The Whisperers (16 page)

‘Ernesto thought it might be a bomb,’ said Phil, referring to the little Mexican who had been working on the car when the device was found. Ernesto was now standing some distance from the auto shop, along with most of the other employees, although nobody had yet called the cops.

‘What do you think?’

Phil shrugged. ‘Could be.’

‘So how come we’re standing here with our noses pressed against it?’

‘Because it probably isn’t.’

‘That “probably” is reassuring.’

‘Why, you think it’s a bomb?’

I looked more closely at the device. ‘From its shape, it seems to be mainly electronic components. I don’t see anything that looks like explosives.’

‘You want to know what I think?’ said Phil. ‘I think you’ve been tagged. It’s a bug.’

It made sense. It could have been placed on my car while I was being questioned at the Blue Moon.

‘It’s big,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t call it inconspicuous.’

‘Inconspicuous enough not to be found unless someone went looking for it. You want to be certain, I can make a call.’

‘Who to?’

‘Kid I know. He’s a genius.’

‘Is he discreet?’

‘You got a wallet?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then he’s discreet.’

Twenty minutes later, a young man with bright yellow dreadlocks and a scrawny beard, and wearing a Rustic Overtones t-shirt, arrived on a red Yamaha Street Tracker bike.

‘Seventy-seven,’ said Phil. He was beaming like a proud parent at graduation. ‘XS650, full restoration. I did most of that. The kid helped some, but I bled for that bike.’

The kid’s name was Mike. He was scrupulously polite, and insisted on calling me ‘sir,’ which made me feel I was representing the AARP.

‘Wow, neat,’ he said, when he took his first look at the piece of equipment on my car. He carefully removed it and placed it on a workbench nearby. Using only his fingertips, he traced the outline of each piece of equipment under the tape. He then used a blade to make small incisions in the tape so he could examine what lay beneath. When he was done, he nodded approvingly.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘It’s a tracking device. Pretty sophisticated, although it may not look that way, what with all the tape wrapped around it. Some of this equipment, well, I’d guess that it’s military grade. Could be that the government doesn’t like you.’

He looked at me hopefully, but I didn’t bite.

‘Anyway, whoever put it there probably didn’t have a whole lot of time to work. If he had, he’d have used something smaller that could be hidden more easily, and run it off the car battery so it wouldn’t need its own power supply. To do that, though, you’d need fifteen, twenty minutes to work undisturbed.’

He used a screwdriver to point out a bulge at the center of the device. ‘That’s a GPS receiver, just like the ones used in a regular sat-nav. It pinpoints the car’s location so it can be checked on a PC. There are eight twelve-volt screw terminal batteries at the end providing the power. They’d have to be changed regularly, so if it was part of some long-term surveillance, it would make sense to come back and fit the smaller version to the car battery when the opportunity presented itself, but this baby would still do fine to be getting along with. The magnets wouldn’t affect the reported position, and it would be easy to remove once it had done its job.’

‘Will whoever put it there know that it’s been detached?’

‘I don’t think so. I deliberately didn’t move it far from the car, and I don’t believe the tracking is that sensitive.’

I leaned back against the bench and swore. I should have been more careful. I had kept an eye on my mirrors when I was on my way to visit both Karen Emory and Jimmy Jewel, and had taken a circuitous route with dead ends and U-turns just in case, but had picked up no signs of anyone following me. Now I understood why. In addition, the men who had interrogated me at the Blue Moon now knew that I had been to see both Karen and Jimmy, which meant they were aware that their warnings to back off had fallen on deaf ears.

‘You want me to put it back where you found it?’ asked Mike.

‘You serious?’ said Phil. ‘Maybe he should just strap it to his chest so they can track him around the house as well.’

‘Uh, I don’t think you want to do that, sir,’ said Mike. Sarcasm didn’t seem to have much effect on him, which made me like him more.

I looked out at the lot. A big rig pulled in and flashed its lights for assistance. I thought of Joel Tobias. I wondered where he was now, and what he might be bringing over the border. The rig had Jersey plates. Jersey. Phil followed my gaze.

‘Hey, I don’t know the driver,’ he said. ‘Makes no difference to me.’

Instead of sending the tracking device to Jersey, I told Mike to put the unit back where he’d found it after all. He seemed pleased that I’d managed to catch up with his own thought processes at last: my knowledge of the unit’s presence was a weapon that could be used against whomever put it there, if the right opportunity presented itself.

I paid Mike generously for his time, and he gave me his cell phone number in case I ever needed his help again.

‘Good kid,’ I said, as Phil and I watched him go. ‘Smart too.’

‘My sister’s boy,’ said Phil.

‘He didn’t call you “Uncle Phil.”’

‘I told you he was discreet.’

I also tipped Ernesto. He thanked me, but clearly felt that the shock he’d received merited a bigger tip. Since he hadn’t actually been blown up, I ignored his pained expression.

‘You got any idea who put that thing on your car?’ said Phil.

‘I do.’

‘You figure they’ll come at you?’

‘Possibly.’

‘You got help?’

‘It’s on its way.’

‘It was me, and someone was putting military-grade surveillance packages on my car, I’d want the kind of help with a gun. Is it that kind of help?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s the kind of help with
lots
of guns.’

10

T
hey hijacked Tobias when he was only a few miles south of Moosehorn on Route 27. A car had been behind him since he’d crossed the border, but he’d paid it little heed. He’d made this run so many times that he’d grown casual: his main concern was the US Customs post at Coburn Gore, and once he passed through safely he tended to switch off. On this occasion, he was also frustrated: he was bringing back only a fraction of what he had anticipated, and he was tired of taking on the burden of these trips alone. As the fatalities had mounted, their group had contracted to its core. It meant more work, and more risk, for everybody, but the rewards would be commensurately greater in the end.

There had been a problem at the warehouse that day. Canadian cops had been crawling all over the neighboring complex as part of a drug operation that was likely to be ongoing for a couple of days, and it seemed unwise to begin moving items within a stone’s throw of the law. Faced with the choice of hanging around, or trying another run when everything was quieter, Tobias had taken the second option. Later, though, he’d berate himself for not being more wary on the journey home, but he’d been assured that Parker had been taken care of, and the tracking device had confirmed that the detective had still been in Portland when Tobias was an hour into his trip.

The detective concerned Tobias, but not as much as Jimmy Jewel did. He’d told the others about Jewel immediately after that first clumsy approach in Dewey’s, and how it looked like he was getting curious about the economics of Tobias’s operation, but they’d advised him to see how it played out. The best that he could do was to convince them to let the operation rest for a time, but as the days passed without incident they grew impatient, and soon he was back on the cross-border run, although for a while they kept tabs on Jimmy and the big elephant who watched his back, but it seemed like Jimmy had decided that Joel Tobias wasn’t worth worrying about. Joel wasn’t so sure, but the others had done their best to convince him otherwise. So with Jimmy apparently minding his own business, and no sign of anyone snooping around, Joel had begun to relax a little.

He was also tired: he was taking on more and more runs as the demand for what they were selling increased. They’d told him that this would happen just as soon as word got around about the quality, and rarity, of what was on offer. Until recently, they hadn’t moved anything that wasn’t already sold, but now Joel was transporting items in anticipation of the final big sale: the ‘fire sale,’ as they had begun to refer to it. They had always known that those initial ‘trickle’ sales might raise warning flags somewhere, but they were necessary to bring in some funds and confirm the value, and extent, of what would ultimately become available. Now the big rewards were in sight, but Joel was the point man, and when Jewel and then the detective had come sniffing, he had been seriously unnerved. His advance payments had already increased substantially, but not as much as Joel would have liked, seeing as how he was taking all of the risks. Words had been exchanged. On top of their initial casual approach to the Jewel business, it had made Joel resentful. He knew that a confrontation was coming. Maybe he should have kept his mouth shut, but deep down he felt that he was right, which was why he’d spoken up to begin with. It took a lot to make Joel mad. He was a simmerer, but when he did go off, then heaven help anyone who got caught by the blast.

He’d also been having more and more bad dreams, and the disruption of his sleep patterns had made him testier with Karen, and he hated that. She was a special girl, and he was lucky to be with her, but sometimes she just didn’t know when to stop asking questions and stay quiet. Ever since Damien Patchett and the rest of them had died, she’d been different, perhaps fearful that the same fate might befall him, but Joel had no intention of taking his own life. Still, Damien’s death had hit him harder than the earlier ones: three of them were dead now, three of his old squad, all by their own hands, but Damien had been the best of them. He always had been.

Damien and the others had started appearing to him in his dreams, bloody and ruined. They spoke to him, but not in English. He couldn’t understand what they were saying. It was as if they had learned a new language on the other side of the grave. But even as he dreamed, he wondered if they were really his old brothers in arms that he was seeing. They scared him, and their eyes were wrong: they were black and filled with fluid, like oily water. Their bodies were warped, their backs hunched, their arms too long, the fingers thin and grasping. . . .

Jesus, no wonder he was tense.

At least the border runs were coming to an end. He’d carefully cultivated the customs officials, and the goons from Homeland Security. His license plate holder identified him as a veteran, as did the stickers and decals in the cab. He wore an army baseball cap, and was careful to listen to the stories from the older veterans who now manned the border. He would slip them a pack of cigarettes occasionally, even playing on his injuries when necessary, and in return they smoothed the way for him. The others had no idea how hard he had worked on his image, and how much the success of their endeavor was dependent upon him.

With all of this on his mind, he hadn’t been paying as much attention as he should have been to the car behind him. When it passed, he was glad to see it go, but that was the rig driver’s natural response to any vehicle that got too close. Eventually, you knew that they were going to try to pass, and you just had to hope that they did it sensibly. Oh, there were truckers who liked playing around with impatient motorists, and others who just took the view that they were the biggest, baddest sons of bitches on the road, and if you wanted to screw around with them, then it was your funeral, sometimes literally. Joel had never been that way, even before he’d started the border runs, where drawing the attention of the law to himself by driving carelessly could see him end up in jail for a long time. Even though there wasn’t much room, and the trees were practically scratching at his cab, he had pulled over slightly to let the car pass. It wasn’t a smart place to pass as they were approaching a bend in the road, and if someone else came at speed from the opposite direction then everyone involved would need as much blacktop as possible if they weren’t all to end up as roadkill. But the way ahead was clear, and he watched the red lights disappear, leaving the road empty and dark.

Half a mile later, he saw the flashing lights, and someone waving a pair of neon glowsticks. He hit the brakes as the beams of his truck caught the yellow Plymouth that had overtaken him earlier. It was side-on, bisected by the white line. Beside it was another car, the one with the flashing red-and-blue lights. He couldn’t make out any markings on it, though, which was odd.

A figure in uniform approached him, its head slightly misshapen. He rolled down the window.

‘What seems to be the problem?’ he asked as a flashlight shone in his face, forcing him to raise his hand to shield his eyes. In that moment, the figure produced a gun, and two other men emerged from the tree line, armed with semiautomatic weapons. Their faces were hidden behind ghoulish masks, and now the man in uniform was pulling a mask down on his face too, but not before Joel got a look at him and thought: Mexican. This was confirmed when the man spoke.

‘Keep your hands where we can see them,
buey
,’ he said. ‘We don’t want nobody to get hurt. We cool?’

Joel nodded. The fact that they were masked offered him some reassurance that he wasn’t about to be killed. Killers on a lonely road don’t need to worry about being identified by their victim.

‘My friends here are going to get in that cab with you and tell you where to go. Just do as they say, and this will all be over and you can go home to your
novia
,
sí
?’ Joel nodded again. So they knew that he had a girlfriend, which meant that they, or someone close to them, had been keeping tabs on him in Portland. He filed that particular piece of information away.