“That’s the one. So he’ll be peeling out of here in about twenty minutes. I thought you’d want to swing by, take a sneak-and-peek through the house with us. Mitch is gonna bring some explosive sheet along in case we decide to set a charge now.”
“I made clear you were doing surveillance only,” Tim said.
“I know, I know, but we’re all getting the sense that Motherfucker stays bedded down. We just thought it wouldn’t hurt to have some explosives on hand, in case the…”
Mitchell’s voice in the background: “-optimal-”
“-opportunity arose. It might be our only window for a while.”
“No way. You just started surveillance yesterday. All we’re doing today is taking a look through the interior to get the lay.”
“All right, fine. We’ll just take a gander, then. Motherfucker’s at 14132 Lanyard Street. Oh, and Rackley? How are you gonna know where to find us?”
“I’ll find you,” Tim said.
“We’re blended into this block like a panther in the jungle, my friend. We’re-”
“Let me guess. Service van with tinted rear windows.”
A long silence.
“I’ll see you soon.” Tim hung up, slid his gun into his waistband, grabbed the Nextel but not the Nokia, and headed for the door. He paused with his hand on the knob. Backtracking, he retrieved a pair of black leather gloves from the bag beside his mattress. With lead stitched into the lengths of the fingers and positioned strategically across the bands of the knuckles, the gloves could put horse-kick power behind a simple punch. Tim threw them into his pocket and headed downstairs to his car. Once he got to within a mile of Debuffier’s house, he pulled over and idled at the curb.
Both sides of the street were lined with garment sellers’ stalls, elongated rooms jammed into the same structure like piano keys. Many of the booths had roll-up, storage-style doors, opening the entire storefronts to the sidewalks. The district had a Third World feel to it-drab functionality and cheap, raw product offset by bright colors and excess. A young boy burrowed into a chest-high heap of Dodgers shirts. Enormous spools of fabric were propped against walls, doorways, tables. A mound of moccasins spilled out onto the curb. The air smelled of candy and burnt churros.
Wheelbarrows, parked trucks, and exhaust crammed the street. A guy with comb-mark-stiff hair strutted past, wearing a sweatshirt with a peeling Versace emblem, his pinky intertwined with that of a girl holding a purse proclaiming Guci-marked down one c.
Bastard offspring of the city of varnish.
The guy threw Tim the stink-eye, probably figuring he was checking out his girlfriend, so Tim looked away to defuse matters. A young man with a bushy beard came by, T-shirts draped over his arm. He caught Tim looking and held up a sample. The shirt featured Jedediah Lane’s head midexplosion, under a bloodred caption that read TERRORISM BLOWS. Tim studied the photo as if it contained some inscrutable secret or the power to pardon. For an instant he wasn’t sure whether the caption referred to Lane himself or Lane’s assassin. At the vendor’s approach, Tim shook his head, and the man moved on.
With laughing Mexican colors and a robust husband-wife team working the register, the stall beside Tim’s car drew his attention. It exclusively featured wedding-cake ornaments. Tim sat staring at the plastic brides and grooms of all shapes and ethnicities, feeling his temperature starting to rise, wondering how a marriage between two people who loved each other madly could feel as though it were slipping away.
With relief he saw that he’d passed the requisite ten minutes to put him at Debuffier’s at the specified time, and he drove off. He parked several blocks away and strolled around the corner. Chipped-stucco houses rose humbly behind cheap metal fences. Two kids with basketball players’ numbers shaved into the backs of their heads zipped past on elongated skateboards, catching air off a buckle in the sidewalk left over from the last earthquake. Rusted cars languished along the curb on both sides of the street, and-to Robert’s credit-there were a handful of service vans, which made sense given the block’s apparent demographics. The decals and signs were varied and colorful. Armando’s Glass Works. Freddy’s Industrial Cleaning. The Martinez Bros Carpet Care. Several of the eponymous entrepreneurs were spending their Saturday sitting on browning lawns, petting Rottweilers and drinking Michelob from the can. The unusually brisk wind carried the sweet-rot smell of lukewarm beer and old wood.
On the north side of the street, Debuffier’s house loomed larger than its neighbors, a sprawling wooden abomination of no discernible architectural style. The porch’s arched entrance should have lent a warmth to the house, but the wood was fragmented, the splintered ends jutting out to add sloppy denticulation to the mouthlike hole. The roof, even more perplexing, was a cacophony of styles-here pitched, there hip-and-valley. Sitting importantly back from the street behind a lawn long since gone to dirt, the house itself was not so much large as complex-a collision, most likely, of the labors of rival builders over virtually unrelated phases of building.
Most of the parked vans’ side windows were tinted. Tim crossed to the north side of the street, opening up a better angle from which to glance back into the van interiors through the windshields, but the majority of the vans were partitioned. Freddy’s Industrial Cleaning looked most suspect. From how low it was sitting on the shocks, it was housing either heavy equipment or a few full-grown men. The Caucasian name didn’t help either.
Tim walked over, pretending to fumble in his pockets for the keys. He paused at the driver’s door, waiting. The clicking of the doors’ automatic locks told him he’d bet right. He slid into the seat, facing forward, and pretended to adjust the radio despite the fact that the neighboring yards were all empty. The van smelled of sweat and stale coffee, and the dash was high; Tim wondered if the Stork had trouble seeing over it when he drove.
He moved his lips only slightly when he spoke. “Not bad, boys.”
A crumpled VanMan Rental Agency receipt was wedged in the cup holder, beside a Big Gulp. Tim could just make out the name on the top line, written in the Stork’s shaky hand: Daniel Dunn.
Danny Dunn, Tim thought. An appropriate alias.
Robert’s voice, peeved and cracked from dehydration, lofted over his shoulder. “How the hell did you find us?”
“Just sniffed you out.” Tim removed his lead gloves from his back pocket and slid them on. “Have you switched the car out?”
“Yessiree,” the Stork said. “I brought the van first thing this morning.”
“Where’s the car you sat in last night?”
Robert’s gruff voice again. “I peeled out and returned it, then bused back. Relax-we’re all clear.”
“Good.”
“Debuffier left early for lunch, so let’s get on it.” A set of keys tapped Tim on the shoulder, and he took them and started the van. “His house is on a double lot, so it backs on the street one over. Pull around the block and park there-much quieter.”
“There’s a gap in the back fence begging to be utilized,” the Stork said.
“Where’s Mitchell?”
“Over there. He’ll meet us at the back door in five.”
Tim eased around the block. “Good vehicle,” he said. “Silent. Ordinary. Forgettable.”
“I’m glad you’re pleased with my selection, Mr. Rackley.” The Stork sounded incredibly proud of himself, almost gleeful. “I even took back the first van they rented me because it gave off a distinctive rattle.”
“Kind of like you,” Robert said.
Tim parked a few feet away from the triangular gap in the fence. The street was dead quiet, so he got out and pulled open the rear doors. Already wearing latex gloves, the Stork and Robert burst from the back, inhaling deeply and fanning their shirts. Robert ducked through the fence gap immediately. The Stork shouldered a black bag by the strap, staggering under its weight. Tim took the bag from him, slammed the rear doors, and ushered him through the fence.