Unfortunately, the lot in which Engelmann sat faced the park from across the street, which meant both Franklin and the homeless man disappeared from view as soon as they ventured south of Anaheim. He started the car-grateful for the first time since he’d rented it that America’s idea of luxury was not performance but serenity; its engine was so quiet, none of the young men in the park noticed. Engelmann slid out of the lot toward the park and took the first left he came to. Then he rolled down the darkened road at five miles per hour, scanning the night for any sign of Franklin-or of his quarry.
Franklin ducked into an alley off the service road. Found a spot halfway out of sight behind a Dumpster. Unzipped. Let loose.
As he did, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned, startled, midstream.
The glowing ember of his cigarette ruined his night vision, so at first, all he saw was darkness unfolding-resolving into a figure. The cigarette fell from Franklin’s lips and hissed when it hit the puddle at his feet. He reached for the gun he’d recently taken to sticking in his waistband, but it wasn’t there. It was in his sock drawer at Nana’s house because the Prophets didn’t like their money guy to carry.
“Hey, Iffy.”
“Aisha?” Relief washed over Franklin, followed closely by embarrassment. “Why the fuck did you sneak up on me like that? Shit-I thought I was three seconds from getting ganked in an alley with my dick out.” He tucked himself back into his baggy shorts and brushed idly at the front of them.
“I’m sorry, Iffy. I just…wanted to say hey, is all.”
Franklin looked her up and down. Stick skinny in ratty clothes. Eyes sunken in deep hollows. Her skin a jaundiced yellow-gray beneath the streetlights. Her forearms pocked with scars from wrist to elbow. “Bullshit, you did. You’re looking to score.”
Aisha looked at her shoes. “I just need a little to get by until payday.”
“You mean until your pimp gives you your take.”
“C’mon, Iffy. You and me go back. I could make it worth your while,” she said, approaching him and reaching for his open fly.
Franklin shoved her. She went down hard. Whimpered as she hit the ground. “Get the fuck off me, bitch. I ain’t the same little nickel-bag nigger who used to float you shit back in the day. I’m big weight now, hear? I’m better than you. Don’t come around no more with your whiny bullshit-the shape you’re in, I wouldn’t let you suck a stolen dick.”
He cocked his leg back to kick the girl. She squealed and covered her face with her arms, but didn’t move to stop him. From somewhere nearby, Franklin heard a cough. When he raised his head to look, a homeless man stood at the alley’s mouth, silhouetted by the streetlights.
Franklin, momentarily chastened by the audience, lowered his foot.
When the blow she was expecting didn’t come, Aisha peeked between her forearms, eyes widening when they lighted on her unlikely savior.
The homeless man said, “Go.”
Aisha scrabbled wordlessly to her feet, tears streaming down her cheeks, and ran. Franklin looked from the homeless man to her, wondering if he should maybe give chase and teach that bitch a lesson.
The homeless man took a step toward Franklin. “I wouldn’t.”
Franklin stayed put. Though he’d never admit it, even to himself, something in the man’s tone frightened him.
They stood that way-an uneasy détente-until the sounds of Aisha’s hurried footfalls were swallowed by the night. Then Franklin puffed out his chest in an attempt to repair his wounded pride. “The fuck are you still looking at?” he asked, trying to force some edge into his voice.
“Nothing,” the man replied. “Nothing at all.”
And then he disappeared into the shadows.
Engelmann was rolling slowly westward on 11th when a young black woman burst from the alley to his left and bounced, crying, off the fender of his car. He slammed the brakes and peered back the way she came. He spotted Franklin fifty yards up the alley, zipping his fly in the shadows of a nearby Dumpster, alone. When Franklin finished, he looked around, and then hiked back toward the park.
Engelmann circled the block, but the homeless man was nowhere to be found. He did another circuit for good measure, and then slid the Chrysler back into his chosen parking lot. Apparently, this poor young woman was the reason Franklin had abandoned his post, and the timing of the homeless man’s awakening was no more than an unfortunate coincidence.
For two more days, he trailed the boy. For two more days, no one approached him. On the third day, two large men of Italian extraction dragged Franklin from his grandmother’s home while she begged for them to stop and shot him in the street-two taps, head and heart, like the professionals they were.
Irving Franklin was a dead end.
13
McKay Pond was still as glass in the chill morning air, a fine mist rising off it and shrouding the reflected image of Mount Washington that graced its surface. It looked to Michael Hendricks like a Japanese landscape painting hung upside down.
Hendricks checked his GPS and nodded slightly to himself. This was the place. He scanned the dense New Hampshire forest, its massive pines so tall they appeared slender from a distance-the needled branches jutting from their trunks suggesting feather more than Christmas tree. But up close, those trunks were big enough that a grown man couldn’t wrap his arms around them if he tried. Hendricks drank in their scent and smiled at the thought that these trees had stood for centuries, yet may never have been seen by anyone but him. And as his eyes followed one trunk upward, spotting the dull glint of fiber-optic camera hidden in its branches some twenty feet off the ground, he hoped they never would be.
Though it was barely six a.m., Hendricks had been up for hours, hiking the length of the perimeter he’d set up around the cabin he called home since he’d returned from Afghanistan-checking pressure sensors, ensuring his cameras were still hidden. It was a ritual of his-something he did whenever he came home from a job. He told himself it was a necessity. That his line of work made him a target. But the truth was far simpler than that. The truth was, those days spent in the woods quieted his mind-allowed him to leave the baggage of the job outside the cabin.
He followed the sight line of the camera to the spot that he was looking for-his footfalls silent on the thick mat of needles below. The cameras were too numerous for him to remember their precise placement; he’d hung two hundred of them in a perimeter that stretched for five square miles of forest. So instead, he relied on GPS and instinct. Locating them was simply a matter of assessing the landscape and determining the optimal placement. Invariably, that was where he’d placed them.
Hendricks was as competent as he was consistent. He had his Uncle Sam to thank for that.
Fresh tracks pitted the earth all around. Fresh, but not human. Hendricks knelt and ran his fingers through the churned up loam.
There. The broken wire, just as he’d suspected.
He removed a tool kit from his belt, and set to work stripping, splicing, and re-shielding the wire. When he was finished, he covered it over with a thin layer of soil and pine needles, and took a big step forward-over the wire.
Instantly, the satellite phone on his belt began to buzz.
Hendricks waved at the camera in the tree, so small as to be nearly invisible. He knew when he returned to the cabin, there’d be a video of that wave waiting for him.
The wire led from the camera to a series of pressure-sensing mats, one of several he had wired up throughout the forest. They didn’t span the full circumference of the perimeter-that would have been too great an undertaking, even for Hendricks-but as far as he was concerned, they didn’t need to. New Hampshire’s White Mountains provided ample protection in the form of treacherous terrain; Hendricks’s sensors simply monitored the most likely ingress points, the spots anyone with any tactical training might identify as attractive for an approach. Step on a mat, activate a camera-and give Hendricks fair warning that you’re coming.