“Good, ’cause if we find him, this nut job may own more than one pop gun.”
When Dennis and Darrel got off the train, there were only three cars parked in the garish green of the sodium-vapor lit lot. One other person, a woman, got off the train with them and went straight to her car. Dennis noticed a private cab idling at the bottom of the station steps. He asked Darrel to jot down the plate numbers of the cars remaining in the station, and then he approached the cab driver.
“You been on all night?”
“Since eight.”
“You see this guy?” He held up a picture.
“No. Who’s that guy?”
“Somebody we’re looking for as a material witness.”
“I knew you guys were cops.”
“You’re good! Any other drivers or companies on tonight?”
“Just John.”
“Can you call John?”
“He’s doing a bar run.”
“Call him, we’ll wait.”
The 2:20 AM pulled out of the station headed for New York without Dennis and Darrel. John, the other cab driver, hadn’t returned to the station yet. Seemed his bar call was a businessman from up island, Port Washington, who was feeling no pain. He probably saved his own, as well as some other poor bastard’s, life that night by calling a cab and not driving himself home.
It was 2:40 when John finally showed up.
“Yeah, this guy. He was in a real hurry. Said his battery died. He gave me a twenty for an eight dollar fare.”
“Why would he do that?” Darrel asked.
“We made the station just as the train was about to pull out. I guess he didn’t want to wait for his change.”
“Where did you pick him up?”
The driver looked at his trip sheet. “115 Hedgerow. Off 25A.”
“Take us there.”
Along the way, Dennis woke up three members of his team. Stakeout was a word they hadn’t heard in years.
Arriving at the address, Dennis got out of the cab, handed the driver a twenty, and asked him to wait a few minutes. The place seemed quiet as he scanned it for any signs of life. Even in the dark he could make out the distinctive lines of the old beat-up ’67 Camaro. He approached it and opened the door, half expecting an alarm. In fact, the overhead dome didn’t even light. He tried the headlights, nothing.
“Dead battery, all right.” He hitched his head toward the ramshackle house. “I wonder if he prefers the French Country motif in his interior decorating?”
“Why don’t you wait until they show this lovely home in Architectural Digest?” Darrel said. “Or get a warrant.”
“You wouldn’t want to go get a coffee right now would you, Officer Spoon?”
“So you could maybe do a little B&E while I was away?”
“Detectives don’t ‘break-in and enter,’ Officer.”
“In that case, cops don’t drink coffee,” Darrel said with an absurd grin. Dennis chuckled as he realized the irony of the situation. The good news was that having an active-duty cop at his side had gotten him this far. The bad news was that this cop could arrest him for snooping around someone else’s private property. It really sucked not having a tin any longer.
He handed the cab driver another twenty and asked him to wait until either the guy came home or his men arrived. Dennis took three steps, snapped his fingers, and returned to the driver’s side window. “Do you have a flashlight?”
Dennis walked back to the gray primer-painted Camaro. Smudges of red-orange body filler were the remains of a long-abandoned attempt to battle the rot. Focusing the flashlight beam at the registration sticker, he jotted down the number. He then stepped onto the decaying porch. Using the flashlight, he peered through the window, scanning what appeared to be the kitchen … and living room and bedroom of this one-room shack. It was obvious this “house” hadn’t seen a woman’s touch in decades, at least not any kind of woman like Cynthia. There were magazines and catalogues on the kitchen table and piles of dishes and aluminum foil TV dinner trays in the sink. A knapsack was on the coffee table in front of the couch, and Dennis thought he caught a glimpse of a scurrying mouse. The couch was ragged and worn and busted on the end, which was probably the spot where the beard always sat. Bingo! On the wall there was a document in a frame. He squinted but couldn’t make it out. “Hey, Darrel, could you come up here for a moment?” Reluctantly, Darrel approached. “Can you read the writing in that frame on the wall?”
“Hold on,” he said with a sigh that signaled I can’t believe I’m doing this! Squinting his twenty-something eyes, he read, “Honorable discharge … Corporal … Thomas … Robert … Regan.”
“That’s my guy!”
“So, are we going to call the FBI?”
“It’s late, let’s let them sleep. I’ll call one of my guys, Benton, to come get us in the morning. Besides, the feds are following their own leads. In fact, they just might drive up any second. You shouldn’t be so anxious to see them anyway.”
“Why not?
“Because, technically, you just violated a law.”
“Why did I even think I liked you?”
“Come on, admit it, I have a winning personality.”
“Okay, it’s your show ’til 8 AM. Then I think we should call the feds.”
“Thanks for joining in on this.”
“Dennis, if your hunch is right and this guy is one of the terrorists, it’s any cop’s wet dream to nab the bastard.”
By daybreak, Dennis and Darrel were heading back to Manhattan in Benton’s car. Davis and another member of the team had taken a position 300 yards away from Regan’s house in the opposite direction from which he was likely to return if he came from the station. Dennis and Darrel caught some shut-eye while Benton crawled through the early rush-hour buildup.
At 8:10 AM Dennis called Burrell but she was out of reach. Instead, he left a message with her subordinate, Agent Rauch. “We found Thomas Regan’s house, here’s the address …”
After he hung up with Dennis, Rauch started looking through his case log. There was nothing about a Thomas Regan or anything about GlobalSync or Dennis Mallory. What he didn’t know was that all of this was ordered held tight by the director and he was not in the loop. So he followed procedure until he could speak to Burrell, who was taking her yearly physical. He picked up the phone and called the FBI New York Operations Center.
They also followed a standard operating procedure when responding to the requests of agents for support, surveillance, or scheduling. In this instance, because the proximate field agents out of the Long Island office were all otherwise engaged, and due to the fact that Rauch didn’t call this in as “arrest with all due haste,” and because, as he understood the retired cop, this had something to do with a “favor” and was not connected to an ongoing case, the next surveillance team up on rotation was advised to take the job. That team, however, couldn’t get to the location for three hours. As the book dictated, the local police force was called. They dispatched one of their radio cars to the location and instructed their officer to observe and report only until the FBI duly relieved him.
When the blue-and-white Wyandanch police cruiser pulled up, the officer driving spotted Davis’s car parked up the hill. He drove up to the car and got out.
Resting his hand on the butt of his .38, he leaned toward the open driver’s window. “Gentlemen, can I help you this morning?”
Davis flashed his Detective’s Endowment Association retirement card. The cop was put off. He usually only saw a DEA card when he pulled over an ex-dick for speeding. It usually worked. After all, any cop who planned to live long enough to be retired figured he would need the same courtesy someday. So he always allowed the perk, hoping the gesture would be returned to him in about thirty-five years. But this was different. This was an FBI stakeout. No ex-cops could be allowed to interfere with that. “Sorry, you’ll have to move.”