“Whatcha lookin’ for, bum?” the boy inquired with all the unfeeling arrogance of a young tough. “Jesus, you sure do stink, man! Dint your mama teach ya to wash?”
Kelly didn’t even turn as he cringed and kept moving. This wasn’t part of the plan. Head down, turned slightly away from the lad who walked alongside him, keeping pace in a way calculated to torment the old bum, who switched his wine bottle to his other hand.
“I needs a drink, man,” the youth said, reaching for the bottle.
Kelly didn’t surrender it, because a street wino didn’t do that. The youngster tripped him, shoving him against the fence to his left, but it ended there. He walked back to his friend, laughing, as the bum rose and continued on his way.
“And don’ ya come back neither, man!” Kelly heard as he got to the end of the block. He had no plans to do so. He passed two more such knots of young people in the next ten minutes, neither of which deemed him worthy of any action beyond laughter. The back door of his perch was still ajar, and tonight, thankfully, the rats weren’t present. Kelly paused inside, listening, and, hearing nothing, he stood erect, allowing himself to relax.
“Snake to Chicago,” he whispered to himself, remembering his old call signs. “Insertion successful. At the observation point.” Kelly went up the same rickety stairs for the third and last time, finding his accustomed place in the southeast corner, sat down, and looked out.
Archie and Jughead were also in their accustomed place, a block away, he saw at once, talking to a motorist. It was ten-twelve at night. Kelly allowed himself a sip of water and a candy bar as he leaned back, watching them for any changes in their usual pattern of activity, but there was none he could see in half an hour of observation. Big Bob was in his place, too, as was his lieutenant, whom Kelly now called Little Bob. Charlie Brown was also in business tonight, as was Dagwood, the former still working alone and the latter still teamed up with a lieutenant Kelly had not bothered to name. But the Wizard wasn’t visible tonight. It turned out that he arrived late, just after eleven, along with his associate, whose assigned name was Toto, for he tended to scurry around like a little dog that belonged in the basket on the back of the Wicked Witch’s bicycle. “And your little dog, too ... ” Kelly whispered to himself in amusement.
As expected, Sunday night was slower than the two preceding nights, but Arch and Jug seemed busier than the others. Perhaps it was because they had a slightly more upscale client base. Though all served both local and outside customers, Arch and Jug seemed more often to draw the larger cars whose cleanliness and polish made Kelly think they didn’t belong in this part of town. That might have been an unwarranted assumption, but it was not important to the mission. The really important thing was something he had scoped out the previous night on his walk into the area and confirmed tonight as well. Now it was just a matter of waiting.
Kelly made himself comfortable, feeling his body relax now that all the decisions had been made. He stared down at the street, still intensely alert, watching, listening, noting everything that came and went as the minutes passed. At twelve-forty, a police radio car traveled one of the cross streets, doing nothing more than showing the flag. It would return a few minutes after two, probably. The city buses made their whirring diesel noises, and Kelly recognized the one-ten, with the brakes that needed work. Their thin screech must have annoyed every person who tried to sleep along its route. Traffic slowed perceptibly just after two. The dealers were smoking more now, talking more. Big Bob crossed the street to say something to the Wizard, and their relations seemed cordial enough, which surprised Kelly. He hadn’t seen that before. Maybe the man just needed change for a hundred. The police cruiser made its scheduled pass. Kelly finished his third Snickers bar of the evening, collecting the wrappers. He checked the area. He’d left nothing. No surface he had touched was likely to retain a fingerprint. There was just too much dust and grit, and he’d been very careful not to touch a windowpane.
Okay.
Kelly made his way down the stairs and out the back door. He crossed the street into the continuation of the alley that paralleled the street, still keeping to the shadows, still moving in a shambling but now exceeding quiet gait.
The mystery of the first night had turned out to be a boon. Archie and Jughead had vanished from his sight in a span of two or three seconds. He hadn’t looked away from them any longer than that. They hadn’t driven away, and they hadn’t had time to walk to the end of the block. Kelly had figured it out the previous night. These overlong blocks of row houses had not been built by fools. Halfway down, many of the continuous blocks had an arched passageway so that people could get to the alley more easily. It also made a fine escape route for Arch and Jug, and when conducting business they never strayed more than twenty feet from it. But they never really appeared to watch it either.
Kelly made sure of that, leaning against an outbuilding that might have been big enough to contain a Model-T Ford. Finding a pair of beer cans, he connected them with a piece of string and set them across the cement walk that led to the passage, making sure that no one could approach him from behind without making noise. Then he moved in, walking very lightly on his feet and reaching into his waistband for his silenced pistol. It was only thirty-five feet to cover, but tunnels transmitted sound better than telephones, and Kelly’s eyes scanned the surface for anything on which he might trip or make noise. He avoided some newspaper and a patch of broken glass, arriving close to the other end of the passageway.
They looked different close-up, human almost. Archie was leaning back against the brown bricks of a wall, smoking a cigarette. Jughead was also smoking, sitting on someone’s car fender, looking down the street, and every ten seconds the flaring of their cigarettes attacked and degraded their vision. Kelly could see them, but even ten feet away they couldn’t see him. It didn’t get much better.
“Don’t move,” he whispered, just for Archie. The man’s head turned, more in annoyance than alarm, until he saw the pistol with the large cylinder screwed onto the end. His eyes flickered to his lieutenant, who was still facing the wrong way, humming some song or other, waiting for a customer who would never come. Kelly handled the notification.
“Hey!” Still a whisper, but enough to carry over the diminishing street sounds. Jughead turned and saw the gun aimed at his employer’s head. He froze without being bidden. Archie had the gun and the money and most of the drugs. He also saw Kelly’s hand wave him in, and not knowing what else to do, he approached.
“Business good tonight?” Kelly asked.
“Fair ’nuf,” Archie responded quietly. “What you want?”
“Now what do you suppose?” Kelly asked with a smile.
“You a cop?” Jughead asked, rather stupidly, the other two thought.
“No, I’m not here to arrest anybody.” He motioned with his hand. “In the tunnel, facedown, quick.” Kelly let them go in ten feet or so, just enough to be lost to outside view, not so far that he didn’t have some exterior light to see by. First he searched them for weapons. Archie had a rusty 32 revolver that went into a pocket. Kelly next took the electrical wire from around his waist and wrapped it tightly around both sets of hands. Then he rolled them over.
“You boys have been very cooperative.”
“You better never come back here, man,” Archie informed him, hardly realizing that he hadn’t been robbed at all. Jug nodded and muttered. The response puzzled both of them.
“Actually, I need your help.”
“What with?” Archie asked.
“Looking for a guy, name of Billy, drives a red Roadrunner.”
“What? You dickin’ my ass?” Archie asked in rather a disgusted voice.
“Answer the question, please,” Kelly said reasonably.
“You get you fuckin’ ass outa here,” Archie suggested spitefully.
Kelly turned the gun slightly and fired two rounds into Jug’s head. The body spasmed violently, and blood flew, but not on Kelly this time. I
nstead it showered across Archie’s face, and Kelly could see the pusher’s eyes open wide in horror and surprise, like little lights in the darkness. Archie had not expected that. Jughead hadn’t seemed much of a conversationalist anyway, and the operation’s clock was ticking.
“I said please, didn’t I?”
“Sweet Jesus, man!” the voice rasped, knowing that to make any more noise would be death.
“Billy. Red Plymouth Roadrunner, loves to show it off. He’s a distributor. I want to know where he hangs out,” Kelly said quietly.
“If I tell you that—”
“You get a new supplier. Me,” Kelly said. “And if you tell Billy that I’m out here, you’ll get to see your friend again,” he added, gesturing to the body whose warm bulk pressed limply against Archie’s side. He had to offer the man hope, after all. Maybe even a little left-handed truth, Kelly thought: “Do you understand? Billy and his friends have been screwing around with the wrong people, and it’s my job to straighten things out. Sorry about your friend, but I had to show you that I’m serious, like.”
Archie’s voice tried to calm itself, but didn’t quite make it, though he reached for the hope he’d been offered. “Look, man, I can’t—”
“I can always ask somebody else.” Kelly paused significantly. “Do you understand what I just said?”
Archie did, or thought he did, and he talked freely until the time came for him to rejoin Jughead.
A quick search of Archie’s pockets turned up a nice wad of cash and a collection of small drug envelopes which also found their way into his jacket pockets. Kelly stepped carefully over both bodies and made his way to the alley, looking back to make sure that he hadn’t stepped in any blood. He’d discard the shoes in any case. Kelly untied the string from the cans and replaced them where he’d found them, before renewing his drunken gait, taking a roundabout path back to his car, repeating his carefully considered routine every step of the way. Thank God, he thought, driving north again, he’d be able to shower and shave tonight. But what the hell would he do with the drugs? That was a question that fate would answer.
The cars started arriving just after six, not so incongruous an hour for activity on a military base. Fifteen of them, clunkers, none less than three years old, and all of them had been totaled in auto accidents and sold for scrap. The only thing unusual about them was that though they were no longer drivable, they almost looked as though they were. The work detail was composed of Marines, supervised by a gunnery sergeant who had no idea what this was all about. But he didn’t have to. The cars were worked into place, haphazardly, not in neat military rows, but more the way real people parked. The job took ninety minutes, and the work detail left. At eight in the morning another such detail arrived, this one with mannequins. They came in several sizes, and they were dressed in old clothes. The child-size ones went on the swings and in the sandbox. The adult ones were stood up, using the metal stands that came with them. And the second work party left, to return twice a day for the indefinite future and move the mannequins around in a random way prescribed by a set of instructions thought up and written down by some damned fool of an officer who didn’t have anything better to do.
Kelly’s notes had commented on the fact that one of the most debilitating and time-consuming aspects of Operation KINGPIN had been the daily necessity of setting up and striking down the mockup of their objective. He hadn’t been the first to note it. If any Soviet reconnaissance satellites took note of this place, they would see an odd collection of buildings serving no readily identifiable purpose. They would also see a child’s playground, complete with children, parents, and parked cars, all of which elements would move every day. That bit of information would counter the more obvious observation—that this recreational facility was half a mile off any paved road and invisible to the rest of the installation.
16
Exercises
Ryan and Douglas stood back, letting the forensics people do their jobs. The discovery had happened just after five in the morning. On his routine patrol pattern. Officer Chuck Monroe had come down the street, and spotting an irregular shadow in this passage between houses, shone his car light down it. The dark shape might easily have been a drunk passed out and sleeping it off, but the white spotlight had reflected off the pool of red and bathed the arched bricks in a pink glow that looked wrong from the first instant. Monroe had parked his car and come in for a look, then made his call. The officer was leaning on the side of his car now, smoking a cigarette and going over the details of his discovery, which was to him less horrific and more routine than civilians understood. He hadn’t even bothered to call an ambulance. These two men were clearly beyond any medical redemption.
“Bodies sure do bleed a lot,” Douglas observed. It wasn’t a statement of any significance, just words to fill the silence as the cameras flashed for one last roll of color film. It looked as if two full-size cans of red paint had been poured in one spot.
“Time of death?” Ryan asked the representative from the coroner’s office.
“Not too long ago,” the man said, lifting one hand. “No rigor yet. After midnight certainly, probably after two.”
The cause of death didn’t require a question. The holes in both men’s foreheads answered that.
“Monroe?” Ryan called. The young officer came over. “What do you know about these two?”
“Both pushers. Older one on the right there is Maceo Donald, street name is Ju-Ju. The one on the left, I don’t know, but he worked with Donald.”
“Good eye spotting them, patrolman. Anything else?” Sergeant Douglas asked.
Monroe shook his head. “No, sir. Nothing at all. Pretty quiet night in the district, as a matter of fact. I came through this area maybe four times on my shift, and I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The usual pushers doing the usual business.” The implied criticism of the situation that everyone had to acknowledge as normal went unanswered. It was a Monday morning, after all, and that was bad enough for anyone.
“Finished,” the senior photographer said. He and his partner, on the other side of the bodies, got out of the way.
Ryan was already looking around. There was a good deal of ambient light in the passageway, and the detective augmented that with a large flashlight, playing its beam over the edges of the walkway, his eyes looking for a coppery reflection.
“See any shell casing, Tom?” he asked Douglas, who was doing the same thing.
“Nope. They were shot from this direction, too, don’t you think?”
“Bodies haven’t been moved,” the coroner said unnecessarily, adding, “Yes, definitely both shot from this side. Both were lying down when they were shot.”
Douglas and Ryan took their time, examining every inch of the passageway three times, for thoroughness was their main professional weapon, and they had all the time in the world—or at least a few hours, which amounted to the same thing. A crime scene like this was one you prayed for. No grass to conceal evidence, no furniture, just a bare brick corridor not five feet wide, everything self-contained. That would be a time-saver.
“Nothing at all, Em,” Douglas said, finishing his third sweep. “Probably a revolver, then.” It was a logical observation. Light .22 shell casings, ejected from an automatic, could fly incredible distances, and were so small that finding them could drive one to distraction. Rare was the criminal who recovered his brass, and to have recovered four little .22s in the dark—no, that wasn’t very likely.
“Some robber with a cheap one, want to bet?” Douglas asked.
“Could be.” Both men approached the bodies and squatted down close to them for the first time.
“No obvious powder marks,” the sergeant said in some surprise.
“Any of these houses occupied?” Ryan asked Monroe.
“Not either one of these, sir,” Monroe said, indicating both of those bordering the passageway. “Most of the ones on the other side of the street are, though.”
“Fou
r shots, early in the morning, you figure somebody might have heard?” The brick tunnel ought to have focused the sound like the lens of a telescope, Ryan thought, and the .22 had a loud, sharp bark. But how often had there been cases just like this one in which no one had heard a thing? Besides, the way this neighborhood was going, people divided into two classes: those who didn’t look because they didn’t care, and those who knew that looking merely increased the chance of catching a stray round.
“There’s two officers knocking on doors now, Lieutenant. Nothing yet.”
“Not bad shooting, Em.” Douglas had his pencil out, pointing to the holes in the forehead of the unidentified victim. They were scarcely half an inch apart, just above the bridge of the nose. “No powder marks. The killer must have been standing ... call it three, four feet, max.” Douglas stood back at the feet of the bodies and extended his arm. It was a natural shot, extending your arm and aiming down.
“I don’t think so. Maybe there’s powder marks we can’t see, Tom. That’s why we have medical examiners.” He meant that both men had dark complexions, and the light wasn’t all that good. But if there was powder tattooing around the small entrance wounds, neither detective could see it. Douglas squatted back down to give the entrance wounds another look.
“Nice to know somebody appreciates us,” the coroner’s representative said, ten feet away, scribbling his own notes.
“Either way, Em, our shooter has a real steady hand.” The pencil moved to the head of Maceo Donald. The two holes in his forehead, maybe a little higher on the forehead than the other man, were even closer together. “That’s unusual.”
Ryan shrugged and began his search of the bodies. Though the senior of the two, he preferred to do this himself while Douglas took the notes. He found no weapon on either man, and though both had wallets and ID, from which they identified the unknown as Charles Barker, age twenty, the amount of cash discovered wasn’t nearly what men in their business would customarily have on their persons. Nor were there any drugs—