Dead on Arrival

Danny pointed.

‘How do you know it’s not the other way?’ DeMarco asked.

‘The GPS. The other little bridge, the first one we crossed over when I was blindfolded, is behind us. It’s that way. So we go this way.’

DeMarco took off the night-vision goggles and looked around. There was no moon, maybe a dozen stars overhead that weren’t obscured by clouds, and it was so damn dark without the goggles he felt like he was standing inside a closet. He didn’t have any idea how the goggles worked, but he was damn glad they did, because if Pugh had someone standing guard, the guard wouldn’t be able to see them unless he was similarly equipped.

‘Okay,’ he said, putting the magic goggles back on. ‘Let’s go.’

They walked down the trail about seventy-five yards and the trail forked.

‘Aw, shit,’ Danny said. ‘Now what? You wanna split up or stay together?’

If Danny had been right about the time, the lab had to be within a hundred yards of the fork in the road. They had radios so if they split up and if one of them found the lab, he could let the other guy know. Nah, forget that, he thought; he didn’t want Danny doing anything by himself.

‘We’ll stay together,’ DeMarco said. ‘We’ll go that way a hundred yards or so and look around for an hour; if we don’t find it, we’ll come back here and go up the other road.’

‘You’re the boss,’ Danny said.

They walked for a couple of minutes. Then DeMarco said, ‘Okay, what are we looking for?’

‘Well, shit, Joe, I don’t know. There’s a door in the ground around here somewhere, I think, and there’s bushes or something coverin’ the door. Probably the best thing to do is just walk around and sniff. The place I was in stunk to high heaven.’

DeMarco went left and Danny went right, noses probing the air like a couple of Italian beagles. He searched for any anomaly on the ground, anything that didn’t look natural. There was nothing. He wondered if he should take off the night-vision goggles and use a flashlight, thinking it might be easier to spot something with the flashlight as opposed to the green color he was seeing through the goggles. They were at least half a mile from Pugh’s house and he didn’t think a flashlight beam would be visible from that distance. He was still thinking about using the flashlight when the walkie-talkie on his belt squawked, a burst of static that scared the crap out of him.

‘What?’ he hissed into the radio. Then he remembered and said, ‘Over.’

‘I found something. Over,’ Danny said.

DeMarco looked around. He could see Danny fifty yards away and he jogged over to him.

‘Look,’ Danny said, pointing to the ground.

Cigarette butts, a lot of them, in an area underneath a good-sized oak. Most of the butts were contained in a rough three-foot circle of ground and DeMarco guessed that the guys who worked in the lab came out here to smoke so they wouldn’t blow themselves up. They’d sit under the oak, puff their cigarettes, squash the butts out near the tree, and then go back to work. So the lab had to be fairly close, probably no more than fifty feet away, but DeMarco still couldn’t see anything with the night-vision goggles other than a fluorescent green forest.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna use a flashlight.’

‘You sure?’ Danny said.

‘No,’ DeMarco said, and took off the goggles and turned on the flashlight. He walked around searching the ground with the flashlight for five minutes but still didn’t see anything that looked like a door. Then he noticed something. The cigarette butts made a trail, a little Hansel and Gretel trail. The guys would be almost done smoking their cigarettes and they’d start back toward the lab, and on the way they’d drop their cigarette butts on the ground and grind them out with their feet. They couldn’t just flick the butts away because they might start a forest fire. So DeMarco followed the butt trail, sweeping his flashlight back and forth, and then he saw it: a little ridge of dirt about four feet long, about an inch high, and the ridge was absolutely straight. There aren’t many perfectly straight things out in the woods. He walked over and knelt down next to the little ridge and ran his hand along it.

‘Here it is,’ he said to his cousin.

They rubbed their hands along the line in the dirt, came to another intersecting line, and finally understood what they were dealing with. It was a piece of wood, four feet square. A half sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood. On top of the plywood was a shallow layer of dirt and three small shrubs. DeMarco couldn’t figure out how the plants could grow in so little soil until he touched the leaves: they were artificial plants and they were glued to the piece of wood. On two parallel sides of the plywood sheet were small rope handles that had been covered with dirt. All you had to do was pick up the piece of plywood and move it to one side.

Hall had said the meth cookers worked at night. During the day, the door to the lab would be almost invisible, just another square of forest, a small plot of dirt and shrubs. From the air it would be completely invisible. The nights when Pugh’s men manufactured the meth, they would simply remove the hatch covering the lab’s entrance; maybe they’d just leave it off to provide ventilation for the space, or maybe a couple of men would put the hatch back in place after the cookers had entered the lab and those guys would stand guard and periodically remove the cover when it was time for the cookers to take a smoke break. When they finished working for the night, they’d put the cover back in place and hide the edges with a layer of dirt. The cover was simple, easy to remove, and, most important, almost impossible to spot unless you were right on top of it. DeMarco would never have found it if it hadn’t been for the cigarette butts.

‘Let’s get this thing out of the way,’ DeMarco said.

‘What if there’s somebody inside the lab?’ Danny said.

‘Then either we would have heard them or they would have heard us, all the damn noise you’re making. Pick it up.’ Danny and DeMarco took hold of the rope handles, raised the door, and saw the steps going down into an underground bunker.

‘Hurry up,’ DeMarco said. ‘Get the pictures.’

Danny hustled down the steps. Using a digital camera, he snapped off half a dozen pictures of the equipment inside the lab, shoved the camera back into one of the leg pockets in his camo pants, and came back up the stairs.

‘Let’s boogie,’ Danny said.

‘We gotta put the cover back or they’ll know somebody’s been here. And if that happens they’ll remove all the drugs and the equipment.’

‘Right,’ Danny said.

Master fuckin’ criminal, DeMarco thought.

They put the cover back in place and brushed dirt over the edges.

‘Now let’s get out of here,’ DeMarco said.

‘You assholes hold it right there,’ a voice said. ‘You move and I’ll put deer slugs into both of you.’

Aw, Christ.

DeMarco watched as a man stepped out of the woods, a tall guy with an enormous gut and a beard. Like DeMarco and his cousin, the guy was wearing night-vision goggles — and he was holding a shotgun. There must have been some sort of alarm system protecting the lab. Maybe the plywood sheet covering the lab’s entrance had been alarmed, but DeMarco didn’t think so. He hadn’t seen any wires or contacts, and it had taken them less than five minutes to take the pictures and put the cover back in place. The man couldn’t have gotten to the lab from Pugh’s place that fast. No, more likely they’d tripped some sort of perimeter alarm, maybe motion detectors or cameras that could see in the dark. Whatever the case, this wasn’t good.

‘Now unzip them jackets real slow and hold ’em open. I wanna see if you’re strapped.’

Shit. The gun Patsy Hall had given him was on his belt, on his right hip, and the guy saw it as soon as DeMarco opened his jacket. Seeing DeMarco’s gun, the man said to Danny, ‘Where’s yours?’

‘Don’t have one,’ Danny said.

‘I pat you down and find one, bud, I’m gonna put a hurt on you.’

Danny didn’t respond.

‘Okay,’ he said to DeMarco, ‘toss the gun into the woods. Use your left hand, just your thumb and one finger. You point it at me and I’ll blow your ass away.’

DeMarco did as he was told. He pulled the gun slowly from the holster and threw it away underhanded, and when he did the fat guy’s head turned momentarily as his eyes followed the arc of the gun — and just at that moment, DeMarco saw Danny’s arm move in his peripheral vision. Pugh’s man, unfortunately, saw Danny move as well. Without any hesitation, he swung the shotgun barrel toward Danny and pulled the trigger. The shotgun blast