'Sure.'
'Oh, really?'
Jay laughed.
'You are really gonna love this part. Avis has theft-recovery devices
installed in their fleet. Somebody decides to keep a car instead of
turning it in? They can dial a number and turn on a little broadcast
unit wired into the car's battery. The unit sends a GPS signal to the
nice folks at Brink's, and they can tell you exactly where the vehicle
is.' He shifted back into the infomercial announcer's voice: 'Now how
much would you pay?'
'Son of a bitch.' Michaels looked at the computer's flat screen The
name on the license was the final selling point: The 'B.W.' stood for
'Bruce Wayne.' And everybody who read comics, watched television
cartoons, or went to action adventure movies knew that Bruce Wayne was
the secret identity of Batman, mentor and elder partner of Robin the
Boy Wonder, aka Dick Grayson.
If this wasn't the guy they wanted, it was one hell of a coincidence.
'All right. Jay, I'm impressed. What will it take to get the car
rental company to give us the tracking information?'
'Already done. Boss. You want to guess where he's going?'
'Surprise me.'
Jay laughed again.
Wednesday, June 15th Port Townsend, Washington
It was almost nine p.m. when Ventura rolled into the small tourist
village of Port Townsend. And though he had the GPS maps hi sops had
sent in with their electronic reports, he spent thirty minutes driving
around, getting a feel for the place. Situated on a fat,
semi-hook-shaped isthmus jutting into Puget Sound, the sleepy town had
once upon a time been the gateway to the U.S. Northwest via the Straits
of Juan de Fuca. Those glory days were long past, and now the tourists
came to see some of the prime examples of Victorian-style houses left
in the country. Ventura had been here in the daylight, and it looked
almost as if somebody had gone back in time, grabbed a section of San
Francisco just before the Great Earthquake of 1906, and dropped it up
here. Some of the larger and more ornate old houses were now
commercial businesses or bed-and-breakfast lodgings, but many of them
were still in use as regular housing. There was a paper mill still
working down on the waterfront as you got to town, but other than that,
not much industry.
The main drag downtown was Water Street, where most of the old
buildings were pre-turn-of-the-century.
There was a restaurant and marina at the end of the street, and a lot
of nicely kept wooden boats moored there.
Above downtown, overlooking a bluff, Lawrence Street was the parallel
uptown road. Here were stores, a theater, and other odds and ends.
From Lawrence Street, Taylor Street ran up the hill to Foster, which
was where Morrison's house was. A bit farther to the north was the old
Fort Warden Military Reservation, now a park where you could rent an
officer's or a noncom's old house and spend a few days hiking and
exploring the long-empty bunkers.
