I saw Bobby’s 88 coming my way in the side view mirror, and lay down before he passed. Thirty seconds later, I took off behind him. Although following him went pretty smoothly, it wasn’t without its problems. Traffic happened to be so sparse that no matter how far I hung back, it was nearly impossible to keep a lot of cars between Bobby and me. Figures I’d pick the lightest traffic day in the history of the free world to start my career as a junior G-Man. It didn’t help much that the skies were perfectly clear, and that visibility was basically unlimited. Even so, there was nothing about Bobby’s driving that indicated he had any idea I was behind him.
Just as he had done the two times I’d accompanied him, he pulled off onto the Conduit by the Van Wyck Expressway and then onto the road that circled the terminals at JFK. As expected, Bobby drove into the short-term parking closest to the Eastern Airlines terminal. He parked in the same aisle, in the same spot as he had on our two previous trips. I guess I never thought of Bobby as someone who was hung up on consistency. There was very little that was consistent about him other than his friendship. With his happy-go-lucky demeanor, radical dogma, and hustler’s heart, he was already a breathing contradiction. It was pretty funny to think of him as the anal retentive revolutionary: A place for everything and everything in its place. I pulled into a spot that afforded me a good view of Bobby’s car and watched as Bobby ushered Bubbeh Ackerman to the terminal.
A few minutes after they vanished from my view, a white, boxy Dodge van pulled up right behind Bobby’s car, obscuring my view. Shit! If I wanted to know what was going on, I didn’t have much choice but to move myself or my car. I got out of the car, and when I did I felt suddenly very naked. I don’t know why exactly. It was silly. There was plenty of activity swirling around me: cars parking, cars pulling in and out of the lot, people heading toward or coming from the terminal. There was no reason that I should be any more or less conspicuous than anyone else. I told myself to just act naturally, and laughed at the inherent contradiction in my own advice. Act naturally; how did that work? I was good at being me, not at acting like being me. At the moment, though, the more pressing issue was finding a way to see what was going on with the white van and Bobby’s car.
Too late. By the time I was done being Prufrock, the ship had sailed. The van was pulling away and heading for the exit. If anything had been loaded into Bobby’s trunk from the van or from the trunk into the van, I’d missed it. Worse, I had no way of knowing if the van had any actual significance. For all I knew, it had stopped at the rear of Bobby’s car because it was having engine trouble. When I got back in the car, I had a tough choice to make and not much time in which to make it. I could wait for Bobby to return and follow him wherever he went, or I could go off after the van. The longer I waited to choose, the less likely the latter option became. I wasn’t going to get caught napping a second time. I twisted the ignition key, backed up, and raced for the exit.
I caught up to the white van pretty quickly. It was easier to tail the van at a close distance than it had been to follow Bobby. To the van driver, Aaron’s Tempest was just one of a thousand cars just like it on the local roads. My face behind the wheel would be just another humanoid blur, no more significant than the other shadowy faces the van driver passed or would pass during the course of his day. Still, once I fell in behind the van, I didn’t tailgate. I tried to keep plenty of cars between the nose of the Tempest and the van’s windowless back doors. The van turned off the main terminal road and onto a road that wound its way through unfamiliar ground, areas of the airport I had never seen before. This was the nuts and bolts part of the airfield, where the jets were hangared and their bellies were stuffed with boxes and crates and aluminum containers. The air was alive with the whining of jet engines and the acrid stink of spent kerosene on burning hot metal. I could almost taste the exhaust on my tongue. Crazy as it may sound, the sun that lit the cargo area seemed dimmer somehow, its light more diffuse. Driving through this part of the airport reminded me of the first time I’d walked into the back of a restaurant and seen the ugly bones behind the pretty face shown to the diners.
The van driver didn’t seem in any rush, keeping at a steady thirty miles per hour. In fact, he was making it so easy for me to keep pace I worried that I’d been spotted, that he was trying to lure me into a trap. But no, those were my nerves talking. I was just freaked because I knew that once we left the airport I would be on my own. When we had worked our way completely through the cargo area, the van finally turned left out of the airport onto Rockaway Boulevard. We stayed on Rockaway Boulevard past the Belt Parkway and into a neighborhood I was utterly unfamiliar with. I saw some store signs that indicated we were driving through South Ozone Park. I may not have known the neighborhood, but I breathed a little easier when we turned onto Linden Boulevard — an avenue that ran through much of Brooklyn and all of Queens — and I saw the grandstands of Aqueduct Racetrack looming ahead. I was a little too relieved, and got so distracted I wound up directly behind the white van.
He turned right. I kept on straight ahead. I circled back as soon as I could, racing to the corner where he’d turned. No more than thirty seconds had passed, but the Dodge van was nowhere in sight. I drove down the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of a bumper or taillight. Good thing I looked to my left when I did because there it was, the van, parking on a side street. I turned down the side street, keeping my distance. The van door opened, and out stepped a big man dressed in blue coveralls and work boots, a wool cap on his head. He wasn’t big as in long, but as in thick. Just the way he walked, circling the van, checking its doors to make sure they were locked, intimidated the hell out of me. There was something else about him too, a vague familiarity. I imagined him with a ski mask over his face and his hands twisted around the collar of my coat. I couldn’t be sure, not from as far away as I was, but he certainly reminded me of the guy who’d whacked me across my ribs the night of the fire at 1055 Coney Island Avenue. If I heard him speak, I’d be sure.
When he was done checking that the van was locked, he crossed over to my side of the street, but never got close to me. Instead, he walked into a hole-in-the-wall neighborhood bar. Part of me was very tempted to walk in there after him, but I wasn’t in the mood to get my ass kicked. Besides, strangers tend to stick out in neighborhood bars like Hasids at a hoedown. There’s no way to just slip in undetected. The minute the door opens in a local joint, everyone in the place turns to see who’s coming in. Instead, I took the opportunity to check out the van more closely. I already had its plate number memorized, but I wanted to take a look inside. I pressed my face to the windshield, cupping my hands around my eyes to block out the sun. There wasn’t much to see. But for the two front seats, it was as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, and not nearly as cozy. Then, when I moved around to the passenger side window to get a different view, I realized it wasn’t quite as empty as it seemed. It had one thing in it I was sure Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard had never had: a sawed-off shotgun.
If I had been standing in the street instead of on the sidewalk, the driver’s seat would have totally obscured it from my view. The interior door panel had been removed and the window wedged into a permanent shut position. The pump-action shotgun sat in two L-shaped metal brackets welded onto the door’s interior. Its stock was gone but for a curved nub, and a few inches had been removed from the end of the barrel. I didn’t know much about handguns. I knew even less about rifles and shotguns, but I didn’t have to know anything about them to understand that I didn’t want to be on the wrong end of a sawed-off.