“We confront him, Lou. You and I. We stand outside that door, our weapons put away, and we talk to him. We reinforce that he doesn’t want the boy hurt and that he doesn’t want to contend with an army of trigger-happy cops. We make, and we keep, a promise to bring him in quietly. He’s not a headline hunter, Lou, not this one. This is a family matter-between him and his father, him and his mother. We can resolve this right here, you and I.”
“And if you’re wrong, the place we’re standing will look like ground zero by tomorrow morning.”
“I’m not wrong,” she stated bluntly. “Work with me here, Lou. There’s a right way and a wrong way to a Jonny Garman. You know that’s right; you know I know what I’m talking about. You bring the circus, and he’ll join it. You bring a show, and he’ll outdo your show. We offer him a way out, and he’ll take it.”
Boldt shook his head no. She wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him. He looked exhausted. She convinced herself he wasn’t thinking clearly. He said, “We wait him out. It’s the long route to discovery, admittedly, but it’s the safe way. We may wait only to find out that it’s not Garman, but we will not corner him in a place where he may be storing that kind of firepower.”
She was ready to interrupt, vehemently, but she held her tongue, sensing his own difficulties. Perhaps he wanted to do exactly what she had just described. Perhaps it was better to allow him to talk his way through it and reach the same conclusion.
“If he comes out on his bicycle, without a backpack, say, we pick him. If he comes out with the boy, we watch but we don’t pick. If his father’s truck is in the storage area-and I’m betting it is-we’ve got big problems, because he’s going to leave here sometime before tomorrow morning, ready to do a little window washing and set up the Santori house, believing it to be Martinelli’s. Once he’s in that truck, he’s too dangerous-”
“You see,” she objected, “we should do it now.” She heard him explaining their situation and knew he was right, but the objection came out anyway.
“No, the point is
It was no place to argue, standing in shadow less than a hundred yards from the assumed location of their suspect. Nonetheless, she heard herself say, “You won’t get him away from that truck.”
“No,” Boldt agreed-too quickly, she thought, sensing she had been tricked. “That’s
Her loyalty to Lou Boldt, her love for him, was far too great. She would not willfully corrupt the investigation. She nodded, though with great disappointment written on her face.
“Promise me, Daffy. Nothing stupid.”
“We’ll wait,” she agreed reluctantly. “But you won’t get him out of that truck. We’d be smarter to do this now.” Her eyes pleaded with him.
But Boldt walked off into the darkness.
By the time the inspiration came to her, she had settled down onto the blacktop, knees into her chest, hidden in shadow. Boldt walked right past her, and she could feel him thinking that she had gone ahead without him.
“Right here,” she whispered.
He pulled her up by the hand and led her around to the far side of the office, where they could talk a little more normally.
“Bike is still there,” he announced gravely. “We have two north,” he said, pointing, “and one south-five of us on the ground. I put Richardson up high,” he said, indicating the interstate, a good distance away, “with a set of glasses. He’s got a clean line of sight on the storage unit. He’ll page me if there’s any activity.”
“He’s there for the night,” she speculated.
“Yes,” Boldt agreed. “Until morning.” He wanted to encourage her. “The car wash, the baiting worked. You saved a life last night.”
“And put another at risk,” she said, meaning Ben.
“If we shoot out a tire,” he said, speculating, “or somehow cause a flat, he’d be forced out of the truck. But if we blow it, or if the truck goes off the road or into traffic, we could cause a disaster. If he picks up on what we’re up to, who knows what he might do? Surrender? I don’t see that.”
“Not once he’s out there,” she said, indicating beyond the fence. “The time to do this is now, Lou.” She wanted one last try at him, for she believed herself right; if coaxed properly, Garman would give it up. “The wild card is his father,” she explained. “We bring Steven Garman down here and him in front of that storage unit. The son is doing this to prove something to his father. They
“The father is an arrested felon,” Boldt reminded her. “And no one but the bomb squad is going anywhere near that storage unit until Jonny Garman is a mile away from here. This isn’t productive,” he said. “We’re supposed to be focusing on how the hell to get him out of that truck.”
She felt a confusion of emotions-knowing she had the answer and knowing Boldt, for whatever reasons, felt obligated to lessen the risk for all involved. She couldn’t blame him; she wanted to do the same thing.
“We need to focus on Garman and that truck, Daffy. You asked what I would do if it were Miles. What I know is, if Miles came out of that storage area inside a truck containing that kind of volatile fuel, I would want Jonny Garman as far away from the truck as possible.”
In the silence a corporate jet came in low and loud overhead. It felt to her as if the ground actually shook. She thought again about raiding the storage unit, how they could use the cover of a jet landing to make their move. But then she considered the idea of Ben caught in an inferno of purple flame rising thousands of feet in the air. If it was her plan, and it failed, could she ever find her way out? In that same instant, she wondered how Boldt could live with the pressure of such decisions. She had an immediate out: She could leave it up to him.
“I know how to get him out of the truck,” she announced proudly, surrendering to his plan, prepared to share her moment of inspiration with him.
His face filled both with excitement and doubt. He too had given it much thought but had come up blank.
She answered his expression with a single word. “Fire,” she said. Then, explaining quickly, “The one thing irresistible to Jonny Garman is a fire.”
72
In the hours between 2 A.M. and 5 A.M., sixty-seven on-call patrol officers from seven policing districts, and twenty-four regular-duty firemen, along with four Marshal Fives, organized into an instant task force whose sole mission was to burn an abandoned machine shop to the ground and divert morning traffic south of the International District so that it was required to pass within a city block of the fire. This involved a staged vehicular accident, a road construction crew, and six dozen pink Day-Glo traffic cones.
The building was one of seventeen on various lists for demolition, some of which had been offered to the city-in lieu of tax breaks-for fire training.
For Lieutenant Phil Shoswitz, it was a bout of heartburn and temper tantrums. From the moment Boldt proposed the operation, the lieutenant objected, claiming Boldt had yet to confirm the identity of the individual inside the storage unit. This hurdle was overcome at 2:20 A.M. when Boldt, under advisement of the facility’s manager, entered the U-Stor-It offices, disabled the security device, and confirmed not only that Jonny Babcock-aka Garman-was a paying customer but that he rented unit 311, the very same unit from which the light had come and the voice had been heard. That same unit, 311, went dark at 1:15 A.M., but the door never opened and no one ever left the property. At that point in time, seven different sets of eyes and a video camera using infrared night-sight
