"You tried paying for the info?" Buddy asked, letting a snide smile inadvertently fuck up a pretty good suggestion.
"Yeah, sure, that was gonna be my next move. The Shreveport P. D. gives me thousands in hustle money t'drop on these douche bags. I just ain't gotten around to it yet." Sarcasm was dripping like humidity on a flower shop window.
"My son died in the Oklahoma panhandle," Buddy persisted. "That's way out of your jurisdiction, so it's nothing you have to worry about, but I need closure here." Buddy reached into his pocket, pulled out a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, and started peeling them off. When he reached ten, he dropped them in a pile on the desk next to Rayce's badge.
"What's that for?" Bobo Turan asked, cocking an eyebrow dangerously.
"That's for the widows and orphans of dead Shreveport police officers, or the Police Betterment Society, or it's for your new backyard patio barbecue. You choose. But me an' Rayce would very much like to spend a few minutes with the guys you have downstairs."
Bobo looked at them and shook his head sadly. "You Hollywood people think you own the whole fuckin' world, don't ya?" When Buddy started to retrieve the money Bobo looked at him sharply. "Leave it be. You got five minutes," he said, snapping up the cash faster than a frog hitting a swamp fly.
Buddy thought the room full of hobos smelled worse than a sock hamper. Rayce, who had actually spent five years as a cop in New Mexico, isolated the group, quickly cutting it down to four people. He saved the sniveling Pullman Kid for last.
When Buddy started passing out hundreds, they found out that two members of Fannon Kincaid's Christian Choir had been at Black Bed Jungle around ten that same morning. One of the hobos in the room mentioned that a skinny tattooed man named Robert Vail had said that the Choir was heading to Harrisburg.
"Why Harrisburg?" Rayce asked the hobo with tattered clothes, brown teeth, and a slight stutter.
"Da-don't know, fu-fucker wouldn't say. Ju-just said, 'Harrisbu-burg.' "
The Pullman Kid was useless. He sat in front of Rayce and Buddy, sniveling. "I wanna go home," was all he said, over and over, until Buddy wanted to hit him.
"Let's get outta here," he ordered Rayce, and they walked out of the holding area. Bobo Turan was waiting in the lobby.
"You solve my 'who cares' murder?" the fat detective asked, grinning.
"Nope," Buddy said.
"Them fuckers down there don't have much movin' around in the way of brain matter."
"Sounds like the Writers Guild," Buddy sighed, then he and Rayce moved past the detective, out of the police building, and into the sunlight.
They crossed the sidewalk to the blue-and-white thirty-seven-foot motor home. Billy Seal had kept the motor running and the air-conditioning on. They entered the cold RV and Buddy slipped into the command chair behind the driver's seat. "Harrisburg," he ordered.
The motor home moved away from the curb, went down the road, turned left, and took the state highway north. There was still no one standing behind Buddy whispering in his ear, reminding him he was mortal.
Chapter 41
It arrived at Fort Detrick at one A. M., taking a military rail that ran onto the base from the switching yard at Frederick, Maryland. The train had no markings, was painted pure white, and was only four cars long. The engine was a sleek EMD-F59PHI with slanted windows and a short hood. It had an isolated "Whisper" cab and a rooftop hump, which disguised an air scoop that routed the diesel fumes high up and over the trailing cars. The special cab was designed to have extra-wide visibility. Since the train was just four cars, the three-thousand-horsepower engine was fast, but light, rated and geared for 110 mph. The White Train also had an aggressive blended brake system with a high deceleration rate. Behind the engine was a pure white cylindrical, covered metal hopper car. It was specifically designed for toxic waste disposal, with both an inner and outer shell made of hard titanium and a special space-age superheated ceramic. It usually carried hazardous waste from either nuclear breeder reactors or military storage facilities disposing of inoperative warheads. The next car, also white, was a Pullman, with living compartments for ten Marines, who rode the roof of the cars in four-man shifts. They were armed with automatic rifles to protect the train from attack or theft because of the weapons-grade nuclear material that was often aboard. Behind the troop car was another white hopper car, identical to the first.
The White Train pulled to a stop on the isolated rail spur in a restricted area near Company A, First SATCOM Battalion Headquarters. The area was jeep-patrolled by units of the Torn Victor Special Forces group. As soon as the train stopped, two black Bell Jet Rangers with fifty-caliber nose cannons landed. One set down on a patch of ground in front of the engine, one behind the last car. The helicopter gunships were assigned to fly air cover over the train, wherever it went.
Colonel Chittick stood in the field and looked at the impressive arrival of the White Train. There was only one such unit operating in the United States. It was booked by appointment through the Pentagon; its missions included frequent runs carrying nuclear waste from Three Mile Island, through the Appalachian Mountain Pass, across the South to Texas, where its radioactive load was pumped from the covered caskets inside the hopper cars into a titanium pipe that went thousands of feet down into the hot inner crust of the earth. There it was swept away by the burning, molten inferno of inner-earth gases into the planet's core.
As the engine shut down, its diesel growled like an unfed beast. Colonel Chittick hoped that in a matter of hours, they would have all of the sarin and anthrax that had been developed and stored at Fort Detrick over the last twenty years pumped aboard the hopper cars and that the train would be safely out of there.
The troop car door suddenly opened, startling Colonel Chittick. Then a uniformed scientist from the C. D. C. branch at Walter Reed Hospital got off. He was in an Army Major's uniform, complete with medical insignias.
"Major Flynn?" Colonel Chittick asked, reaching out to shake his hand.
"Yes. Colonel Chittick?" the man replied. Flynn did not have a trace of military bearing; he was a narrow-shouldered, balding man with glasses. He wore no combat designations or ribbons. He looked to Colonel Chittick to be in his mid-fifties.
Chittick nodded as they shook hands. The two of them had spoken twice on the phone.
Now, several Marines got out of the troop car and looked around. They were all dressed in camouflage uniforms and high-laced combat boots with their pants bloused and tucked neatly inside; all were wearing white helmets with the HAZMAT seal on the back.
"Come on," Chittick said. "We can take my car to the containment area." As the two Bell Jet Rangers finished winding down, the whine from their engines was finally replaced by the sound of cold night wind blowing across open fields of tall grass. Chittick led the Major over to a sedan command car, parked on a concrete apron with its headlights on. They got into the car, Colonel Chittick behind the wheel. He had released his driver for security reasons. As he pulled off the apron onto the narrow lane, he looked back over his shoulder… The White Train was parked in the middle of the empty field lit by moonlight, looking like some ghostly apparition with the two black dragonfly helicopter gunships next to it.
"Pretty fucking impressive," Chittick said.
"We transport some very nasty stuff," Major Adrian Flynn said, in his quiet, unobtrusive, scientific voice.