When he surveyed the trash field, Nick found that he remained alone. How such a thing could be possible, he did not know, but the voices must have spoken out of the compacted refuse beneath him, rising through crevices from… From where?
“
The lost and beseeching tone suggested intractable misery, and resonated with Nick’s own repressed despair.
“Who are you?” he asked.
He received no reply.
“
A tremor passed through the trash field. Brief. Subtle. The surface did not swell and roll as before.
Nick sensed the mysterious presence withdrawing.
Rising to his feet, he said, “What do you want?”
The searing sun. The still air. The stink.
Nick Frigg stood alone, the slough of trash once more firm beneath his feet.
Chapter 17
At a bush with huge pink-yellow-white roses, Aubrey Picou snipped a bloom for Carson, and stripped the thorns from the stem.
“This variety is called French Perfume. Its exceptional mix of colors makes it the most feminine rose in my garden.”
Michael was amused to see Carson handle the flower so awkwardly even though it had no thorns. She was not a frills-and-roses kind of girl. She was a blue-jeans-and-guns kind of girl.
In spite of his innocent face and floppy straw hat, the master of this garden seemed as out of place among the roses as did Carson.
During decades of criminal activity, Aubrey Picou never killed a man, never wounded one. He never robbed or raped, or extorted anyone. He had merely made it possible for other criminals to do those things more easily and efficiently.
His document shop had produced forged papers of the highest quality: passports, birth certificates, driver’s licenses… He’d sold thousands of black-market guns.
When individuals with a talent for strategy and tactics came to Aubrey with plans for an armored-car heist or with a scheme to knock over a diamond wholesaler, he provided the risk capital to prepare and execute the operation.
His father, Maurice, had been an attorney who specialized in massaging juries into awarding outrageous financial compensation to questionable clients in dubious personal-injury cases. Some in his profession admiringly called him Maurice the Milkman because of his ability to squeeze buckets of profits out of juries as dumb as cows.
The Milkman had put his son through Harvard Law with the fond hope that Aubrey would embrace the — at that time — new field of class-action litigation, using bad science and good courtroom theater to terrorize major corporations and to drive them nearly to bankruptcy with billion-dollar settlements.
To Maurice’s disappointment, Aubrey had found the law tedious, even when practiced with contempt, and had decided that he could do as much damage to society from outside the legal system as he could from within it. Though father and son had for a while been estranged, eventually Maurice had been proud of his boy.
The Milkman’s son had been indicted only twice. Both times he had escaped conviction. In each case, after the foreman delivered the innocent verdict, the juries stood and applauded Aubrey.
To forestall a pending third indictment, he had secretly turned state’s evidence. After ratting out scores of thugs without their knowledge, he retired at seventy-five, his reputation intact among the criminal class and its admirers.
“I don’t do guns anymore,” Aubrey said. “Not the big, loud, door-busting kind or any others.”
“We know you’re retired—”
“For true,” Aubrey assured her.
“—but you still have friends in all the wrong places.”
“This rose is called Black Velvet,” said Aubrey. “The red is so dark, it looks black in places.”
“We’re not setting you up,” Carson said. “No prosecutor will waste thousands of hours to nail a harmless octogenarian gardener.”
Michael said, “Besides, you’d fake Alzheimer’s and have the jury in tears.”
“French Perfume doesn’t belong in a bouquet with this,” Aubrey told Carson, “but Black Velvet strikes me as more of a rose for you.”
“What we need are two Desert Eagle pistols, 50 Magnum.”
Impressed, Michael said to Carson, “Is that what we need?”
“I said
Aubrey gave a Black Velvet rose to Carson, who accepted it reluctantly. She held one flower in each hand, looking nonplussed.
“Why don’t you requisition through the PD?” Aubrey asked.
“ ‘Cause we’re going to kill a man who would walk out of a courtroom, free and laughing, if we put him on trial,” she lied.
In the shade of his hat, Aubrey’s eyes glittered with interest.
“We aren’t wired,” Carson assured him. “You can pat us down.”
“I’d like to pat you down, all right, darlin’,” said Aubrey, “but not for a wire. This isn’t how you’d talk if you were wearing one.”
“For the Eagles, I’ll want one hundred rounds of.50AE’s, 325 weight,” Carson said, “jacketed hollow points.”
“Formidable. You’re talking maybe fourteen-hundred-feet-per-second muzzle velocity,” Aubrey said.
“We want these guys very dead. We’ll also need two shotguns. We want to use slugs, not buckshot.”
“Slugs, not buckshot,” Michael agreed, nodding, as if they were entirely simpatico about this, as if he weren’t scared half numb.
“Big stopping power,” Aubrey said approvingly.
“Big,” Michael agreed.
“Semi-auto so we can fire a second round singlehanded,” Carson continued. “Maybe an Urban Sniper. What’s the barrel length on that?”
“Eighteen inches,” Aubrey said.
“We’d want it cut down to fourteen. But we need these fast, so there’s no time to wait for customizing.”
“How fast?”
“Today. Soon. As soon as now. Urban Sniper, SGT, Remington — we’ll have to take any credible shotgun that’s already been modified to meet those specifications.”
“You’ll want a three-way sling for each,” Aubrey said, “so you can shoulder-carry and hip-fire.”
“So who do we go to?” Carson asked, still holding a rose in each hand as if she were protesting to end all war.
Unconsciously working the rose snips—
“He’s well protected,” she said. “We’re going to have to wade through some people to nail him. But they’re all dirtbags, too.”
Not convinced, Aubrey Picou said, “Cops go bad all the time. Given the lack of support they get and all the flack they take, who can blame them? But not you two. You two don’t go bad.”
“You remember what happened to my dad?” Carson asked.
