“That’s not much of a deterrent,” Tony observed.
“The bad guys wouldn’t know that until they got close to the truck, and I’d guess he has a panic button in there. This place is huge.”
We’d come to the very end of the container pier. The Cape Fear River was nearly a half mile wide at this point, and looked wider because of the total darkness on the other side. Channel buoys winked at us all the way down the river. We could hear that muscular current swirling through the dolphin pilings at the end of the pier. The water smelled of salt marsh and diesel oil; some seagulls overhead on night patrol screamed at us. The visible debris in the water was streaming by at a good five knots.
“Something’s not computing here,” I said. “I mean, look: If some bad guys are trying to smuggle in radioactive material, why in the hell would they, first, plant some in town, and then, second, splash it on the outside of a container here in the port?”
“How do we know it got downtown?” Pardee asked.
“We don’t,” I admitted. Pardee had a point. If Allie ingested the hot stuff, she could have done that anywhere. The fact that she was downtown when it got to her didn’t mean anything.
Pardee nodded.
Tony finally lit up his cigarette. “Yeah,” he said, exhaling a cloud. “You’d think, if the jihadis were trying to get a dirty bomb or something in, they sure as hell wouldn’t want to alert that crew back there.”
“And not once, but twice? Radiation getting loose in the Wilmington area? Maybe from the Helios plant, maybe not. Now this. Maybe it’s some whack-job stealing shit from a hospital radiology lab, spreading it around town just for grins.”
“The fact that it was outside may be important,” Pardee said. A seagull appeared out of the darkness and landed boldly twenty feet away. Frick went for it, resulting in a lot of squawking and feathers. Frack, showing his age, just watched.
“Yeah, I agree. I wonder if it’s maybe a-”
At that moment, we saw a commotion up at the tractor-trailer. They had unloaded about half the boxes from inside the container. From our vantage point, it looked like they’d gone all the way to the front wall of the container, but then I realized there weren’t enough boxes out on the pier. They’d hit a fake wall.
The Helios team was backed out, and a bunch of border cops jumped into the container and went to work on the wall. We started walking back to get a closer look, but stayed close to the first row of stacked containers as we went up the pier. The cops appeared to be getting nowhere fast, so they filed out and let a couple of longshoremen climb into the container with axes in hand. I saw Ari walk over to the edge of the pier, obviously searching for a cell phone signal.
Then there was a shout from inside the container as the fake wall burst open and a dozen or so men bolted out, piled right over the startled longshoremen, and ran flat-out into the container stacking area, fanning out in all directions, before the cops could comprehend what was going on. Everyone at the scene was caught completely flat-footed. A couple of cops pulled their weapons, but then realized they couldn’t shoot the stowaways just for running. One security truck peeled out in pursuit and instantly collided with the corner of a container in a true Keystone Kops moment. Tony started laughing.
Then we heard a shout from our left. It sounded like it had come from down below the edge of the pier. We ran to the edge in time to see Ari Quartermain floating past in the current about twenty feet off the pier, waving frantically. The lights from one of the gantry cranes shone down into the water, or we would never have been able to see him.
“Get it,” I yelled at Frack, who went over the side in one big jump and splashed down into the water. He surfaced a moment later and began paddling in the direction of the struggling Quartermain. Tony found a life ring with a rope attached, and we started walking to keep up with the current as Frack dragged the man closer to one of those ladders we’d spotted. The dog had Ari by his jacket collar, and, fortunately, Quartermain wasn’t fighting the dog, but swimming with him instead. When they got close enough, Tony made sure Ari could see the life ring and then tossed it to him. Once he had it, Tony belayed the rope on the pier and let the current bring both man and dog alongside, close enough for Quartermain to grab one rung on the next ladder. Up the pier I could hear sirens approaching.
Frack still had a mouthful of Quartermain’s jacket, but Ari, thinking faster than I might have managed under the same circumstances, held on to the ladder with one hand while he poked the life ring over the dog’s front end. I called Frack off, and the three of us hoisted him back up to the pier while Quartermain clung to the bottom of the ladder. I’d swear Frack was grinning as we hauled his fuzzy wet butt over the edge of the pier. That mutt loves an adventure.
Tony went down the ladder and helped Quartermain climb up. Once they were topside, Ari flopped down on the concrete, gasping from his exertions in the icy water.
“What happened?” I asked him.
“One of those runners knocked me into the river,” he said, still puffing. “I think he went in, too, but I didn’t see him again.”
Frack stuck his nose into Ari’s face and gave him a big lick. Ari patted the dog’s head and thanked him formally for saving his ass. Up the pier there were more cops arriving, and several vehicles were starting to prowl the virtual canyons between all the stacked containers. We flagged down a passing security truck and asked the rent-a-cop to take a badly shivering Ari up to the scene to see if they could get a blanket for him.
Tony and Pardee automatically had started to walk up the pier, but I called them back.
“Bad idea,” I said. “Bunch of embarrassed cops and feds up there. Time for us interested parties to dee-part.”
As we drove back into Southport, I asked Tony if he’d found any decent gin mills in town. Tony, being Tony, knew of four; he was nothing if not attentive to important logistical details. We stopped at one a block in from the municipal beachfront. I left the shepherds in the vehicle. The place was about as dead as an off-season beer joint could be, which suited us just fine. The bartender was down at one end of the bar, eyes glued to the evolving story of a mass escape of stowaways down at the container port.
“Well,” Tony said, “Quartermain wanted the attention off Helios; that mess should do it.”
The television was now showing aerial views of the container pier.
“Anybody ever say if the radiation they got over there was similar to what they found inside Allie?” Pardee asked.
“They think they had alpha at the truck scene,” I said, “and that’s the best candidate for what got Allie.”
“Yeah, that’s kinda my point,” Pardee said.
“As in, these could be two related incidents?”
“Three incidents-Allie, the hot trailer, and now a bunch of illegals in a container.”
Tony finished his drink and put the glass down with an audible clink. “I don’t know, boss,” he said. “Maybe we should just do what Creeps suggests. Radiation poisoning? Gamma fucking rays? Human smuggling? That’s all federal shit. This is no place for us local gumshoes.”
“Granted, but I still want to know what happened to Allie.”
“We know what happened to Allie,” he replied. “We just don’t know why.” He paused to deliver a mild burp. “Although I have a theory.”
“Which is?”
“She ran into a ‘thing’ in the night,” he said. “A national security ‘thing.’ It went bump and then ate her up from the inside out. I’m sorry for her, don’t get me wrong. But shit happens, you know? As in, wrong time, wrong place?”
This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Pardee?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I’ll stay if you want,” he said. “But whatever the hell’s going on here is gonna go major league after tonight, and I, for one, don’t want to disappear into one of those overseas rendition centers.”
I sighed and studied my glass for a moment. I could understand where they were coming from. When we set up H amp;S Investigations, we agreed that it would be mostly part-time work-basically, guys would put in as much time as any of them wanted or needed to make some money. None of us had to take on a case if we didn’t want to, and, after a life of chasing vicious street criminals, additional excitement was typically not the objective.