Читать книгу Revenge of The Dog Team - William W. Johnstone - Страница 6

Too many cooks spoil the broth, or so the old saying goes.

And too many hunters?

That was the question for Steve Ireland. He had time to think it over, plenty of time, because he was on a hunt and the one thing a hunt requires is patience. Hunting is mostly a waiting game, waiting for the time and the place and the prey to align in the optimum combination for a sure kill.

Steve’s hunting ground wasn’t a wilderness far removed from civilization, not this time, although in the past he’d tracked his prey in jungles, forests, mountains, and deserts. Tonight, though, he was doing his hunting in a big city; in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.

He was a manhunter but no lawman; at least, no lawman officially recognized by any civilian judicial authority in the land. He wasn’t the type who brings ’em back alive either.

Steve Ireland, a few months short of thirty, was six feet, two inches tall, rangy, long-limbed. Lean to the point of gauntness, he was hollow-cheeked with sharp, jutting cheekbones. His hair was dark and needed a trim. His face was stiff, strangely immobile, all but the eyes. Deep-set eyes were alert and darkly glittering in that clean-shaven, frozen face.

He wore a lightweight utility vest, baggy T-shirt, wide-legged pants, and sneakers. His clothes were dark-colored but not black; they looked more dingy than sinister. Tucked into his waistband over his left hip was a 9mm Beretta semiautomatic pistol worn butt-forward, for a cross-belly draw. He liked it that way for a city kill.

The untucked T-shirt was worn over the piece, an impediment to speedy access but necessary for concealment. The utility vest also cloaked the weapon. Some spare clips were tucked into the pockets; at the back of the neck, a custom-made sheath held a long, slim, stilettolike throwing knife that ran down vertically between his shoulder blades. He was a dead shot who happened to also have a real facility with knives.

Whether the prey be man or beast, hunting is hunting. The rules are the same. The predator goes where the game is.

Steve stood in an alley between two brick buildings, across the street from the main entrance of a topless bar. It was after midnight on a midweek June night.

Washington, D.C., is a place of many parts. When the average citizen thinks about the capital, the first impression that usually comes to mind is a vista of stately white monuments, broad thoroughfares, and massive government office buildings. The bar wasn’t located in that part of town.

Washington is also the site of a sprawling inner city, an urban ghetto of teeming tenements, dire poverty, and rampant crime, including one of the nation’s highest murder rates. The bar wasn’t in that part of town either.

It was in a fringe area near the river but not in sight of it, a seedy, rundown marginal industrial zone on the edge of the warehouse district. There were a lot of gas stations, auto parts stores, some machine shops, a couple of trucking company lots, a tire regrooving place, and the like.

Doors were made of solid metal, windows were netted by protective antitheft grilles, walls and chain-link fences were topped with strands of razor-barbed concertina wire. After dark, the legitimate establishments were locked up tight, alarm systems switched on, and their personnel made fast tracks for points elsewhere.

A lack of residential properties and a broad-minded local zoning board had encouraged the rise of a number of leisure-time entertainment venues generally not welcomed in more finicky neighborhoods: a head-banging heavy metal music club, an adult emporium peddling triple-X-rated magazines and DVDs, some gin mills, and a couple of strip joints.

One of the latter was being dogged by Steve Ireland. No mere hole-in-the-wall dive, it aspired to a certain kind of gritty grandiosity. A one-story, shoebox-shaped structure with a flat roof, it and its adjacent parking lot occupied most of a city block. One of its narrow ends fronted a four-lane boulevard; that’s where the main entrance was located. Above it, a red neon sign bannered its name: The Booby Hatch.

Unlike most of the other buildings in the area, the club’s parking lot was not fenced in. It didn’t need to be. The management was wired into the territory’s organized crime syndicate and paid for protection. Muggers, thieves, vandals, and other malefactors knew better than to ply their trade here. Crooks being what they are, though, every now and then one would be too dumb or greedy or strung out to obey the prohibition; swift retribution was sure to follow, and another corpse would be found in a vacant lot, to be labeled by police and press as a “gang killing” and just as swiftly forgotten by officialdom, if not by the lawbreaking elements at whom the object lesson was directed.

A parking lot attendant stood on watch during operating hours, mostly to make sure that no hooker tricks or drug deals were consummated on the grounds. The syndicate had an in with the cops, but there was no percentage in allowing the kind of action that gives the vice squad and liquor-licensing authorities a pretext to hike the going payoff rate.

Some hustlers were allowed in the club, as long as they were reasonably discreet and presentable and took their johns off premises to do their business. That okay came with an obligation to kick back a certain percentage of their fees to the management. They were a draw, too, bringing in male clientele and getting them to spend plenty on overpriced, watered-down drinks. Club dancers weren’t allowed to date customers as a matter of policy, to keep management from catching heat from the vice boys. Although back rooms were maintained for select dancers to intimately entertain special friends and associates of the owners.

The street outside was well traveled day and night, mostly by cars and trucks in a hurry to get somewhere else. Police cars cruised back and forth at regular intervals, pausing to roust street hookers and pick up falling-down drunks and cart them off to the city jail.

When prowl cars came rolling along, Steve Ireland faded a few paces back from the alley mouth where he was keeping vigil, melting away into the inky darkness that dwelt in the narrow passageway between two buildings. They were commercial buildings, closed for the night, with narrow slitlike windows set high in brick walls, pale oblongs wanly glowing from dim lights burning within.

The boulevard was lined with heavy-duty street lamps that flooded it with a harshly unnatural, blue-white-tinged glare. But it penetrated no more than a few feet into the alley, which was stuffed thick with black darkness.

The wall on Steve’s left was lined with a couple of trash bins filled with cinder ash and metal scraps and shavings from the machine shop within. He ducked behind them when patrol cars came making their slow, sharklike glide along his side of the street.

His car was parked nearby where he could get it into action fast. He could have kept watch from inside it, but he preferred to be out here, where he could move around and stretch his legs. A lone man sittting behind the wheel of a parked car in this neck of the woods would attract too much attention from the law and street people.

Besides, until recently, he’d been cooped up for months in a small room in a private clinic, recuperating from critical injuries sustained during an overseas mission. He’d had enough of that to hold him for ten lifetimes.

It felt good to be outside in the fresh air, such as it was. Washington is built on what used to be swampland, and flaunts its origins throughout most of the year with heavy humidity. This late June night, the air was so thick and damp and hazy that it plastered haloed rings around street lamps and headlights.

There were dark bands of wetness under his arms, and his shirt hung limp with sweat. From long habit he went jungle-fighter style, wearing no undershorts beneath his pants and hanging free and loose.

The occasional street hookers who went strutting along the sidewalks took advantage of the sultry night air to peel down to the minimum, tube tops and short-shorts, the better to flaunt what they had. The turf was more or less off-limits, but a steady stream of them trolled the pavement, gambling on getting picked up by a cruising john and getting in his car and away before attracting the notice of a cop. They were on fairly safe ground as long as they kept moving and didn’t linger in doorways or on street corners.

Other denizens of the nighttime world made the rounds: winos, crackheads, lush rollers, bone thugs, penny-ante drug dealers, homeless derelicts, and crazies. Now and then, they would wander into the alley, nearly stumbling into Steve before becoming aware of his presence. When they did, they got out fast. One look was all it took to realize he was up to serious business they wanted no part of.

His vantage point gave him a clear sightline on the club’s front and parking lot. The front entrance was the only way the customers entered and exited the building. There were fire exits in each of the long side walls, and a back door that opened onto a loading platform, but they were off-limits to all but staffers, to prevent any deadbeats from trying to beat the house after running up a hefty bar tab. The oversized, hulking goons that served as bouncers and club personnel weren’t being paid to let anyone pull a fast one on them.

The parking lot had a single entrance/exit that accessed the street. Steve knew the layout of the club; he’d been in there earlier tonight while dogging his quarry, and he’d made sure to survey the layout of the joint. Not that he expected his man to execute any evasive maneuvers; Quentin simply wasn’t the type. He didn’t know he was being followed and even if he did, he wasn’t built for any kind of action that might scuff up his expensive, Italian-made tasseled loafers.

Durwood Quentin III, to give him his full monicker. A multimillionaire with a kink for the down-and-dirty side of the street. With his money, he could have been playing around with high-fashion models or high-line, five-thousand-dollar-a-night call girls.

Instead, he prowled the low-down side of the capital’s nighttime world, making the rounds of strip clubs, titty bars, and hustler dives, the raunchier the better. He also had a tendency to top off the evening by picking up street hookers and knocking off a quickie in his car. With some of the hard skanks he’d been dallying with, he was lucky one of them hadn’t cut his throat for his wallet and watch. Which would have saved Steve Ireland some trouble.

Steve had become an instant expert on Quentin’s wayward ways because he’d been tailing him on his forays for the last few nights, after first drawing the assignment to neutralize the financier.

Know your target, learn his pattern to find his point of maximum vulnerability, and strike. That was how Steve Ireland operated, and he was very good at his job. Or at least, he had been, before the hazards of war had put a serious hurting on him and laid him up in a recovery ward for the better part of six months. He was just getting back into harness with the Quentin sanction.

It wasn’t until tonight, though, that he’d learned that someone else was also on Quentin’s trail. A combination of luck and skill had caused Steve to spot the interloper before the stranger had spotted him. It takes one to know one, and Steve had tagged the other as a hunter, too.

Earlier, when Quentin had first exited his expensive Georgetown townhouse and pulled away in his car to begin his nightly prowling, Steve had been surprised to notice a second car take off after Quentin’s Cadillac and start following it. The newcomer was a black Crown Victoria.

Steve nosed his machine in line after the other two and brought up the rear. The night air was hot, muggy, but the air conditioner was off and the windows open. He liked it better that way. It kept him in closer contact with his surroundings than if he’d been sealed inside a closed car with the AC on.

Quentin drove across the Rock Creek Bridge into the city proper, trailed by the two tail cars, the Crown Vic and Steve’s machine, a nondescript dark-colored late-model sedan. There was plenty of traffic and Steve was a skilled shadower, so he had no trouble keeping tabs on his quarry and the unknown second party who’d interjected himself into the scene. Steve didn’t even have to stick too close to Quentin; all he had to do was keep his sights on the Crown Vic that was following the Cadillac.

The three cars threaded a maze of streets named for the letters of the alphabet and the states of the union. Steve used all of the shadower’s tricks, sometimes fading back, other times passing both vehicles and letting them overtake him, occasionally pulling over to the curb and switching off his lights for a few beats to make it look like he’d reached his destination, then falling in behind a van or truck and using it as cover to switch on his lights and resume the pursuit.

Several times, he caught a glimpse of the Crown Vic’s driver and lone occupant, a big guy with close-cropped dark hair and a mustache. Only a glimpse, though; he didn’t want the other guy to get too good a look at him and realize that the tailer was being tailed. Steve had an advantage in that he’d followed Quentin for several nights previously and had a pretty good idea where he was going; the sequence of stops might vary, but the ultimate destination remained the same.

Like an iron filing drawn by a magnet, the Cadillac traced a course away from the blocks of federal office buildings and well-lit monuments, arrowing toward the raunchier side of town, a vice district in all but name.

Of course, that was all a matter of perspective, Steve sourly reflected; to the taxpayer, the whole governmental apparatus could be considered a vice district, the difference being that unlike the politicians, the screwing the hookers gave you was a lot more straightforward and honest.

The shadow man who was tailing Quentin injected a new variable into the equation, one that Steve didn’t like so well. He’d already gotten a feel for Quentin’s habits and rhythms, and had pretty well worked out how and when he was going to carry out the sanction. The newcomer was a complicating factor, and that never boded well for an operation. For one thing, it indicated that a third party was involved.

Steve was operating solo on this assignment, but he was part of a larger apparatus; the same could be true of the stranger.

Durwood Quentin III was a person of interest to any number of outside interests, official and otherwise. He had a blueblood pedigree. His people were Old Money; he’d attended the right prep schools, graduated from an Ivy League college and postgrad business school, and been slotted into a fast-track position in a prestigious Wall Street brokerage house. He’d married a former debutante, the heiress to a considerable fortune herself, and fathered a couple of kids on her. He belonged to the right clubs, played a good game of tennis and a fair game of golf.

He’d had all the advantages, but inevitably, his true nature had asserted itself and brought him to his present delicate condition. He was a plunger and long-shot bettor with other people’s money, namely his clients’ financial accounts. He had the temperment of a degenerate gambler, always doubling up and redoubling on ever riskier speculations, finally descending to outright fraud and chicanery.

He’d posted spectacular profits at first, at least on paper, but came a day when he couldn’t make a margin call, and the entire towering pyramid of options and hedges and credit-default certificates and junk bonds had all come tumbling down like a house of cards.

His family were big-money contributors to the current administration in the White House; their clout had kept him from being prosecuted by the Securities and Exchange Commission for stock fraud. By then, his marriage was already long defunct; his compulsive womanizing had seen to that.

The Quentin name and family conections still counted for something, Durwood using them to land himself a post as CEO of Brinker Defense Systems, a Washington-based defense contractor. There was no such person named Brinker associated with the company, as it turned out; the name was an inside joke cooked up by its founders, alluding to the fact that they skated on the brink of solvency and legality.

Quentin made a perfect front man, exploiting his contacts with a clique of civilian political appointees in the Pentagon’s procurement department to land Brinker some nice fat contracts. Brinker’s products proved to be of the same quality as the bad paper Quentin had been pushing at the brokerage house: defective, when not actually nonexistent.

The sweet ride had hit a speed bump when Brinker landed a deal to supply weapons to Iraqi and Afghani police forces that were being trained and equipped by the U.S. Army. The company couldn’t just stiff the Army; they had to deliver something. Operating through some accommodating defense ministers in a tiny Balkan state who served as front men for the transaction, they bought a quantity of arms and ammunition from the People’s Republic of China. The matériel, surplus equipment left over from the Korean War, was transshipped to Afghanistan and Iraq. So haphazard and slipshod was the operation, that much of the delivery was still packaged in cases bearing the PRC’s original labeling and Red Star insignia. The pistols and rifles were too rusty and antiquated to ever actually hit a target; that is, assuming that the cartridges could even be made to fire.

Brinker might have gotten away with it at that, considering that their high-level civilian friends and co-confederates in the Pentagon were equally minded to sweep the mess under the rug and make it go away.

They hadn’t reckoned on the tenacity and single-minded devotion to duty of one Colonel Millard Sterling. Sterling was career Army and posted to the same procurement department in the Pentagon that had brokered the Brinker arms deal. He might have looked more like an accountant than a warrior, but in his way he was a strike trooper straight down the line.

The contract had been granted despite his opposition, thanks to the influence wielded by political appointees, and he was determined to expose the whole rotten mess. He couldn’t be bluffed, bought, or scared. Pressure came down from above, giving him the time-honored bureaucratic screw job, relegating him to the Pentagon’s version of Siberia and career limbo. Sterling stubbornly kept at it, building a file of relevant documents and affadavits, collecting a damning paper trail that led straight back to the malefactors. He kept going through channels, filing reports, bombarding the higher-ups with the naked facts. Worse, some officials were starting to take him seriously.

That’s when Colonel Millard Sterling was found dead in the garage of his modest home in a Virginia suburb, his head virtually blown off by a blast from a shotgun clutched in his hands.

Suicide, his detractors said. It proved he’d been delusional from the start, causing him to construct a paranoid fantasy about alleged irregularities in the Brinker arms deal and, ultimately, take his own life. His grieving family swore he’d never owned a shotgun, but that was sloughed off as the understandable blindness of relatives unable to come to grips with the fact of their loved one’s self-destruction.

The Brinker affair seemed to have died stillborn, only to be revived some months later when a long-term congressman and high-level member of the House Armed Services Committee involved with military procurement was arrested by the FBI in connection with an unrelated bribery investigation.

Under intensive grilling and with the threat of a lengthy prison term, the representative spilled his guts, unloading his inside account of a massive criminal conspiracy between defense contractors, legislators, and federal officials to defraud the United States government.

Among those implicated were members of the Brinker board of directors. The company went bust and some of its officers went to jail, but not Quentin Durwood III. Having learned his lessons since his brokerage house days, he’d been careful not to leave his tracks on the dirty dealings that had gone down during his tenure as Brinker’s CEO. His accomplices who’d been nabbed pointed the finger at him, but the uncorroborated testimony of convicted felons was inadmissable as evidence.

He looked guilty, was guilty, but the government couldn’t prove it in court, so he walked away from the Brinker scandal and collapse free and clear.

So far. Investigations were still continuing, and there was always the chance that prosecutors might unearth some new angle to nail him, though as yet they hadn’t come up with anything particularly promising.

One item that had come up during the probing indicated that Quentin had been complicit and possibly instrumental in arranging through party or parties unknown the murder of Colonel Sterling. The information was based on hearsay evidence of a confidential informant, and was too thin and tenuous to justify the expenditure of time, money, and manpower, so it was never followed up.

One of the federal agents who was privy to this lead was an army veteran, a former military policeman who maintained contact with former colleagues who were still on active duty, including a high-ranking officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps. The G-man passed the information along to his buddy.

In due course, it came to the attention of an army special investigating unit whose specialty lay in investigating such matters. Due to national security concerns, its name was unknown to all but a few. Suffice it to say that the SIU had considerable resources behind it, including sophisticated electronic eavesdropping and communications interception capabilities.

They started digging, unhindered by an excess of red tape or concern for the legal niceties. The lead was authenticated and verified. Durwood Quentin III had indeed contracted for Colonel Sterling’s death. This was proved to a moral certainty.

Due to issues of due process, jurisdiction, and some of the extralegal means used to acquire said proof, irrefutable though it was, it could never be admitted into a court of law. Quentin was guilty of an army officer’s murder and legally untouchable.

Which is where Steve Ireland came in.

Few if any nations will openly admit to using assassination as an instrument of policy. Most if not all of them use it; they just don’t care to admit it, because to do so lifts the curtain a little too much on how the world really works.

The United States government has publicly proclaimed a prohibition against state-sanctioned assassination of foreign political leaders. Since the terror attacks of 9/11, that position has become somewhat equivocal in theory; in practice, no official in any governmental agency or clandestine service wants to sign their name to documents initiating such a project. That doesn’t mean that the deed isn’t done; it just means that nobody wants to leave a paper trail signing off on it.

The military’s job is to make war. That capability is the core of deterrence and national security. The individual service member must, if necessary, be ready, willing, and able to kill the enemy. Whether that function is carried out in bloody hand-to-hand combat or by the push of a button to launch a missile, is unimportant. What matters is the intent.

Assassination is warfare by other means. That is why the Dog Team was born.

In the shadowy half-world of clandestine (“black”) operations, the Dog Team is one of the blackest of all black ops. Knowledge of its existence is classified Above Top Secret and restricted to a select few. Theirs is an awesome responsibility, one not given or taken lightly.

The Dog Team is the U.S. Army’s assassination arm, its killer elite. Its members are authorized to “neutralize,” that is, kill, persons whose elimination is deemed vital to the national security. This includes enemies both foreign and domestic.

Terrorists, spies, and traitors are not the only foes. Sometimes, the threat comes in strange and unfamiliar guises. Many and oddly assorted are those who seek to make covert war on the republic. Sinister political cabals, corporate cartels, and organized criminal elements conspire, singly or in combination, in a ceaseless effort to suborn the Constitution and seize supreme power by any means necessary.

They may be beyond the reach of the law—but not of the Dog Team.

Brinker Defense Systems had cheated the Pentagon out of many millions of dollars. This in itself was not unusual. The multibillion-dollar defense budget has long been viewed by many unscrupulous plotters as a cash cow to be milked by hook or crook. That’s a given, just part of the way the system works. If every public-and private-sector chiseler who defrauded the U.S. taxpayer was marked for liquidation, the slaughter would be prodigious.

By setting in motion the murder of Colonel Millard Sterling, an honorable officer who was doing his duty, Brinker prexy Durwood Quentin III had crossed a threshold and entered the Dog Team’s gunsights.

Team member Steve Ireland had drawn the sanction. Now somebody else was trying to horn in on the game.

Who?

Less than an hour earlier, Quentin’s Cadillac had rolled into The Booby Hatch’s parking lot. The Crown Victoria that had been following it continued southbound to the next intersection and turned left into a side street.

A few cars behind, Steve Ireland’s sedan cruised through the cross street and kept on going. Glancing left, he saw the Crown Vic’s red taillights come winking on as it braked to a halt in the middle of the side street. In his rearview mirror, he saw the vehicle make an illegal K-turn back onto the main drag, so that it was pointing northbound toward the club.

At the next light, Steve turned right, then right again, putting him northbound on a street running parallel to the one where the club was located. He followed it for a couple of blocks, made another right, then another, emerging southbound on the boulevard a long block above The Booby Hatch.

Pulling in at the curb a couple of car lengths past the corner, he parked the car and killed the lights. Rolled up the windows and switched off the engine.

The overhead dome light was switched off so that it wouldn’t light up when the car doors were opened. Steve got out of the car and locked it. It was on the opposite side of the street from the club, a good hard stone’s throw away. The neighborhood was pretty crummy, but there wasn’t much danger of the car being broken into or stolen, not on The Booby Hatch’s Mob-protected turf.

Reaching under the left side of his utility vest, he surreptitiously adjusted the flat pistol tucked butt-out in the top of his pants against his hip so that it sat the way he liked it. On a hot night like this when everybody was wearing lightweight summer clothes, wedging the gun in his waistband was less conspicuous than wearing a shoulder rig or clip-on belt holster.

He made sure his T-shirt covered the rod. It would slow his draw, but life is trade-offs. The flap of the utility vest reached down below below his hip and added to the concealment.

He strolled along the sidewalk, toward the club. The economy might be in the toilet, but you’d never know it by the mass of parked cars crowding The Booby Hatch’s lot. The witching hour was near, tomorrow was a work day, but the joint was jumping. It just goes to show people find the money for what they really want, Steve thought.

The building throbbed with the muffled beat of electronically amplified, bass-heavy dance music that thudded like war drums in the night. Loud as it was, it couldn’t drown out the buzzing and crackling of the neon sign that spelled out the club’s name over the entrance. The lurid red glare splashed the front and sidewalk like the blaze of a burning building.

Knots of men milled around, both blue-collar working stiffs and suit-and-tie office drones. From the noise they were making and the seething restlessness of their movements, it was obvious that more than a few of them had a load on.

Steve kept on walking. Further down the block, he spotted the Crown Vic parked on the same side of the street as the club. It was empty.

Two attributes his trade demanded were sharp eyes and good night vision. He spotted a man standing on the corner of the side street where the Crown Vic had made a K-turn. The man stood in a patch of gloom, but the street lamps were so bright that there wasn’t much shadow to be found.

A big guy, with short dark hair and a mustache. The guy from the Crown Vic. He was talking to a woman. Steve couldn’t make out too much detail, but from what he could see of her figure and how much skin she was showing, it was a sure bet that she wasn’t a recruiter from the local mission making a midnight run to save souls. Their heads were close together, but their body language said that they weren’t a couple, at least not in the usual sense of the term.

Steve checked for traffic, turned, stepped down off the curb, and crossed the street, angling back toward the club. It was easy to melt into the swarm of drunks and loudmouths clustered on the sidewalk and in the parking lot. The neon sign buzzed, the red glare seethed and flickered, the electro-beat was a physical thing that vibrated through the pavement.

Nobody paid any attention to Steve. Covering behind an SUV, he looked for the couple on the corner.

They must have come to a parting of the ways, because the woman was walking along the sidewalk toward the club, while the man hung back on the corner, idling in place. She moved like she felt right at home, striding boldly, confidently, breasts bobbing, hips swaying, long legs flashing. As she neared, Steve got a better look at her. She was the kind of woman used to being looked at, and worked hard at it.

She had long hair and wore a dark, low-cut sleeveless top, a skirt whose hem barely reached the top of her thighs, and knee-high shiny white high-heeled boots. As she closed in on the club, the click-clacking of her high heels against the pavement beat out a percussive rhythm that made itself heard over the clamor of the dance music, the buzzing sound, and the hangers-on crowding around in front of the building.

The loiterers started buzzing louder than the sign as they became aware of her presence. Heads swiveled around so fast to take a look at her that some of their owners risked whiplash. Eyes bulged or narrowed, depending on their owners. Gawkers nudged their buddies to get an eyeful of the newcomer.

She was an eyeful, all right. In her high-heeled boots, she stood about five-nine. Her red-hair was cut in bangs across her forehead and hung down at the sides to mid-chest level. Her hair was cherry red, and from its uniform straightness and the glossy artificiality of it, it looked like a wig.

Her skin was bone-white, her features bold. Wide dark eyes were ringed with enough mascara to give them a raccoon aspect; a bold, red-lipped mouth turned up at the corners, though not necessarily in a smile. She was broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, wide-hipped, and long-legged. Her breasts were strictly from implants, and the cosmetic surgeon hadn’t stinted on the silicone on the day they were installed.

Catcalls and whistles, hoots and hollers vented among the loiterers as she moved among their midst. A car was pulling out of the parking lot, causing her to pause to let it pass. Steve used the opportunity to take a couple of pictures of her with his cell phone camera for future reference. The street was almost as well lit up as the crowd, allowing the camera to catch a pretty sharp image.

The car braked to a halt, blocking the sidewalk. The driver’s-side window rolled down and the driver, a curly-haired fat-faced guy, stuck out his head. He must have known her, because he called familiarly to her. “Ginger! Hey, Ginger, it’s me, Sal! C’mere, doll!”

Ignoring him, Ginger walked around the back of the car, making her way toward the club’s front entrance. Sal rolled down the passenger-side window and leaned across the front seat, continuing to call to her. “C’mon, let’s go for a ride! Ginger!!”

Wriggling eel-like through the knots of males, not looking back, she kept on her hip-swaying way. With practiced ease, she avoided the clutching hands of guys trying to cop a feel.

“Ginger, Ginger!”

Another car was trying to get out of the lot, but Sal’s car was blocking the exit. The driver of the second car leaned on the horn hard. Sal gave him the finger and shouted what the other could do to himself. The second car had four guys inside; a couple of them opened the doors and started to get out. Sal saw them coming. His car lurched forward into the street, just as suddenly slamming to a halt to avoid plowing into an oncoming car.

The new car held down its blaring horn for a long time as it sailed northward on the boulevard. Sal punched the gas, tires squealing as he turned left, crossing the centerline of the road and bulleting southbound.

His taillights were vanishing red dots by the time the guys in the second car climbed back inside, laughing and crowing that they’d sure showed him.

The press of male bodies grew thicker as Ginger neared the club’s front door. A wise guy grabbed her right breast and squeezed it clown-like, like he was honking a horn. She leaned into him and she must have worked a knee, because the joker went white-faced and open-mouthed as he crumpled up like a crushed beer can.

Ginger brushed past him and disappeared inside the club. The guy she’d kneed lay curled up on his side on the pavement, gasping for breath, clutching himself with both hands between his legs. His face had gone from white to green.

Those nearby, including the guy’s buddies, thought that was funny as hell and stood around yukking it up. They didn’t think it was so funny a moment later when a club bouncer came barreling out the front door, looking more than ready to do some bouncing.

He told the joker’s buddies to get him the hell out of there. They hauled the disabled man to his feet, holding him up with their hands hooked under his arms. He was still using both hands to hold his privates. His pals half carried, half dragged him across the lot and loaded him into their parked car.

The beefy bouncer stood there with meaty fists on his hips, watching them as they drove away. He went back inside the club.

Steve had paid little attention to the distraction, focusing on the tail man, the Crown Vic driver still standing on the corner. Steve stood where he could watch the other without being seen by him. Five minutes passed before the other made a move, starting up the street toward the club. He made a beeline for the entrance. Steve got a good look at him.

The tail man was big, with a bodybuilder’s physique, one that had been augmented by megadoses of steroids. He would have made the club bouncer look modest-sized by comparison. Fortyish, he wore his dark hair cropped close to the scalp, as close as a three-day beard. His blocky head seemed as wide as it was long. His brows were thick dark vertical lines; he had a thick black mustache of the type that Steve for some reason always associated with firefighters and cops.

The tail man didn’t look like a firefighter, but he didn’t seem the type for a shadow job either; he was too broad-beamed to be unobtrusive, to pass for just another face in the crowd. If a subject once caught a look at him, he woudn’t be forgotten. He was a big bastard. Appearances be damned, though; a tail man was just what he was. A tail man and what else?

He wore a dark sport jacket, tight T-shirt, and baggy slacks. He wore a gun in a shoulder rig, and from the size of the bulge it made under his left arm, it must have been some cannon.

At first impression, Steve would have tagged him for a cop, an undercover cop maybe. That would have jibed with the Crown Vic he was driving; the machine had a major-league mill with mucho muscle under the hood, and was favored by a lot of police departments around the country.

Steve checked out the man’s shoes; shoes were a tipoff. Cops, even undercover ones, tend to pamper themselves with a certain kind of shoe: wide, thick-soled black oxfords that are comfortable for those who spent a lot of time on their feet. This guy, though, was wearing heavy-duty work boots with reinforced toes; they stuck out from beneath wide-legged pant cuffs. Footwear that was good for kicking down doors or giving a stomping.

Whoever he was, before he stepped through the club’s front doors, a couple of head shots of him were snapped by Steve’s cell phone camera.

Steve wasn’t much for fancy gadgetry when he was on assignment; the fancier the gadget, the more that could go wrong with it. Should he be apprehended by the authorities, it wouldn’t do to be found in possession of sophisticated hardware that could be sourced back to the military and compromise his cover.

Nowadays, everybody has a cell phone, and even the most basic models come with built-in cameras. Steve’s cell had a few refinements that weren’t exactly standard option, such as an encrypter-decrypter, scrambler, and several other security devices, including a fail-safe destruct mechanism that would activate if any unauthorized personnel tried to tamper with or investigate the unit, turning its hardware into a fused lump of slag that looked like the results of battery leakage.

The communication mode was now switched off; when Steve was on the hunt, there was no distracting taking or receiving of calls.

The tail man smelled of cop, but it didn’t figure. Durwood Quentin III was in deep shit, but it was all on the federal level. No federal investigative agency, not the FBI or ATF or any of the others, tolerates heavy steroid use by its personnel, and this guy was seriously on the juice. That was obvious at a glance; even his muscles had muscles. Legitimate bodybuilding can do only so much and no more; you can be sure that anybody built like a comic book superhero got there with some chemical assistance.

The same generally went for state cops. A county or city cop could get away with it maybe. But why would they be interested in Quentin? The tail man’s acquaintance with the likes of Ginger could indicate a vice squad operation. Or a criminal one, either Mob or independent. Or who knows what…?

Whatever it was, Steve didn’t like it, but for now he’d play a waiting game. He decided against going into The Booby Hatch for a look-see. He didn’t think the tail man was on to him, and didn’t want to risk tipping him off by nosing around too closely.

Steve hung around outside the club for another five minutes before slipping away. He crossed the street, taking a circuitous route to an alley he’d noticed earlier and filed away mentally as a good potential observation post.

Certain that he was unobserved, he eased into the passageway between two buildings, where a few paces swallowed him up in blackness. From the alley mouth, he could see the club, its parking lot, and down the street where the Crown Vic was parked. He stood around for a couple of minutes, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the lack of light before giving the alley a quick once-over. The passageway didn’t run clear through the block of buildings to the next parallel street; it terminated in a kind of courtyard behind the backs of the two buildings fronting the street, and was used by both businesses as a parking lot. It was empty now of all but a white delivery van.

The back of the space was hemmed by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence; beyond lay a long gravel strip ten feet wide that bordered the backs of several one-and two-story commercial buildings separated by driveways and walkways that accessed the street parallel to this one.

That was good. No locals were going to be using the alley as a shortcut between the two streets. Steve settled in for stakeout.

About fifteen minutes later, the tail man emerged from inside the club. The crowd of loiterers was thinning, though the lot was still about two thirds full of parked cars. He stood off to one side by himself, smoking a cigarette.

Ten minutes later, Quentin came out through the front doors, hanging all over Ginger, an arm draped across her shoulders. Loose-jointed, disheveled, his red flushed face plastered with a sloppy grin, he seemed to be feeling no pain.

The tail man was in Quentin’s field of vision, or would have been if Quentin hadn’t been busy trying to look down the front of Ginger’s top. He didn’t have to look hard to see much; that plunging V-neckline put plenty on display.

Ginger and the tail man made eye contact for an instant, no mutual flash of recognition passing between the two. Quentin steered Ginger into the parking lot, making for his car.

The tail man turned, walking south, moving briskly but not running. When he was about halfway to the Crown Vic, Steve Ireland stepped out of the alley and headed north, quick-time, toward where his car was parked facing south.

He entered by the passenger-side front door, climbing over the transmission hump and into the driver’s seat. He fired up the engine, its muffled but powerful rumblings sending a shudder through the car, a shudder that died down to a shiver. He rolled down the front windows to let in some air and get a feel of the night, but kept the headlights dark.

Not far from the street’s southeast corner, a pair of headlights flashed on: the Crown Vic’s.

A couple of minutes later, Quentin’s Cadillac rolled out of the parking lot, its right rear wheel going over the curb, thumping the undercarriage against the asphalt road surface. The machine moved northbound, picking up speed. It passed Steve; inside, he could see the outlines of two silhouette heads, Quentin’s and Ginger’s.

The Crown Vic pulled away from the curb and into the lane, following. When it passed, its driver’s head was facing front toward the road ahead, not so much as glancing in Steve’s direction.

Steve looked left, right, left again, not seeing anything that looked like a police car, at least not a marked one. A couple of cars, one of them an SUV, came rushing along northbound. When they flashed past Steve’s sedan, he gunned the engine, whipping the steering wheel around hard left.

The sedan made a screeching U-turn across the white line and headed north. Getting into the lane behind the SUV, using its bulk to cover him from being seen in the Crown Vic’s rearview mirror, he switched on his headlights.

Traffic lights were green for a long way along the straightaway. Rows of street lamps lit the thoroughfare like a stage set. Jockeying past the SUV, Steve pushed the sedan along at a quick clip until he caught sight of the Crown Vic. It was sticking pretty close to the Cadillac, which was about a half-dozen car lengths ahead.

Steve switched lanes, slowing to allow the SUV to pass him on the left. The SUV’s driver must have taken being passed earlier as some kind of personal affront, because he punched the accelerator to zoom past the sedan. Moving up fast, it caused the Crown Vic to glide right into the next lane to allow it to pass.

Good; that would momentarily distract the tail man from the vehicles behind him. Thanks, Speedy, Steve thought, grinning without mirth. The SUV bulleted onward, crossing lanes to pass the Cadillac on the right, then flashing ahead, its taillights rapidly dwindling out of sight.

Steve nestled in with a knot of three or four vehicles, using them for cover while keeping the Crown Vic and Cadillac steadily in sight.

A quarter mile further on, red and blue flashing lights came into view, slowing traffic on both sides of the roadway. The SUV was pulled over at the side of the road, a police car standing behind it. A uniformed cop stood beside the driver’s side of the SUV.

Steve grinned again, this time meaning it. Tight grin. An instant’s passing amusement, and then he was once more all business. He, the tail man, and Quentin and Ginger all vectored north toward a final destination unknown, imminent, and inexorable. And for some, perhaps all—terminal.