The emergency-room doctor-a young woman in her thirties-began peeling the tape that was holding the thick dressing firmly over my eyes. “You have a visitor, by the way.”
“Hey, Joe.”
I recognized Spinney’s voice, its usual levity dulled with concern. “Hey, Les. Did you catch ’em?”
“They blew across the border at Derby Line like a rocket. The Mounties and the provincial police are on it now. Haven’t heard back yet. Probably won’t, either, if the escape went off as well as the attack.”
The doctor murmured, “Okay-here we go,” and gently lifted the pads from my eyes. I squinted in pain, even though I could see the lights directly overhead had been turned off, and that the white curtain around my bed did a good job as a filter.
“How’s the vision?” she asked me, her face about ten inches from mine.
I blinked several times, trying to focus on her, and finally switched to Spinney’s face at the foot of the bed. “I haven’t gotten nearsighted, but everything else looks pretty good. They just hurt, and they’re sensitive.”
She smiled but stayed put, watching me. “Okay, good. I’m going to shine a light in your eyes, just to make you really uncomfortable, and then I’ll put in some more drops. After that, you should be able to get out of here.”
She wasn’t underrating her fancy penlight-it hurt like hell and made the tears pour down into my ears-but she seemed satisfied by what she saw.
She straightened up, smiled again, and expertly administered some soothing, cool drops. “You’re all set. The effects of the flash will pass soon enough, and I seriously doubt you’ll have any permanent damage. I’ll give you some drops to self-administer, along with instructions and a pair of horrible-looking cardboard sunglasses you can use until you can get some decent ones. I think you’ll find you’ll need them for a couple of days, though, so don’t be heroic, and just put up with the jokes, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She nodded curtly. “You’re free to go-you can collect your belongings on the way out. Good luck.”
Spinney watched her sweep aside the curtain and disappear into the surrounding hubbub of the rest of the ER. “I always get the old guys with bad breath.”
“What’s left of the jewelry store?” I asked him, checking my watch. I’d been in the Newport hospital for four hours by now.
“A hole in the ground. The fire chief owns the property till he declares it stone cold, so we still hadn’t been allowed in when I left, but those bastards did a job and a half. Maybe they learned from the idiots we caught in Burlington.”
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the gurney, my eyes already adjusted to the semi-gloom. “I take it nobody survived.”
“Nobody and damned near nothing. Based on what you saw, ATF’s pretty sure they used a tube-fired rocket. They’ve got someone heading over to see what they can find in the rubble. It was propane, though, that set the place off like a roman candle. The rocket must’ve hit the gas tanks on the back side of the building.”
I shook my head. “I was half-asleep. I only caught a glimpse of the driver-not enough to make an ID. I don’t even know what make of car it was… A dark four-door convertible is all I remember.”
“We got all we need on the car. They caught it on video at the border. The Canadians’ll probably find it in a field in a few hours, fresh from somebody’s hot sheet. You ready to go?”
I wandered behind him, half blinded, to the counter by the door, picked up my drops and floppy glasses, and finished the paperwork. Outside, it was still dark, and pleasantly cool, so I slipped the glasses into my breast pocket for future use.
I used them at the fire scene, however, surrounded as it was with flashing red, white, and blue electronic strobes, not to mention firefighters equipped with powerful, erratically pointed flashlights. “Hole in the ground” turned out to be a highly accurate description of an erstwhile two-story building. Charred black and glistening with water, the rubble filling the cellar barely came up to my waist. Spinney and I and several other members of the surveillance team stood around the spot where we’d been staked out hours earlier, and watched the fire department slowly gather up its tons of equipment from the flooded street.
The fire chief-short, square, and grim-came up to us, still dressed in his dirty bunker coat and helmet. He gave a curious glance at my Halloween spectacles, but addressed Lester Spinney. “I guess it’s all yours. I don’t suppose you can tell me what it was all about.”
It wasn’t a question. Spinney shook his head. “Sorry. Thanks for your help.”
He looked at us silently for a couple of seconds, shook his head, and left without further comment.
It took us twenty-four hours-from the middle of one night to the middle of the next-to sort through the remains of the store. We were helped by not having to determine the cause of the fire-a question that sometimes involves weeks of painstaking reconstruction of the remnants of a building-but we did want to determine the fate of the boxes that had been carried inside just before the blast.
Our methods were a demented cross between an archaeological dig and a landfill operation. The cellar hole was surrounded by two backhoes, several trucks, and a large generator, but it was filled with jumpsuit-dressed forensics types in rubber boots, some of them equipped with tweezers and small bags. Our reward, when it came, however, was delivered by a backhoe. As the blade cleared away one of the few remaining piles in the basement’s far corner, a large, sturdy, five-foot-tall metal safe came into view, its blackened, damp surface gleaming in the halogen lights rigged all around the hole. Word went out for a locksmith.
Three hours later, in the privacy of the Border Patrol substation’s enclosed garage in nearby Derby, the locksmith turned the safe’s handle and began pulling open the door. Spinney stopped it from swinging wide enough to reveal the interior, and thanked the disappointed man with a cheery smile.
The small bunch of us-Frazier had given in to curiosity and had joined us a half-hour earlier-waited until the locksmith had cleared the exit, and then Spinney let us all see what the fire had left behind. It being a modern, fireproof safe, our expectations had been high. What we saw immediately bore us out.
Before us were stacks of money-hundreds of thousands of dollars-as well as banded bundles of credit-card receipts, jewelry, a small pile of gold bar, and several baggies filled with white powder-far more than would have fit into the few cardboard boxes delivered the night before.
Spinney let out a low whistle and slipped on a pair of latex gloves. “Jesus, Joe. We just made our bosses some serious bucks.”
The others laughed at his gleeful expression. I’d forgotten that being “local” officers-and working for a federal task force-both Spinney and I had made our departments eligible to share in any booty recovered during the investigation. An oddly piratical concept, it was a tempting inducement in persuading municipalities to farm their officers out for federal use. Just hearing Spinney’s comment, I knew my own previously disparaged involvement here was going to suddenly undergo a drastic facelift.
Ironically, my personal satisfaction in this treasure was mixed. While its cash value would remove a lot of the heat I’d been getting back home, the lack of any documents in the safe meant we had no specific knowledge of how Truong Van Loc was running his small empire.
After inventorying and shifting our findings to the Border-Patrol safe, Frazier, Spinney, and I retired to a small meeting room in another part of the building.
“One thing we have going for us-I hope,” Frazier started off, “is that the sheer bulk of that loot indicates most of it was there before last night’s delivery.”
“Making the jewelry store a bank?” Spinney asked.
“Possibly the bank,” I added, my enthusiasm suddenly fired by Frazier’s comment. “If we’re lucky, Truong just took a serious hit to his wallet, and maybe to his whole operation.”