Personal injuries (45 page)

As always, Kosic offered no response.

"I need to talk to him, Rollo."

Kosic's eyes rolled upward, the whites prominent. "Rollo, that's where I get the cash. That account. They know. I have to talk to him."

Kosic seemed to realize he had no choice about speaking. "I don't see the point in that."

"I've got to, Rollo. I haven't told Mason shit. But I have to tell him
some
-thing now. This checking account looks pretty funny, with all the cash flying out of it. We've gotta figure out how I can keep Morty clean. I'm not sure anybody'll believe it if I say he didn't know where the money was going. And some of the things I might say, that wouldn't be so hot for his license anyway. I need to know what Brendan can swing over at BAD."

Rollo had shaken his head metronomically throughout Robbie's remarks.

"Barking up the wrong tree. He can't help you with that."

Feaver feigned fury. He picked the subpoena up again and threw it down. He leaned over Kosic's desk.

"This is my fucking law license. This is God knows how long in the joint with God knows whose joint up my can. I'll handle the weight, but I need help. And I need it right now, Rollo. I gotta say the right thing."

For Kosic, for Tuohey, the dilemma was exactly what McManis had described: they had to keep Robbie on the reservation, but not say or do anything that might lead to further troubles for them down the line, if Feaver didn't stand up. Rollo pondered with a finger on his lips, the bad nail revealed. He said they'd get back to him.

As Robbie neared the door, Kosic finally volunteered something.

"It's too bad your dick ain't a weather vane, Robbie. With all the time you spend waving it around, you would have seen this coming."

There was no further word from them for more than twenty-four hours, but on Tuesday afternoon, Milacki appeared in Robbie's reception area without warning. Feaver called Alf, hoping to get the FoxBIte upstairs instantly. Instead, Klecker told Robbie just to leave his telephone on speaker. Downstairs, Alf rolled tape and muted his end so there would be no telltale sound from Robbie's phone as it broadcast the conversation. Phyllida then showed Milacki back. Sig was impressed by the stylish furnishings.

"Is that real client skin you got there on the walls?"

"Just the Polacks. They're the only ones who believe it's a face-lift when I ask them to bend over." Bonita had brought Sig a Coke and he excused himself after he belched.

"How's your golf game?" he asked.

"About as rusty as my clubs."

"Couple guys thought you'd like to catch an early round before work. Out at Rob Roy?" Brendan's club. "This is on the Q.T., okay? They don't open up for play until eightthirty, so these guys sneak out to number five." Milacki gave him instructions. Robbie was to park his car at the far end of-the club lot, near the maintenance shed, and then walk down a quarter of a mile or so, on a path through the Public Forest. Robbie knew the spot from childhood picnics.

"There's a little lake there?"

"Pond, right," said Milacki. "Tee off at 6 a.m."

Called to the conference room along with Stan, I heard the tape that afternoon. It sounded as if it had been recorded in a canyon.

"How'd he react when you mentioned the lake?" I asked Robbie. Feaver responded with a faint fatalistic smile. It was a remote setting. We were all thinking the same thing. Even Sennett.

"I want the surveillance tight," Sennett told Amari. "I want guys dressed up as the birds in the trees. Whatever it takes. I don't want Robbie out of sight."

Amari shrunk up his mouth sardonically. "We're on their turf. Literally. I bet you Tuohey can play that golf course in the dark. He knows when a twig is moved. And I gotta get my guys in place in the middle of the night? We'll be damn lucky if one of them doesn't fall in that lake and drown"

"They're setting it up to feel secure," said Sennett. "Tuohey thinks he won't have to look over his shoulder. If you do it right, Robbie, he'll let his hair down. He's got to make sure you'll stand up and take the hit for all of them. You just have to get him to say it out loud." I cornered McManis before I left. I wanted to know what he would say if I insisted that Robbie wear body armor, a bulletproof Kevlar vest. He might be able to hide it under a jacket. Jim turned over the idea. He skipped what I later realized was the correct response: Up close, it would be a head shot anyway.

"Look, George, I can't tell you it's completely safe. Because it isn't. But we're going to have surveillance all over the area. If anybody shows up we don't like or don't know, anybody the Kindle County agents recognize as hooked up, if it looks like Milacki or Kosic are packing-if anything's wrong, I'm closing down, George. That's my word to you." His light eyes did not leave mine. "But I don't see them writing Robbie secret messages and then disappearing him ten days later. They'd have made a move last week, if they were going to do that. That's the logic, at least." Then he turned his palms up, acknowledging how little any of these efforts at prediction were worth in the end.

CHAPTER 38

WE MET AT THE HICKORY STICK MALL, one of those vast emporia where the immense parking lot, all but empty in the still darkness of 4:30 a.m., bore silent comment on the trivial appetites that would have this place swarming by midday. A large reader board for the multiplex, the only thing illuminated, against a ghostly sky tinctured with the first gray drops of early light, advertised a number of the films I hadn't yet seen.
Last Action Hero. Jurassic Park.
For the moment, I had no need for imaginary adventures.

As cover, we'd agreed to wear fishing attire, posing as a group of Center City yahoos trying to land a crappie or two before work. I'd borrowed a khaki vest with zippers and pockets from Billy, one of my sons. The surveillance van moved around the huge lot picking up each of us, our signal no more subtle than our parking lights.

Robbie and I were together on the north side of the mall. We'd had only a few moments to talk before the gray van came by. Robbie had been up all night with Rainey.

Looking him over, I realized that Robbie Feaver had turned an important corner in his life in the last few weeks; he remained good-looking, but worry and sleeplessness and depression and poor diet had worn on him in a way likely to be permanent. They had stolen some of his glory. Yet he'd maintained the show-must-go-on spirit, and had done his best to look his part. He had on a snappy golf shirt, with a rich firestitch weave, and fancy golf spikes, wingtip style, with kelties over the laces.

I told him he could still say no to this.

"No I can't," he answered. "I always knew I was gonna get Brendan or die trying." The best news, he said, was that he'd be in the woods, so he wouldn't have to worry about taking a dump in his trousers.

In the van, I asked for a minute with Stan. As we stepped out, McManis handed each of us a pole. Neither Sennett nor I was much of an outdoorsman and McManis briefly called us back, warning us, completely deadpan, to watch out for the hooks. Stan and I stood out among the vacant painted stripes of the parking lot, a hundred yards from various expensive department stores, pretending to test the flex of the rods.

I told Stan that my client seemed fairly concerned he was about to be killed.

"Won't happen," said Sennett. "If I didn't think we could protect him, I wouldn't be going forward. Don't let him back out on me, George."

That wasn't the issue, I said. I just wanted Stan to assure Robbie that he'd virtually sing "The StarSpangled Banner" every time he mentioned Feaver's name to the sentencing judge. He did it, but Robbie didn't look much happier. In the van, we reviewed the scenario one more time and Alf readied the equipment. Odds said Milacki wouldn't frisk Bobbie again for fear that one more insult might drive him into the government's arms. Even so, with Robbie wearing neither boots nor a suit jacket, hiding the FoxBIte was a challenge. Considering everything, Alf had decided to secrete the units in the crown of a wide-brimmed Australian-style raffia golf hat, concealing them under a sturdy rubberized lining. Kiecker made Robbie go through several swings to be certain the headgear would stay on. The one serious problem was that in order to fit the recorder and transmitter within the slender space available, Alf had to use a smaller battery. That meant Robbie couldn't meander through the round with Tuohey waiting for him to get conversational at the nineteenth hole. The FoxBlte would run out of power after an hour and forty minutes.

A staticky squall of radio reports reached the van from the agents positioned in the Public Forest. The communications were easily overheard and sometimes unsettling. The surveillance was not as comprehensive as planned. Amari's guys had erected deer blinds in four of the oaks that bordered the golf course. The process of building them in the middle of the night, with the County Forest Police occasionally sweeping down the neighboring roads, had been both comical and hair-raising. But even with nightvision binoculars, it had been impossible to fully scope out the terrain. As light began to perk up, the agents were reporting that there were a number of spots--especially the deep bunkers of the sand traps-where Robbie would be completely out of sight. There had been some discussion of putting the portable camera in Robbie's golf bag, but it would have been almost impossible to keep the lens trained in the right direction. Instead, the four surveillance agents in the trees were each equipped with cameras, two standard video cams that would record in color, and two of the 2.4 GHz models that would transmit a picture to the van. A cordon of additional agents would be poised at the perimeter of the course with binoculars, joggers and walkers, out with the first sunlight, were not uncommon, but Sennett for once seemed unconcerned about the risks of detection.

"If we get blown, we get blown," he said. Nobody could get word to Tuohey anyway in the middle of the golf course. Sennett, to his credit, was determined not to lose sight of Robbie. Finally, at 5:30 a.m., it was time to go. Amari had a unit tailing Tuohey, and they radioed that Brendan and Kosic had just pulled out of the garage of the stone house in Latterly. Two surveillance cars, new Novas that had been fitted over with the rusted bodies of earlier models, swept into the mall lot to follow Robbie to the country club. Evon and McManis and I walked Robbie to the Mercedes.

"Any time you think this is out of control," Jim said, "you say Ùncle Petros' and we're coming to get you. You don't have to be right. If you're spooked, bring it down. Nobody'll say word one afterwards."

I shook his hand and Evon gave him a half-embrace with an arm quickly raised to his shoulder.

"Big show," she said. "Big star." He liked the thought. We drove to a predetermined spot in the Public Forest, a small graveled area where bikers and cancers commonly off loaded their equipment. Alf and Clevenger worked feverishly on the electronics; everything functioned. From the outposts in the trees, the cameras captured an impressive panorama, and, with the benefit of manual operation, could magnify images up to 48

times as they zoomed in. Alf reported that the agent-cameramen were belted to the tree trunks like loggers.

At 5:45 precisely, the Mercedes appeared in the club parking lot. The hot pink of sunrise was almost gone from the eastern sky. Robbie, who had put on a white vest to protect against the morning chill, looked to the woods with a commanding face-aloft expression practiced in the court room. Then he threw the heavy white leather golf bag, with a brand name emblazoned on it in gold script, over his shoulder, and set his hat on his head with both hands. To conserve power, the FoxBlte had been turned off after McManis recorded the customary initiating speech. One of the surveillance cars now prowled along the edge of the road and the agent on the driver's side hit the FoxBlte remote. In the van, we heard Robbie state, "This is a test, this is just a test of the emergency warning system." Alf radioed and the agent's auto pulled away. As Milacki had promised, the maintenance gate was unlocked, and Robbie began trudging through the heavy midwestern woods. This was, for the most part, a first-growth forest, full of the old hardwoods, bur oaks and pin oaks and white oaks and hickories, with ferns and runners growing up in their shade. Primroses and wild raspberries clustered in the marginal patches of sun. Robbie tromped along, preoccupied and unconnected to what was around him, much like the settlers who'd walked the forest a century before. The traders, farmers, and merchants who'd first come to this area were hardscrabble types looking solely for the chance to profit. The land to them was not the home of the spirit but a commodity to exploit. The Public Forests had been saved from despoliation at the end of the nineteenth century through the efforts of a few Eastern-educated architects and city planners, rich men's sons who were indulged because these parcels seemed too remote to be worth quarreling over.

On the audio, as Robbie walked, there was an almost musical background of birds and insects, the rutting calls of squirrels and chipmunks, and the rushing water of little brooks descending from the pond where Robbie was to meet Tuohey. He groaned now and then under the weight of the bag, but skipped the occasional wisecracks that sometimes punctuated the recordings when he was alone. Eventually, he reached the road through the Public Forest. The parking lot where we were stationed was no more than three or four hundred yards away. He walked down in our direction, then followed a woodland path back toward the golf course. On the screen, we saw him step over the galvanized guard rail at a curve. The ground was soft as he approached the water and, offbalance with the bag, he stumbled at one point, catching himself against the steep bank. Even so, a spot of black mud stained his vest. Habits being what they are, he fussed with it for a time before heading on.

The chain-link fence between the country club and the forest broke at this point for a bridge that crossed the neck of Galler's Pond. The spring waters spread with indifference between rich and poor, over both public and private land. The bridge was divided along its length by a fourfoot stockade fence. The rear side, with the cross-braces running between the posts, faced Robbie. He was supposed to dump his clubs over and then use the ties to vault onto the club property. He had just boosted the bag across when, on the screen, he cranked a concerned look over his shoulder. The agent operating the nearby camera was taken unawares. He'd kept a tight shot on Feaver for fear that he'd lose him among the leaves. Now, as the cameraman attempted to locate what had distracted Robbie, he panned far too quickly and couldn't regain focus as he retreated to a wider shot. By the time he'd readjusted and found Feaver, Robbie was back at the bottom of the bridge talking to a Kindle County police officer. We'd heard Robbie tromping down the span, dispensing a sunny greeting, but it was a shock to see it was a cop who'd accosted him.