He jostled us aside and ran in a crouch across the lawns toward the redhead’s house. Even in a crouch, Bubba running across your lawn is about as easy to miss as Sputnik would be. He weighs something less than a piano but something more than a fridge, and he’s got that demented newborn’s face billowing out from under spikes of brown hair and above a neck the circumference of a rhino’s midsection. He kind of moves like a rhino, actually, lumbering and slightly to his right, but oh so quickly.
We watched with mouths slightly ajar as he dropped to his knees by the BMW, slim-jimmed the lock in the time it would take me to do it with a key, and then opened the door.
Angie and I both tensed for the blare of an alarm, but were met with silence as Bubba reached into the car, pulled something out, and slid it in the pocket of his trench coat.
Angie said, “What in the fuck is he doing?”
Bubba reached behind him and unzipped the gym bag by his knees. His hand searched around inside until he found what he was looking for. He removed a small black rectangular object and placed it in the car.
“It’s a bomb,” I said.
“He promised,” Angie said.
“Yeah,” I said, “but he’s, oh, nuts. Remember?”
Bubba used the sleeve of his trench coat to wipe the places he’d touched in and outside the car, then he gently closed the door and scrambled back across the lawn and over to us.
“I,” he said, “am so fucking cool.”
“Agreed,” I said. “What did you do?”
“I mean, I’m the balls, dude. I’m it. I surprise myself sometimes.” He opened the back door of the van, tossed the gym bag on the floor.
“Bubba,” Angie said, “what’s in the bag?”
Bubba was damn near bursting. He threw the folds of the bag wide, waved us to look inside. “Cell phones!” he said with a ten-year-old’s glee.
I looked in the bag. He was right. Ten or twelve of them—Nokias, Ericcsons, Motorolas, most black, a few gray.
“Great,” I said. I looked up into his beaming face. “Actually, why is this great, Bubba?”
“’Cause your idea sucked, and I came up with this one.”
“My idea wasn’t bad.”
“It sucked!” he said happily. “I mean, it blew, dude. Put a bug in a box, have the guy—or wasn’t it some chick at first—take it in the house.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, what if he leaves the box on the dining room table, goes up to the bedrooms to do whatever it is you want to hear?”
“We were kinda hoping he wouldn’t.”
He gave me a thumbs-up. “Fucking great thinking there.”
“So,” Angie said, “what was your idea?”
“Replace his cell phone,” Bubba said. He pointed into the bag. “These all have bugs already inside. All I had to do was match one of mine”—he pulled a charcoal Nokia flip phone from his pocket—“to his.”
“That’s his?”
He nodded.
I nodded with him, let my smile match his own, until I dropped it. “Bubba, no offense, but so what? The guy’s inside his house.”
Bubba rocked back on his heels, raised his eyebrows up and down several times. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said. “So—how do I put this?—why the fuck does he need to use his cell phone when he probably has three or four house phones inside?”
“House phones,” Bubba said slowly, a frown beginning to replace the smile. “Never thought of those. He can just pick one up and call anywhere he wants, huh?”
“Yeah, Bubba. That’s sort of their point. He’s probably doing it right now.”
“Shit,” Bubba said. “Too bad I cut the phone lines out back, huh?”
Angie laughed. She clapped his cherub’s face between her hands and kissed his nose.
Bubba blushed and then looked at me, that smile beginning to grow again.
“Ahm…”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry,” I said.
“For?”
“Doubting you. Okay? Happy?”
“And talking down to me.”
“And talking down to you, yes.”
“And speaking in a derisive tone of voice,” Angie said.
I glared at her.
“What she said.” Bubba jerked a thumb at Angie.
Angie looked over her shoulder. “He’s coming back out.”
We all climbed into the van, and Bubba shut the door behind us, and we looked out through mirrored glass at the redhead as he kicked his front tire, opened his car door, and reached across the seat, pulled his cellular from the console.
“Why didn’t he call people during the ride back?” Angie asked. “If the calls were important…”
“Roaming,” Bubba said. “Someone’s moving, it’s way easier to tap into their conversation—listen in or clone the phone, whatever.”
“But stationary?” I said.
He screwed his face up. “What, you mean like writing something down? What’s that got to—”
“Not the paper. Stationary,” I said, “as in standing still.”
“Oh.” He rolled his eyes at Angie. “Showing off the college again.” He glanced back at me. “Okay, Joe Word of the Day, yeah, if he’s ‘stationary’ it’s way harder to cut into his transmission. Gotta go through land lines and tin roofs and antennas and satellite dishes, microwaves, the whole fucking nine if you know what I mean.”
Carrottop walked back into his house.
Bubba used one finger to type on a laptop computer on the floor between us. He pulled a grimy piece of paper from his pocket. In his second-grader’s scrawl, he’d listed the cell phone types and serial numbers, and then the frequency numbers for his recording devices beside them. He typed a frequency number into the computer, then sat back on the floor.
“Never tried this before,” he said. “Hope it works.”
I rolled my eyes and sat back against the side panel.
“I don’t hear anything,” I said after about thirty seconds.
“Ooops.” Bubba raised a finger above his head. “Volume.”
He leaned forward and pressed the volume button at the base of the laptop, and after a moment, we heard Diane Bourne’s voice through the tiny speakers.
“…Are you drunk, Miles? Of course it’s an issue. They asked all sorts of questions.”
I smiled at Angie. “And you didn’t want to follow the redhead.”
She rolled her eyes and said to Bubba, “One good hunch in three years, he thinks he’s a god.”
“What questions?” Miles said.
“Who you were, where you worked.”
“How did they get onto me?”
Diane Bourne ignored the question. “They wanted to know about Karen, about Wesley, about how the fucking session notes got in Karen’s possession, Miles.”
“All right, all right, just relax.”
“Fuck relax! You relax! Oh, Jesus,” she said through a long stream of air. “The two of them are smart. Do you understand?”
Bubba nudged me. “Talking about you two?”
I nodded.
“Shit,” Bubba said. “Smart. Oh, sure.”
“Yes,” Miles Lovell said. “They’re smart. We knew that.”
“We never knew they’d trace anything to me. Fucking fix it, Miles. Call him.”
“Just—”
“Fix it!” she snapped. And then she hung up.
No sooner had Miles hung up than he dialed another number.
A man answered on the other end. “Yeah?”
“Two detectives sniffed around today,” Miles said.
“Detectives? You mean cops?”
“No. Private. They know about the session notes.”
“Someone forgot to retrieve them?”
“Someone was drunk. What can Someone say?”
“Sure.”
“She’s rattled.”
“The good doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Too rattled?” the calm voice asked.
“Definitely.”
“She’ll need a speaking to?”
“She may need more. She’s the weak link here.”
“The weak link. Uh-huh.”
There was a long pause. I could hear Miles breathing on his end, static and hiss on the other.
“You there?” Miles asked.
“I find it boring.”
“Which?”
“Working that way.”
“We may not have time for your way. Look, we—”
“Not over the phone.”
“Fine. The usual, then.”
“The usual. Don’t worry so much.”
“I’m not worried. I just want this dealt with faster than your usual inclinations allow.”
“Absolutely.”
“I’m serious.”
“I recognize that,” the calm voice said, and then he broke the connection.
Miles hung up, immediately dialed a third number.
A woman picked up a phone on the fourth ring, her voice thick and sluggish. “Yeah.”
“It’s me,” Miles said.
“Uh-huh.”
“’Member that time we were supposed to pick something up at Karen’s?”
“What?”
“The notes. Remember?”
“Hey, it was your deal.”
“He’s pissed.”
“So? It was your deal.”
“That’s not the way he sees it.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying he could go on another of his warpaths. Be careful.”
“Aww, Jesus,” the woman said. “You…you fucking kidding me? Jesus, Miles!”
“Calm down.”
“No! Okay? Jesus! He owns us, Miles. He owns us.”
“He owns everyone,” Miles said. “Just…”
“What? Just what, Miles? Huh?”
“I dunno. Watch your back.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot. Shit.” She hung up.
Miles broke the connection and we sat in the van and watched his house, waited for him to pop his head out and take us wherever it was he intended to go.
“That woman sound like Dr. Bourne to you?”
Angie shook her head. “No. Definitely younger.”
I nodded.
Bubba said, “So this guy in the house, he did something heinous?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
Bubba reached under his trench coat, pulled out a .22 and screwed on a silencer. “So, okay. Let’s go.”
“What?”
He looked at me. “Let’s just kick in the door and shoot him.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “You said he did something heinous. So, okay, let’s shoot him. Come on. It’ll be fun.”
“Bubba,” I said, and placed my hand over his so he lowered the gun, “we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet. We need this guy to lead us to whoever he’s working with.”
Bubba’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open and he stared at the van wall like a child whose birthday balloon just popped in front of his face.
“Man,” he said to Angie, “why’s he bring me along if I can’t shoot someone?”
Angie put a hand on his neck. “There, there, fella. All good things come to those who wait.”
Bubba shook his head. “You know what comes to those who wait?”
“What?”
“More waiting.” He frowned. “And still no one gets shot.” He pulled a bottle of vodka from his trench coat, took a long pull, and shook his massive head. “Don’t seem fair sometimes.”
Poor Bubba. Always showing up for the party in the wrong clothes.
18
Miles Lovell left his house shortly after sundown as the sky saturated itself in tomato red and the smell of low tide rode the breeze inland.
We let him get a few blocks away before we turned out onto the beach road and picked him back up again near the gas tanks on that industrial-refuse stretch of 228. Traffic was much lighter now, and what there was of it headed toward the beach, not away from it, so we hung a quarter mile back, waiting for the light to leave the sky.
The red only deepened, though, and plumes of deep blue feathered up around it. Angie rode with Bubba in the van and I rode ahead of them in the Porsche as Lovell led us back through Hingham and onto Route 3 again, heading farther south.
It wasn’t a long ride. A few exits later, he pulled off by Plymouth Rock, and then, a mile later, turned down several smaller dirt roads, each getting dustier and less developed as we hung way back and hoped we didn’t lose him in any switchbacks or small lanes shrouded by thick vegatation and low tree limbs.
I had my windows rolled down and the radio off, and I could hear him occasionally, the crunch of his tires on rutted road up ahead, a strain of the jazz on his stereo flowing through his sunroof. We were deep in the Myles Standish forest, as far as I could tell, the pine and white maple and larch towering over us under the red sky, and I smelled the cranberries long before I saw them.
It was a sweet, sharp smell, hot with a secondary odor of fermenting fruit laid bare to a day’s sun. White vapors rose and drifted through the trees as the night cooled the bog, and I pulled over in the last clearing before the bog itself, watching Lovell’s taillights wind down the final small lane that led to the soft banks.
Bubba’s van pulled in beside the Porsche, and the three of us exited our vehicles and carefully shut our doors behind us so that the only noises they made were soft clicks as the locks caught. Fifty yards through thin trees we heard Miles Lovell’s door open, followed by the snap of it shutting. The sounds were hard and clear out here, traveling over the misty bogs and through the thin tree line as if they were occurring beside us.
We walked down the damp, dark lane that led to the bog, and through the thin trees we caught glimpses of the sea of cranberry, green at this stage of their growth, the knobby surfaces of the fruit bobbing in the moisture and white vapor, lapping gently against themselves.
Footsteps echoed off wood and a crow cawed in the deepening night air and the treetops rustled in a soft humid kiss of wind. We reached the edge of the tree line by the rear bumper of the BMW, and I peeked my head around the final tree trunk.
The cranberry bog lay wide and undulating before me. The white vapor hung like cold breath an inch over the crop, and a cross of dark plank wood divided the entire bog into four long rectangles. Miles Lovell walked up one of the shorter planks. In the center of the cross was a small wood pump shed, and Lovell opened its door, walked inside, and shut the door behind him.
I crept out along the shoreline, used Lovell’s car to block me, I hoped, from the view of anyone on the far side of the bog, and looked at the shed. It was barely big enough to qualify as a Porta Potti, and there was one window on the right side facing the long plank that stretched north across the bog. A muslin curtain hung down on the other side of the glass, and as I watched, the panes turned muted orange with light and Lovell’s muddy silhouette passed by and vanished on the other side.
Save for the car, there was no cover out here—just soggy shore and marshy ground to my right that buzzed gently with bees, mosquitoes, and crickets rousing themselves for the night shift. I crept back to the tree line. Angie, Bubba, and I worked our way through the thin trunks to the last group fronting the bog. From there we could see the front and left side of the hut and a portion of the cross that stretched over to the opposite shore and disappeared in a black thicket of trees.
“Shit,” I said. “Wish I’d brought the binoculars.”
Bubba sighed, pulled a pair from his trench coat, and handed them to me. Bubba and his trench coat—sometimes you’d swear he carried a Kmart in the thing.
“You’re like Harpo Marx with that coat. I ever tell you that?”
“Seven, maybe eight hundred times.”
“Oh.” My cool quotient was definitely slipping.
I trained the binoculars on the shed, racked the focus, and got nothing for my efforts but
a clear view of wood. I doubted there was a window on the far side, and the one I’d seen on the right wall had been curtained, so it appeared for the moment that all there was to do was wait for the mystery man to appear for his meeting with Lovell and hope the mosquitoes or bees didn’t come out in force. Of course, if they did, Bubba probably had a can of repellent in his trench coat, maybe a bug light.
Around us, the sky bled free of red and gradually painted itself dark blue, and the green cranberries brightened against the fresh backdrop while the mist changed from white to mossy gray and the trees turned black.
“You think the guy Miles is meeting could’ve shown up first?” I asked Angie after a while.
She looked out at the hut. “Anything’s possible. He would have had to approach from another way, though. Lovell made the only tracks over there, and we’re parked to the north.”
I panned the binoculars to the southern tip of the cross where it disappeared in tall stalks of withered yellow vegetation rising out of a gaseous marsh teeming with mosquitoes. That definitely seemed the least appealing and most difficult direction from which to approach, unless you really dug malarial infections.
Behind me, Bubba snorted and kicked at the ground, snapped a few thick twigs off a tree.
I turned the lenses on the opposite shore, the eastern tip of the cross. There, the shore looked firmer and the trees were thick and dry and tall. So thick, in fact, that no matter how much I adjusted and readjusted the focus, I could see nothing but black trunks and green moss going back fifty yards.
“If he’s in there, he came from the other side.” I pointed, then shrugged. “I guess we get a glimpse of him on the way out. You got a camera?”
Angie nodded, pulled from her bag a small Pentax with built-in auto lenses and flash adjustments for night shooting.
I smiled. “One of my Christmas presents.”
“Christmas ’97.” She chuckled. “The only one I can safely show in public.”
I caught her eyes, and she held my gaze for a moment in which I felt a stab of sudden, overpowering yearning. Then she dropped her eyes, a flush of heat rose up my face, and I went back to the binoculars.
“You guys do this sort of shit every day, don’t you?” Bubba said after about another ten minutes. He took another pull from his vodka bottle and burped.
“Oh, sometimes we get car chases,” Angie said.