Dead on Arrival

Hall introduced Pugh to his security detail over the phone. She told him Stan was the man in charge as Emma figured that Jubal — being the redneck that he was — wouldn’t like it if a woman was responsible for his safety. So Pugh thought that four people were protecting him, not six; DeMarco and Emma stayed out of sight.

After four days of watching Pugh, DeMarco was about to go out of his mind from boredom and he had grooves in his hands, arms, and neck from scratching at bug bites. He didn’t know what kind of bugs they were, but they were vicious little bastards. But if sitting around doing nothing and getting eaten alive by insects bothered Stan and his crew, DeMarco couldn’t see it. These guys, you could drop them into a swamp at night and they’d stand there in the water, never moving, while leeches vacuumed out their blood.

DeMarco was teamed up with Stan and Harry; they had the day-shift watch, from six in the morning to six at night. Emma was on the back-shift watch with Bob and Stew, because she figured Lincoln’s assassin was more likely to come at night. When Jubal went to work at the scrap yard, they followed him then hung around all day while Jubal ripped parts off cars. DeMarco figured working in a scrap yard had to be a pretty boring job; it was definitely a boring job to watch.

After Jubal finished work, usually about four every day, he went to his favorite bar and drank beer for three hours, then went back to his trailer and drank more beer. Stan had instructed Jubal not to change his routine in any way. Emma had told Stan to tell Jubal this. She wanted to give Lincoln’s killer every opportunity.

Emma figured that the killer would watch Pugh for a couple of days, then break into his trailer at two or three in the morning and start ripping out his fingernails. He might try to snatch Pugh and take him someplace to talk, but it seemed more likely that the killer would take him at his home. Emma and her guys spent a lot of time looking for anybody who might be watching Pugh, but didn’t see anyone, and this Emma found disconcerting. Stan and his guys were too good to miss somebody following Pugh, and she started to wonder if Oliver Lincoln had decided he didn’t need to kill him.

Emma said later if they hadn’t all been sexists, including her, they never would have blown it the way they did.

On their eighth day in Montana, DeMarco sat with Stan in a clump of weeds on a small hill watching Jubal work in the junkyard. Stan, pro that he was, kept searching the surrounding area with his binocu lars, and every hour or so he’d talk to Harry on the radio to make sure nothing was happening on the side of the junkyard that Harry was watching. DeMarco mentioned to Stan that sitting in the weeds was maybe a good way to get bitten by a snake, which earned him a what-a-wuss look from Stan.

Jubal was currently taking the mirrors off three cars that had just been towed into the junkyard. DeMarco figured side-view mirrors were probably a pretty hot commodity in the junk business, as people were always ripping off their mirrors when they didn’t pay attention going in and out of their garages. At least that’s the way DeMarco had ripped the mirror off his car three months ago.

About 11:30 A.M., they saw Jubal wipe his hands off on a rag he kept in his back pocket and walk toward the main office to eat his lunch. Ten minutes later, a Ravalli County sheriff’s car drove into the junkyard. DeMarco figured the cops probably came to places like this fairly often to check on stolen cars being stripped for parts. He picked up his binoculars and looked at the cop. She was wearing a peaked hat, sunglasses, and a brown uniform. Around her waist was a wide black belt with all the usual cop stuff on it — handcuffs, radio, nightstick, Mace, and gun. DeMarco figured a skinny man, a man with no hips, would have a hell of a time keeping the belt from falling down around his ankles with all the crap there was on the belt. But this cop, she had nice hips. A nice ass too. She didn’t seem to be having any trouble keeping the belt up.

Fifteen minutes later the cop left.

DeMarco pulled a can of Coke out of his knapsack — he was getting pretty tired of drinking warm Coke — and checked his watch. ‘Looks like Jubal’s taking a long lunch break today,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Stan said.

Yeah. DeMarco had tried talking to Stan but gave up after a couple of days. It was as if the guy was saving his voice for something; maybe he and his pals were some sort of lethal barbershop quartet.

Half an hour later, Stan said, ‘Something’s wrong here.’

‘What?’ DeMarco said. He’d just seen something that looked like a centipede, and he’d been checking the weeds to make sure there wasn’t another one around close enough to crawl up his pant leg.

‘I said, something’s wrong here,’ Stan said. ‘This guy’s never taken this long a lunch break before, and his boss, he’s always outside walkin’ around, doin’ something.’ Stan was silent a minute, then picked up his radio. ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘is everything okay on your side?’

‘Yeah, haven’t seen a thing. But why the hell is this guy still inside the office?’

‘I don’t know, but I don’t like it,’ Stan said. ‘I’m going down there.’

Emma, DeMarco, and Stan were standing in the parking lot of the motel where they were all staying. Harry was making a phone call.

‘Emma, I’m sorry,’ Stan said. ‘I just never figured, in a place like this, that she’d impersonate a cop. I never figured it would be a she. Jesus, I fucked this up. I don’t know what to say.’

‘I never thought it would be a woman either,’ Emma said. ‘She’s probably been watching him for a couple of days, and if we hadn’t had mental blinders on, we would have seen her. Son of a bitch!’

‘And, Jesus, she just shot the shit out of him,’ Stan said. ‘He sure as hell told her whatever she wanted to know.’

When Stan had entered the junkyard office, he saw the owner first, the Indian who owned the place. He had a single bullet hole in his forehead. He’d been lucky. Jubal had also been shot in the head, but before that he’d been shot half a dozen times in both knees with small caliber bullets. The killer had used a silenced weapon, probably a.22, and it looked like she’d just kept shooting Jubal in the knees until he told her everything she wanted to know.

As soon as Stan saw the bodies, he called Emma, then called 911. Calling 911 may have been a mistake because it was three hours before the cops would let Stan go. He didn’t tell the cops that he and DeMarco had been watching over Jubal or that they’d seen the killer. All Stan told the cops was that he’d come to the scrap yard to get a part for a car and that just as he’d driven into the place he’d seen a sheriff’s car leaving.

‘What do you think Jubal told her?’ DeMarco said.

Before Emma could answer DeMarco’s question, Harry walked back to the group. He’d been using a pay phone near the motel office. ‘She didn’t kill the cop. They found the patrol car, and the cop was inside the trunk, gagged, in her underwear, out cold. She’d been hit on the head, hard. Right now she can’t even remember her own name.’

‘Could you identify her?’ Emma asked Stan.

‘The killer?’ Stan said. ‘Yeah, no doubt about it. I got a good look at her.’

‘I saw her too,’ DeMarco said. ‘But in profile and she was wearing sunglasses. So-’

‘No!’ Emma said. ‘You can positively ID her. And don’t you dare say otherwise. When we catch her we’re going to say we have two eyewitnesses who saw her walk into that office in a cop’s uniform, and that nobody went in there again until Stan found the bodies.’

‘Got it,’ DeMarco said. ‘But what do you think Jubal told her?’

‘I know what he told her. He told her the picture was a fake, that Patsy Hall had the picture made by some NSA guy, and he told her the name of that waitress in Winchester. I’ve already called Hall and told her that we blew it …’

‘Oh, man,’ DeMarco said. ‘I’ll bet Patsy was pissed.’

‘… and I called someone to go pick up that waitress and hide her and her kids until we can figure out what to do next.’

‘Do you think Hall’s in danger?’ DeMarco said.

‘I don’t know,’ Emma said. ‘Maybe.’

‘So now what?’ DeMarco said.

Emma didn’t say anything. The four of them — Stan, Harry, DeMarco, and Emma — just stood there in the motel parking lot like a small group of friends trying to decide where to go for lunch. Or maybe like friends who had just eaten a very bad lunch.

‘What will Lincoln do?’ Emma said. DeMarco could tell that she was talking to herself, thinking out loud, playing a game of chess with Oliver Lincoln two thousand miles away. ‘He could kill Patsy, just to eliminate a threat.