The ability to kill people with a telephone call — that’s the ulti- mate manifestation of power, isn’t it? And those ignorant charla- tans in the Caribbean are still sticking pins into dolls. If only they could comprehend how far mankind had progressed with the won- drous aid of modern technology, developed from the triumphant findings of rigorous, unbiased science. Two thousand years anno domini murder is no longer uncertain, affected by mysterious forces and mystic symbols and the position of the moon and plan- ets. We civilized moderns just let our fingers do the walking…
Camacho rinsed the dirty dish, glass and fork and placed them in the dishwasher. Somewhere here in the kitchen his wife had cigarettes hidden. They had both quit smoking six months ago, but she still liked to savor a cigarette in the afternoon over a cup of coffee while a soap blared on the television. And she thought he didn’t know. A cop is supposed to know things, lots of things, and occasionally he finds he knows too much.
The Minotaur
The pack was on the top shelf in the pantry, behind a box of instant rice. After a couple of puffs, he poured himself a finger of bourbon and added water and ice. He sat at the kitchen table and opened the sliding glass door to the backyard a few inches to ex- haust the smoke.
Beyond the back fence the houses facing the next street over were silhouetted against the glare of the streetlights. The shapes cast weird shadows in his backyard. He smoked two cigarettes before he finished the whiskey and put both butts in the garbage under the sink. In the family room he lay down on the couch and pulled the throw blanket over him.
As he tried to relax the faces and images ran through his mind in a disjointed, unconnected way: Albright, Franklin, Matilda Jack- son with her obscene third eye. Admiral Henry, Dreyfus with his pipe and files, Harold Strong blunt and profane, all the letters with their penciled block words that said nothing at all and yet whis- pered of something, something just beyond his understanding… It was a long time before Luis Camacho drifted off to sleep.
He awoke to the smell of coffee and bacon. Breakfast was strained, as usual. In a crisis of identity last fall, their sixteen-year-old son had transformed himself into a punk all in the course of one sunny Saturday at the mall. The boy sat sullenly at the table this morning with his remaining hair hanging over his forehead and obscuring his eyes. The shaved place above his left ear, clear up to where his part used to be back in those old, “normal” days, looked extraordi- narily white and obscenely naked, his father thought, rather like a swatch of an old maid’s thigh. Luis Camacho sipped coffee and studied the tense, quivering lips visible below the cascading hair.
When the boy had left the table and ascended the stairs, Luis remarked, “What is his problem?”
“He’s sixteen years old,” Sally said crossly. “He’s not popular, he’s not a good student, he’s not an athlete, and the girls don’t know he’s alive. The only thing he does have is acne.”
“Sounds like an epitaph.”
“It’s his whole life.”
Camacho was just starting on the Sunday paper when the phone rang. His wife answered. “It’s for you,” she called.
It was Dreyfus, calling from a car phone. “Luis, it’s Smoke Judy. He’s out driving this morning. Left his house in Morningside ten minutes ago- Maybe a meet.”
“Where is he now?”
“Going north on the beltway. We just passed the Capital Centre arena.”
“You guys got the van in standby?”
“Nope. It’s back at the shop.” The shop was headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “Nobody thought we’d need it today.”
“Get it. I want a record this time. Any idea where he’s going?”
“Not a glimmer.”
“I’ve got to get dressed and shaved. I’ll be in the car in fifteen minutes. Call me on the car phone then.”
“Sure.”
Sally came into the bathroom while he was shaving. “You’re in the paper today.” She showed him the story and the photo. “You didn’t tell me there was a shooting.”
“Friday night. Dreyfus shot a guy.”
“It says here the dead man had already shot at you.”
He eyed her in the mirror, then attacked his upper lip.
“Luis, you could have been killed.”
“Then Gerald could shave his bead as bare as his ass and run around in a loincloth.”
She closed her eyes and shook her hair. “Weren’t you scared?”
He hugged her. “Yeah. I seem to be spending more and more time in that condition.”
Camacho was driving south on New Hampshire Avenue past the old Naval Ordnance Lab, now the navy’s Surface Weapons Center, when the car phone buzzed. It was only 9:30 on Sunday morning, but already a good volume of traffic was flowing along the avenue. It seemed as if all the Silver Spring suburbanites had big plans for this spring day, which was partly overcast. He wondered if it would rain as he picked up the phone. “Camacho.”
“He turned off the beltway and is headed north on 1-95 toward Baltimore.”
“How many cars do you have?”
“Seven.”
“Stay loose. He’ll be looking.” A car would be in front of the suspect vehicle and another well behind, but in sight. The addi- tional cars would be at least a mile back. Every four or five minutes the car behind would pass Judy as the lead car accelerated away and got off at the next exit, where it would watch the cavalcade pass and join as the last car. The third car would assume the position immediately behind Judy. If this was done properly, Judy would never notice he was being followed. Had the agents had a helicopter or light plane this morning, none of the cars would have even been in sight of the suspect.
Camacho drove onto the beltway eastbound and went down two miles to the 1-95 exit, where he merged with a string of cars and trucks headed north. He eased the car up to five miles per hour over the speed limit and stayed in the right-hand lane.
In the two weeks that Camacho’s men had had Commmander Smoke Judy under surveillance, be had gone driving on only one occasion. That time he had gone to a mall and spent forty-five minutes in an electronics store watching college basketball on tele- vision, eaten two slices of pepperoni pizza and swizzled a medium- sized Sprite, and gawked for five minutes in a store that specialized in racy lingerie. Just another debonair bon vivant out on the town.
As he passed the Fort Meade exit rain began to fall. Dreyfus called once. The subject was still headed north. Dreyfus had had the lead car take the Route 32 exit in case Judy was on his way to Baltimore-Washington International Airport, but Judy passed it by. After a U-turn the FBI car was back on 1-95 chasing the caval- cade. Camacho hung up the telephone and listened to the wipers. Since this was his personal car, he didn’t have a radio to monitor the surveillance.
In a few minutes the rain ceased. The clouds still looked threat- ening with patches of blue here and there. The car ahead flung up a spray from the wet road that kept Camacho fiddling with his wiper control and wishing he had taken the intermittent wiper option.
Following the ribbon of interstate highways, Smoke Judy circled Baltimore and headed north toward York. Just short of the Penn- sylvania line he began to slow in the left lane. Dreyfus was in the car immediately behind and used the radio to call the trailing car, which was three miles back. When Judy swung through an emer- gency vehicle turnaround and accelerated south, the trailing car was already southbound at fifty miles per hour, waiting for Judy to catch up. Dreyfus and the drivers of the other car waited until Judy was completely out of sight before they gunned across the median throwing mud and turf and resumed the pursuit. One of the cars almost got stuck.
“He thinks he’s being cute,” Dreyfus told Camacho. who took the first exit he came to and crossed over the highway, then sat at the head of the on-ramp to wait.
“Think he’s spotted you?”
“I don’t — we’ll see. He’ll go straight home if he has.”
Smoke Judy didn’t go home. He went to the inner harbor of Baltimore and parked in an outlying lot, then walked unhurriedly past the aquarium and the head of the pier where the three-masted frigate Constellation was berthed and sat in front of the giant in- door food mall, near the water. He sat for almost twenty minutes watching
