Night Vision (31 page)

For the period of a week—sometimes two, depending on the importance of the assignment—I charted the subtle movements and interactions of a stranger’s life. I did it invisibly, with a laboratory precision that in the end allowed me to segregate that person from his surroundings as effectively as using tweezers to remove a bee, undetected, from its colony.

That was my specialty—my genius, Tomlinson might have called it, had he ever learned the truth. What I do, however, doesn’t demand genius. I have no illusions about my own gifts, other than to acknowledge that, since I was very young, I have had an obsessive need to identify, then define, orderly patterns in what most would dismiss as chaos.

We all have our quirks.

That’s my job when out of the country: to discern order in the chaos. To create a precision target. As creator, I am also tasked with finding the most effective method of displacing that target from his surroundings.

I am good at it.

After wrestling with the decision for a mile, I decided I wasn’t in the mood for a conversation with Tomlinson. Instead, I pulled over long enough to send a text:

After a moment of thought, I added,
Is Emily safe?
then sent the text with a slow
Whoosh!
that told me reception was getting worse.

I got out of the truck long enough to urinate, then got back in, but left the dome light on. Out of long habit—or, perhaps, just to reestablish my focus—I took inventory of my equipment bag. First, I popped the magazines of both pistols to make certain they were loaded, although I knew they were.

I am not a gun fancier or collector, but the precision tolerances of fine machinery appeals to the same sensibilities that cause me to linger over a fine microscope. It was true of my Sig Sauer P226 pistol. The Sig was one of the first issued after the Joint Service Small Arms test trials of 1985, and I have trusted my life to it since that time. I had recently purchased a new magazine that held fifteen rounds instead of only ten. I had also added Tritium night sights, which I had yet to try on a range.

I held the Sig’s magazine in my hand, testing the mobility of the rounds with my thumb, the odor of Hoppe’s No. 9 gun solvent spreading a lingering sweetness through the cab of my truck. It reminded me of Tomlinson’s crack about smelling gun oil in the lab whenever I felt restless. An inside joke? Or was it a veiled reminder that, one way or another, my relationship with Emily was doomed as long as I continued to live my shadow life.

Whether a dig or a warning, what he’d said was true: When I get restless, it shows. After a month or two without a new mission, I find myself studying maps. I find myself at night sitting within easy reach of my Trans-Oceanic Radio, recleaning my weapons as if that private ceremony was an incantation that would bring a call from my handler.

After inspecting the Sig Sauer, I took the much smaller, lighter Kahr pistol in hand. It was black-matte stainless, comfortable to hold. After so many years trusting the Sig, it was tough to admit that this was now my weapon of choice. It wasn’t as tiny as another favorite—a Seecamp .380—but the Kahr slipped just as easily out of the pocket. And it could be hidden almost as completely in the palm of my hand. Firing the Kahr, though, was a pleasure, and it had more stopping power than the Seecamp.

Like the Sig, the Kahr was loaded with federal Hydra-Shok hollow points. But the Kahr had the added advantage of a built-in laser sight that was activated whenever I gripped the thing to fire.

Unlike the high-tech Dazer Guardian, also in the bag, the laser sight was red, not green.

It was unlikely that I would use any of these weapons, just as I knew there was very little chance now that I would stumble onto Harris Squires and the Guatemalan girl. He and Tula were on their way to Red Citrus while I was out here wasting time on back roads east of Immokalee.

It didn’t matter. I was in a certain mood. To rationalize wasting time, I told myself this was training, a way to stay sharp.

I leaned to roll down the passenger window, and drove on.

 

 

Tomlinson is right.
I’m not a fast driver. I slowed even more whenever I switched on the dome light and checked the satellite aerial. My pal had used a highlighter to square off the boundaries of Squires’s property, but it still wasn’t easy to pick out landmarks. I was driving through a shadowed mesa of cypress that I guessed was Owl Hammock. It meant I had at least fifteen miles to go.

Thus far, I hadn’t passed a car. Not one.

Alternately squinting at the aerial, then accelerating, my headlights tunneled through a starry silence, toward a horizon abloom with the nuclear glow of Fort Lauderdale, eighty miles to the east.

I passed through the precise geometrics of tomato fields and citrus orchards. Then more cypress domes that exited into plains of myrtle and saw grass. My eyes moved from the road, to the satellite aerial, then to my watch.

11:45 p.m
.

Training exercise or not, my mind wandered back to Emily. My reaction to her had been a surprise. A shock, in fact, and now it was a new source of restlessness that was pleasure mixed with angst.

I had left Tomlinson alone with Emily for a reason—a deceit that Tomlinson had guessed correctly. It was a test. He suspected it, I knew it. I was subjecting myself, my new lover and my old friend to yet another of my relentless personal evaluations.

“Why do you set traps for people you care about when you’re the one who is inevitably hurt?” a smart but troubled woman had once asked me.

I had no answer then. I had no answer now.

It was a uncomfortable truth to admit, but that was balanced by something I believed with equal honesty: Emily Marston could be trusted. There was no rational explanation for why I trusted her, but I did. Attraction is commonplace. A visceral, indefinable unity is not. The chemistry that links two people is comprised of elements too subtle to survive dissection, too complex to permit inspection.

It was unlike me to ponder the exigencies of romance, but that’s exactly what I was doing as the miles clicked by. My mind returned to the bedroom, where I had used every gentleness to follow Emily’s physical signals, then fine-tuned what I was doing to match her respiratory and moaning guidance. Our rhythms escalated until, finally, she had tumbled over a sheer apex, crying out, then sobbing, a woman so disoriented even minutes later that she seemed as vulnerable as a creature newly born.

I’d like to believe I am a competent lover, but I knew my skills did not account for an eruption of such magnitude. It was Emily, uniquely Emily, her physical release so explosive that it was as unmistakably visual as it was audible—a jettisoning fact that only made her sob harder, and voice her embarrassment.

“That’s why I’ve always been so careful about men,” she had whispered. “I can’t help how my body reacts, and it’s goddamn embarrassing. It creeped Paul out, I think, so I almost never really let myself go. Tonight,
Christ
! I got carried away, I guess. I’m so sorry.”

Sorry? I had just experienced one of the most sensual couplings of my life. I did my best to reassure her and succeeded, apparently, because half an hour later it happened again.

To equate sexual release with trust was as irrational—or as sensible—as any other aspect of love play between male and female. But there it was. It was the way I felt.

Just by thinking it through, I felt better about coming to Immokalee alone. After only a day together, I had no right to expect fidelity from the woman nor a reason to demand trust. If Tomlinson or anyone else could lure Emily away, so be it. I would be disappointed.
Very
disappointed. But I also knew that I would be secretly relieved. Discovering the truth tonight might spare me a more painful surprise down the road—no doubt the reason why I set such traps in the first place.

It was refreshing to be able to admit that to myself. Freeing, in its way. So I closed a mental door on the subject and focused my attention on what I was doing.

A good thing, too.

By then, in the lights of my truck, I could see a curvature of tree line that indicated a bend in the road. According to the satellite aerial, it was where County Road 846 turned north as County Road 857—and marked the midway point of Squires’s acreage. To the south was saw grass and swamp. To the north, more of the fertilized geometrics that define Florida agriculture.

I slowed enough to poke my head out the window and checked an east-facing road sign that drifted past. I was not surprised by its message. It was the same sign I’d seen in my odd vision of the girl.

IMMOKALEE 22 MILES.

Almost concurrently, two Hispanic-looking men on the Everglades side of the road caught my attention. They were standing by a gate, smoking cigarettes, no vehicle in sight. The gate was chained, I noted. I also noted the way the men turned their faces away from my headlights, shielding their identities, as I drove past.

They were spotters, I decided. They were standing watch. If Squires had indeed driven Tula Choimha home to Red Citrus, why were these two guarding the gate to his Everglades acreage?

It suggested to me that I had indeed seen some kind of structure beneath the trees in the aerial photo. It suggested to me that Squires and the girl were nearby.

Slowing to a crawl, I gave the men a mild wave. In response, one of them flipped his middle finger, then turned his back. His reaction was more than just aggressive. It was stupid. Why would he invite a confrontation down here in redneck country, where a lot of pickup trucks still had gun racks?

I decided the guy was either drunk or he was aggressive for a reason. Was there something happening beyond that metal gate he couldn’t risk anyone seeing or hearing?

I shifted into neutral, letting the truck coast, as I picked up my phone to call Leroy Melinski. It was the reasonable thing to do even though I didn’t want to do it. Perversely, I hoped there was no reception or that I got the man’s voice mail. Leaving the detective out of the loop would allow me to remain invisible.

I liked the potential of that. Neither Melinski nor anyone else knew where I was. The two men at the gate had no idea who
I
was. I could talk to the men or slip by unnoticed and search the area alone. Do it right and no one would ever know I had been there.

I got my wish. No reception.

I lifted my gear bag onto the passenger’s seat as I shifted into reverse and swung the truck around. By the time I got to the gate, both men were standing in the road, dark bandannas now covering their faces like bank robbers in a TV western, their body language communicating a rapper’s insolence. The bandannas and the tattoos told me they were members of a Latin gang—
pandilleros
, in Spanish slang.

Should I stop? Or should I park a mile up the road and jog back?

I foot-flicked my high beams on long enough to convince myself that neither man was palming a weapon. It gave me a reason to stop, which is exactly what I wanted to do—another perverse preference. I can tolerate stupidity because it is a biological condition. Ignorance and arrogance are choices, though.

I got out of the truck, engine running, lights on and my gear bag within easy reach if I needed it.

Beside the bag was the palm-sized laser I’d brought along, the Dazer Guardian. Because I had demonstrated the weapon to Emily earlier, I’d already overridden the twenty-four-hour security timer, which meant the weapon was operational, ready to use at the touch of a button.

I gave the thing a long last look, then almost stuck it in my pocket before I swung the door closed. But then I reminded myself I had never tried the light on a shark, let alone a couple of two-legged gangbangers, and now was not the time to risk a disappointing first test.

I felt confident I wouldn’t need it, or any of the other weapons in my bag.

I was wrong.

 

 

Because both men assumed
I didn’t speak Spanish, I listened to them exchange nervous and profane assessments of me as I walked toward them.

I was a homosexual cowboy who had lost his hat as well as a horse that I abused anally. I was a drunken Gomer—a welfare redneck—who was too poor to buy a truck that was not inhabited by rats.

Hearing that caused me to take a closer look at the lane beyond the gate, wondering about their truck. It was all tree shadows and darkness, but my headlights were bright enough that I should have seen reflectors on their vehicle.

I did not. It confirmed what I had suspected: The dirt road led to a cabin or some sort of area where these two had parked.

Maybe Squires and the girl were there now. If not, someone else was there, because I heard radio static and then watched one of the men pull a little VHF from his pocket, saying in Spanish, “Don’t bother us now. We got a visitor. Some white Gomer—he’s probably pissed because Dedos just flipped him off.”

Latin gang members use nicknames. Dedos was appropriate. It meant “Fingers
.
”

The radio crackled in reply, a voice saying, “Tell that
pendejo
to stop causing us problems! A white dude? Jesus Christ, get rid of him! What kind of car? You call me back if there’s any trouble, you hear me, Calavero?”

Calavero—another graphic nickname.

“A truck. An old redneck piece of shit, don’t worry about it,” Calavero said, looking at me now as he shoved the radio into his pocket. Then he said in pretty good English, “What you doing way out here, Gomer? You lost or something? Hell, man, my homey, he was just using his finger to point to the best direction for you to go. Straight up, unless you want to drive through a bunch of cow shit.”

The man laughed, glancing at his partner, Dedos, then used his chin to motion toward me. It was a signal to separate, possibly, because Calavero started moving to my left as Dedos took a couple of steps toward the truck’s passenger side.