me. Interstate 5 goes all the way from Mexico to Canada, where Canada names her 5 also and lets her run into the Rocky Mountains. I drove through British Columbia once. Beautiful. You might not know that California is longer than Texas is wide. Almost got into a bar fight about that, in Fort Worth, from where Lindsey hails.