Dead on Arrival

bumpitty-bump,bumpitty-bump.’

‘Bumpitty-bump?’ DeMarco said.

‘Yeah, like we were going over logs or one of those whaddaya-call’em — cattle guards. It happened twice, right before we stopped. Bumpitty-bump, bumpitty-bump, then a couple minutes later, bumpitty-bump, bumpitty-bump again. Then, a couple minutes after that, we stopped.’

Hall studied the map. ‘Here,’ she said, pointing. ‘This could be it. There’re two creeks running through his place, small ones, no more than two or three feet wide. If I remember right … Wait a minute.’ She went to the file cabinet again, the one from which she’d taken the map. She pulled out an accordion file folder and came back to the table. From the folder she pulled a stack of eight by ten black-and-white photographs.

‘We did one aerial surveillance of Pugh’s farm. I tried to get ’em to park a satellite over his place for a week, but they laughed me off.’ She flipped through the photos, then stopped and studied one.

‘Here. You see that? A little bridge made from logs, and here, about two hundred yards away, is another one. The two bridges are where these two creeks come close to each other and run parallel for a while. So if you’re right about the time it took you to get from the second bridge to the lab, the lab’s probably someplace within a quarter mile of the second bridge.’

‘But which one’s the second bridge?’ DeMarco asked.

‘Were you going uphill or downhill when you came to the second bridge?’ Hall asked Danny.

‘Uh … downhill,’ Danny said.

‘Then this is the second bridge,’ Hall said, stabbing a finger at the topographical map. She looked directly at Danny, her eyes bright, and said, ‘You’re going to have to go in there tonight and find that lab.’

‘Bullshit!’ Danny said.

55

DeMarco put on the night-vision goggles. The trees in the woods were clearly visible, everything a greenish color. He’d never worn night-vision goggles before — or a military camouflage suit, combat boots, and a bulletproof vest either. And he wished he wasn’t wearing any of those things right now.

Hall said she couldn’t search for the lab with them. She and her guys — a bunch of DEA cowboys who knew how to shoot and sneak through the woods — couldn’t go onto Pugh’s property without a warrant, and they didn’t have sufficient justification to get one. If Danny had been positive he’d been on Pugh’s property it would have been different, but since he’d been blindfolded and didn’t have a clue as to how far he’d traveled, it was impossible to state with certainty where the lab was. Then toss in the fact that the judge would have to accept the word of a convicted felon regarding its whereabouts, and there was no way Hall was going to get a warrant.

So DeMarco and his cousin were on their own. DeMarco didn’t want to go with Danny to search Pugh’s farm, but he didn’t trust his flake of a cousin; he couldn’t put the unveiling of a national conspiracy in the hands of a mafia fence.

Hall and another agent had driven them to the northern boundary of Pugh’s four hundred acres in a black Jeep Cherokee. To reach that spot it had been necessary to go through two pieces of property not owned by Pugh, and Hall had to cut through two barbed-wire fences on the way. Cutting the fences didn’t seem to bother her a bit, DeMarco noted.

‘You’re sure you know how to use a GPS?’ Hall asked Danny a second time.

‘Yeah, I’m positive. I got my hands on one once …’

This meant, DeMarco suspected, that one of Tony Benedetto’s crews had stolen a crate of the instruments.

‘… and I played with the thing for a couple of days,’ Danny said. ‘I know how to use it.’

‘Okay,’ Hall said, and she showed him and DeMarco the GPS unit she was holding in her hand. ‘Here’s the waypoint for where we are now, and here’s the waypoint for the second bridge. When you get to the bridge, start looking for a trail or a path.

Look for tire tracks made by ATVs, places where the grass has been beaten down. Understand?’

‘Sure,’ Danny said.

Sure, my ass, DeMarco thought. Like his cousin was Davy Crockett instead of some fuckin’ New York wiseguy who could barely find his way through Central Park.

Hall pulled a pistol in a clip-on holster out of one of the pockets of the black ski jacket she was wearing and handed it to DeMarco. ‘That’s a forty-caliber automatic. There’re eight bullets in the clip. You shoot somebody, even in the arm, it’ll put him down. Have you ever used a gun?’

‘Yeah,’ DeMarco said. And that was the truth. He’d once killed a man with a revolver. The man had shot at him and DeMarco had pulled the trigger of the gun he’d been holding out of sheer fright and amazingly hit the guy. But the total amount of time he’d spent with a pistol in his hands could be measured in minutes, and the number of times he’d fired one at another person was exactly once. He didn’t bother to tell Hall this. He did ask, ‘Is the safety on or off?’

The agent with Hall muttered, ‘Oh, great.’

Hall shot a shut-up look at the agent and said to DeMarco, ‘Give it to me.’ He handed her the weapon, and she did something to it and handed it back. ‘Now the safety’s off and there’s a bullet in the chamber. If you have to take it out of the holster, don’t shoot yourself in the leg.

‘Oh, and one other thing,’ she said. ‘There might be people working in the lab.’

‘What?’ DeMarco and his cousin said at the same time.

‘Pugh’s cookers work at night, but we don’t think they work every night.’

‘You don’t think?’ DeMarco said.

‘That’s right. Every couple of weeks Pugh buses in a bunch of people to do things around his place: clear brush, prune trees, whatever. These guys will stay on his property overnight in his barn, sometimes for a couple of nights. What we think is that five or six of the workers are really Pugh’s cookers. They sneak off to the lab in the dark and stay there for a couple of nights and brew his meth, then they leave on the bus with the real workers when they’re done. Anyway, Pugh had a bunch of guys come in a few days ago and they left the day before yesterday, so we’re pretty sure they’re not in the lab now. But be careful.’

Be careful, DeMarco thought. That was just great fuckin’ advice. But he didn’t say anything.

‘So I guess that’s it,’ Hall said. ‘We’ll wait here for you. If you haven’t found the place by dawn, come back here and we’ll try again tomorrow night. And good luck.’

‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Danny said. ‘Aren’t you gonna give me a gun too? I mean, if there’re guys in that lab-’

‘No way,’ Hall said. ‘I shouldn’t even be giving one to your cousin. The DEA’s not supposed to go around arming civilians, and I’m sure as hell not giving one to a guy that’s still under indictment for murder.’

‘But-’ Danny said.

‘No,’ Hall said, eyes like flint. ‘If you’re in danger, call on the radio and we’ll come in and get you. But I hope we don’t have to do that, because that’ll really screw up our chances of getting Pugh.’ Then she laughed and said, ‘Unless he personally kills one of you.’

Yeah, that was real funny, DeMarco thought.

They didn’t make bad time. The good thing about the woods on Pugh’s property was that there wasn’t a lot of brush or ground cover. They had to veer around thickets of trees a couple of times, but Danny, who was in the lead, brought them back on course. Maybe he really did know how to use the GPS.

It took them twenty minutes to reach the log bridge. The bridge spanned a creek that was two feet wide and had carved a shallow gully into the landscape. Leading to and away from the bridge was a trail created by vehicle tires.

‘Which way,’ DeMarco whispered.