“Carrying anything else?”
“In my bag,” I said.
“Works for me,” he said, guiding the limo over the bridge to Portland.
An hour past sunup, we went back the way we’d come. It only took us a few minutes to get across the bridge and back into Vancouver. Byron had a street map. It was easy to locate the address. But as soon as I saw the block, I knew I’d used up my luck for the day. The address was for one of those commercial mailbox joints. The “suite” number I’d taken from the labels was just a rental box.
“Fuck!” I said, softly.
“Let me scope out the place,” Byron said. He didn’t wait for my response.
I watched him cross the street and open the door to the mailbox place. Then I shifted position so I could scan the area, and settled down to wait.
It wasn’t long. “It’s a real small operation,” he said, getting back behind the wheel. “Maybe four hundred boxes, all against the left-hand wall as you walk in. No windows in the boxes. Everyone has their own key. I figure the way they make their money is taking FedEx, UPS, stuff like that. Tack a couple of bucks onto the regular price, save the customer a lot of running around.”
“No way to lurk, right?”
“No way at all. I asked the woman behind the counter about prices and stuff, like I wanted to rent a box. There was only one guy in there, getting his mail. It’s empty—no chairs, just a flat table like they have in the post office. You don’t have business in there, they’d spot you in a second.”
“Damn.”
Byron didn’t need a translator. “You want to try some cash?” he asked.
“No. It’d be like putting all your money on a real long shot. If whoever we try to juice dimes us, the targets might spook and run.”
“You got pictures?”
“No. Just names.”
“Hmmm … We need something like the bang-dye the banks put in money bags when they’re being robbed.”
I didn’t say anything, accepting that Byron had dealt himself in, letting my mind drift over the problem. A dozen different people went in and out in the next fifteen minutes. A lot of traffic, but no surprise. The Post Office will rent you a box, but they won’t sign for FedEx, and you can’t give them a call and ask if a certain letter came in for you. A lot of small businesses use these places as their regular address.
“Let’s go,” I finally told him. “This limo might be just the thing at a nightclub, but it sticks out here big- time.”
“Okay. What’s our next move?”
“I think I’ve got a way to put that bang-dye in their bag.”
“You know someone who speaks Russian, Mama?”
“Sure. Plenty people speak.”
“You know somebody out here?”
“West Coast?”
“Yeah. Portland area would be best.”
“Find out, okay? I call tomorrow, same time, okay?”
“Okay.”
I stayed in the hotel all day, curtains drawn over the windows,
“Privacy Please” sign on the door. Trying to think it through. Byron said he had someone he wanted to hook up with, gave me his pager number, and told me to beep him if anything jumped off.
Options. The Post Office used to have a form for tracing people who left a forwarding order with them. A stalker used this public service to find a woman once. And killed her. The Post Office doesn’t use that form anymore, except for businesses. Besides, those forwarding orders expire after a year or so. No good.
I could send them an oversized envelope and tag it in some way—a giant red sticker would do the job—and then try and spot it in the hand of someone leaving the drop. But it was February. People wore coats. And carried bags. No good.
I could probably get a photo of the Russians—INS would have them on file. Or maybe Clancy could sweet-talk a snapshot out of Marushka. But that could dead-end easily enough. They could be paying someone to fetch the mail for them. Or even be using the mail drop as a way station, forwarding it from there to somewhere else.
I had to go with the bang-dye idea. And play it for a delayed explosion.
The phone rang at ten that night.
“What?” I answered.
“You have car?” Mama asked. I could tell she was talking on a cellular, guessing the outgoing lines on the bank of pay phones in the back of the restaurant were tapped. Everyone in my family is a player in different things, but one thing we all play is safe.
“I can get one.”
“Okay. You go tomorrow. Wear ring.”
The directions she gave me weren’t that specific, but all I really needed was the town. And the name of the
