“Let me finish. The other cousin owns a grocery store in East Dunham. I checked it out and it looked all on the up and up until I saw them loading explosives in the back room.”
“You saw that?”
“Well, Al used to be a bomb-sniffing dog and he-”
“You’re fucking kidding me-right?”
Rudy rolled his eyes and let out a huge exhalation. He wiped his hand through his sparse hair and spun around, pacing back and forth across the hall.
“Not only that, Rude.” Now, I was pleading with him. “The guy who beat Eli and Mikey and the other guys in the park is the guy who beat me and Al up in the Blue. He also is tied up with the women in the porn site,” I said.
“You’re losing me.”
“Remember you told me how much Gabbibb was making from the all the surgeries and cancer treatments?”
“Yeah, so? He’s a doctor.”
“I bet anything he’s behind the beatings. He’s paying someone to bring him business, and he knows if he does it to the guys in the park, no one is going to make a lot of noise about it,” I said.
“So why a dirty bomb and why such a high-tech scheme for a bullshit little city like Crawford?”
“Rudy, what is Crawford known for? What’s our city’s trademark?”
Rudy rubbed his chin. “You think because of the wind they chose Crawford to set off a dirty bomb?”
“We’re under an hour from the city,” I said.
Rudy looked right into my eyes and shook his head.
“You better be right, Duff. This ain’t no bullshit irritable bowel syndrome disability diagnosis. If we’re wrong, we’re dead.”
“If we’re right, a lot of people are going to be dead.”
It was Friday afternoon, which meant I had twenty-four hours, give or take a few hours, to find the location of the webcast. I also had to pray that the FBI or somebody would find Gabbibb even faster. I called Rudy at the hospital. He told me that Gabbibb didn’t come in today, that he didn’t have any scheduled time off and no one knew where he was. That was scary, but I thought it over and I decided that I had to go after Shony and let the government work on Gabbibb.
I started with dropping the video camera off with Jerry. I asked him to see if he could enlarge or enhance the picture to make the people and the license plate more discernible. Jerry told me that he could enlarge the digital image, but because of some sort of issue with something called “pixels,” the resolution would be poor as the images were enlarged. He also said there was a chance he could work around that, but that it would take a little time.
I thanked Jerry and as I was heading out, I asked him if he had a cell phone I could borrow. He went into a closet and came out with a small box that had a half dozen or so.
“Take your pick,” Jerry said.
“What are you doing with these?” I asked.
“Somebody I did some work for didn’t have any money, so he paid me with these. It was a nice thought, but I don’t have much use for them.”
“Thanks, Jer, I appreciate it.”
Now it was time to get to work.
The one thing I knew was that Stephanie was connected with the Eagle Heights clinic and Tyrone and Baldy chauffeured her there for her first visit. I had nowhere else to start, so I decided to see what more I could find out. I called Katy and I knew there was a good chance I was about to go to the well one too many times, but I didn’t have any other wells to pursue. I gave her a call at the clinic.
“Katy speaking.”
“Katy, it’s Duff.”
“Whatever it is, the answer is ‘no,’” she said. “I’m hanging up.”
“Wait. This is important.”
“Important?” she said. “Does it have to do with your Internet porn obsession? Here I was, giving you all sorts of information and God knows what you were doing with it.”
“I was looking at porn on the Internet because I think one of my clients was involved in something ugly-that’s what I was doing,” I said.
“I’m sure. I don’t think it’s going to matter much. From what I hear, you’re getting fired as soon as you get back to work.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Rhonda was on the phone with Claudia. I heard them talking about posting your job within a week.”
“Great-it doesn’t matter anyway. Look, can you tell me when Stephanie is due back in?”
“Why should I tell you anything? You sound like you got some issues and I don’t think I trust you.”
“Katy, listen to me. The last time we spoke, you wound up giving me info that you knew was against the rules. You didn’t want to, but something inside told you it was more right than wrong. You’re a good person, don’t become one of these asshole social workers. Your instincts had you go out on limb for me because you believed something about me was right. Listen to your instincts,” I said.
The phone went quiet.
“Stephanie is going with a bunch of the women to look at the new halfway house. Rhonda wants her to be part of the first group of eight that gets admitted there. They’re leaving in half an hour,” Katy said.
She hung up before I could thank her.
I didn’t have time to tail them to the halfway house. It would be tough to hang around the halfway house and not be seen, and I just couldn’t pull up in front of the place and say hi to everyone there. I put on my sweats, my knit cap, and decided to do some roadwork.
I wasted no time getting there. I parked the Eldorado about a mile and a half away in the parking lot of the only Kingsville grocery store. I told Al I’d be back and I started to run. At about an eight-minute-per-mile pace, I came up on the halfway house in a matter of minutes. Thank God, the van with the clinic lettering was still there.
I put my hooded sweatshirt up and turned up the block before the house. I swung back down the street that led right to the clinic. Rhonda was leading a group of women toward the parking lot back to the van. Stephanie was in the middle of the pack with a group of rough-looking young women, most of whom were dressed in cheap, tight, acid-washed jeans. Most of them had that big eighties hair look that seems to be so popular with uneducated women who spend a lot of time on the street.
I pulled up my run about a half a block away and pretended to stretch as if I were cooling down. I turned my back to the group and bent over to stretch my back before I turned back around. That’s when I saw the white pickup truck parked on the other side of the van. When I had come down the street, the angle I was looking from made it impossible to see the truck. Wandering across the street, doing my stretching gave me a different point of view.
Stephanie was talking to Tyrone, who was on the passenger side of the truck, and though I couldn’t say for sure, I would bet that Baldy was behind the wheel. The women were getting in the van and Rhonda came over to the pickup truck to get Stephanie, who was lagging behind. It looked like Rhonda said something quick to Tyrone before Stephanie finally got in.
The van took a right out of the parking lot and then the pickup took a left, which surprised me. I decided to run after the pickup as long as I could without being too obvious. They continued down Route 44 and didn’t turn for as long as I watched them. That was the opposite direction from the clinic.
I ran back to the grocery store and started the Eldorado. Al was nervously shifting his weight from one foot to another in what appeared to be the basset equivalent of pacing. He was glad to see me and gave me an enthusiastic lick to let me know. I headed to the clinic, which was about a fifteen-minute drive from the halfway house. Even with the head start it wasn’t going to be hard to catch up with an Econoline van. I pulled up on Ninth Street and waited for the van to show up. I got there just minutes before they did.
The women slowly got out of the van and headed back into the clinic, presumably to sign out and get their purses. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I hung out to watch them all leave. In a matter of minutes, the women
