'Or why would he go up to the top of an empty street on a cold night after dark to sit in the car and talk,' Lundquist said.
'Could be a date?' I said.
'With two women? One of whom is carrying a forty-one-caliber weapon?'
'Not impossible,' I said. 'They make a forty-one-caliber derringer, and it could have been two women who were confronting the man who'd been cheating between them.'
'Possible,' Lundquist said. 'Not likely.'
'Or he could be crooked,' I said, 'And he was meeting the bagman and it went haywire.'
'More possible,' Lundquist said.
'You know something about Rogers?' I said.
'No. But he's the head cop in a town that's noted for cocaine trafficking.'
'And Felipe Esteva runs the cocaine,' I said.
'You think so.'
'Yes.'
'Maybe I think so too,' Lundquist said. 'But neither of us has proved so yet.'
'Maybe one of us will,' I said.
'Yeah, and maybe we'll find out who killed Valdez.'
'Or maybe we won't,' I said. 'And maybe it won't be what we think it is if we do.'
'It'd be cleaner if there wasn't this sex thing. The fact that Valdez was castrated.'
'Maybe to confuse us,' I said.
'Maybe. If so it's working. Every cocaine explanation can also be a jealousy explanation,' Lundquist said. He took a last swallow of tea and stood up. Half the tea was still in his cup.
'You got this one?' he said.
'Sure,' I said. 'I'm on expenses.'
'Thanks,' Lundquist said. He hitched his holster slightly forward on his hip and went back out into the bright cold sunlight. I paid the tab and left Wally half a buck and went back to my motel.
Chapter 17
From behind a cluster of evergreens on a hill above Mechanic Street I could see Esteva's warehouse across the river. The road past it wound parallel with the river, then dipped under the Main Street bridge and out of sight. I was sitting in Susan's red thunderjet for the third day in a row looking at the warehouse. When anyone came out or a truck pulled in, I looked at it through binoculars. Which meant simply that I was learning nothing at closer range. Crates of vegetables got unloaded off big trailer trucks and slid down rollers into the warehouse. Smaller crates came out of the warehouse and were loaded onto delivery trucks.
Susan's car was not ideal for unobtrusive surveillance, being bright red and shaped like a carrot, but if Esteva or anyone else saw me they didn't seem to care. Nobody came up and told me to scram.
I had a thermos of coffee, with sugar and cream. I was sure that not drinking it black was the first step toward quitting. I also had several sandwiches (tuna on pumpernickel, turkey on whole wheat, lettuce and rnayo) that I'd made up the night before after shopping Mel's Wheaton Market where I'd found the pumpernickel in the imported food section. The sun was bright and the greenhouse effect was ample to warm the car with the motor off. I had gotten Wally to fill my thermos without having to actually lay hands on him. Another tribute to the power of a winning personality. I sipped some coffee, took a bite of a sandwich. The sound of my munching broke the silence. It was the most excitement I'd had since Tuesday. Across the river a figure came out of the warehouse and walked toward one of the trucks parked against the chain link fence in back of the yard. He was carrying an overnight bag. I put my coffee cup down on the plastic top of the transmission hump, balanced the sandwich on the top of the dashboard, and picked the binoculars up off the passenger seat.
The person with the overnight bag was Brett Rogers.
It was the first time I'd seen him at the warehouse since I'd been sitting up there looking at it. He opened the door of a big tractor rig, tossed the overnight bag in, climbed in after it, and in a moment I saw a puff of smoke from the exhaust pipe that stuck up above the cab.
Why the overnight bag?
The trailerless tractor pulled slowly out of the yard and turned right along the river. I started up the car and put it in gear and headed down across the Main Street bridge, cloverleafed under the bridge onto Mechanic Street, and drifted along behind the kid. I didn't have much expectation but following him was something to do. Three days of sitting had produced nothing. If I followed Brett Rogers around for a while and that produced nothing, what had I lost.
We headed south a ways, along the river, and picked up the Mass. Pike at the Wheaton toll station. We went east on the Mass. Pike. On the Pike it was easy to stay back a ways and still keep an eye on the big tractor ahead of me. Lots of cars went the whole distance on the Pike, so it wasn't worrisome to see the same car behind you periodically. It's a pleasant ride on the Pike, the hills west of Worcester roll easily, and the gleaming winter sun made everything look pristine. There was little to see but the forest, and every time I drove the Pike I thought of William Pynchon and that gang heading west through these hills to settle Springfield.
East of Worcester we turned off and headed north on Route 495. Route 495 had been built circling Boston on about a forty-mile radius in the hopes it would be like Route 128, which circled Boston on about a ten-mile radius and had turned into the yellow brick road. There weren't as many hi-tech establishments along Route 495 yet, but no one had given up hope and opportunities for land development were advertised on community-sponsored billboards all along the highway. There were some plants going up, but you could still see cows along 495.
