The Car Bomb (The detroit im dying Trilogy, Book 1) (19 page)

“
Why not the Detroit police? They have so many more people and resources.”

“
Because Peoples thinks they may be involved in this corruption thing too. At least one or two of them anyway. We can’t risk it.”

Bobby shook his head. “If we go up to Grandma’s, what are you going to do?”

“
I’ll spend the night at the Airport Ramada. I’ve arranged to meet Peoples there in the morning. I’ll make sure I’m not followed, and the station is sending a couple of security guards to stake out the room, so I’ll be fine.”

“
Rent-a-cops?” Bobby sounded incredulous.

“
Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

As Marci got to her feet, Frank glanced
at Tim Allen on the Sony. He’d met Allen a couple of times at the station on promo tours. Seemed like a nice guy but bottling some kind of strange anger.

“
Why are you doing this, Frank?” she asked, “For what? You’re risking your life and maybe ours for some guy who was charged with murder. And for a story that won’t make any damn difference.”

He turned to her. “It makes a difference to me. That’s all I can tell you. If I don’t do this story, it’s like my work means nothing, and my job is a joke.”

“
What story, Daddy?”

His daughter was standing in the doorway.

“
Oh, it’s a long one, baby.”

Jen moved into the room. “What’s going on? Why is there a cop waiting out in front?”

Marci stared at Frank and said, “Someone tried to kill your father tonight.”

Bobby also stood and used the remote to turn off the Sony. “Some guy drove by and tried to hit Dad while he was doing a stand up downtown.”

“
Hit? You mean with a gun?” Jen kept moving, straight for her father. “Daddy, please tell me what’s going on?”

He folded her in his arms, grateful for the contact. “Not a gun, with a car. And I don’t know if he was really trying to hit me. It may have been more of a scare tactic. The important thing, honey, is that you and Mom and Bobby are spending a night or two up north at Grandma’s until this thing is settled.”

Jen leaned back and glared at her mother. “What thing? Why don’t I know anything about this?”

Marci ignored her. “How’s it going to get settled, Frank?”

“
Look, if the tape Peoples gives me really incriminates the judge, I’ll do the story tomorrow night, and it’ll be all over. Once this thing hits air, Peoples will feel safe enough to go to the feds, and the heat’ll be off. I’m a target only as long as I’m helping Peoples go public and get to the feds.”

Marci walked out of the room with an angry step.

In darkness now, Bobby got behind the wheel of a white Navigator, Jen was already in the backseat, and Marci was walking out of the house. Carrying a garment bag and a small suitcase, Frank closed the front door and followed her to the back of the big SUV. In the hatch, he placed the suitcase next to a couple of other small bags.

“
Marci, I’m sorry about all this. I know it’s unfair to you and the kids, but really there’s no other way right now.”

“
Well, we’ve always taken a backseat to your job. I hope you get your story.”

Next to the open front passenger door, he tried to caress her shoulder, but she turned away. He said, “Please believe me, honey. What I said tonight on the show is the god’s truth. I love you, and I’m going to make it up to you and the kids.”

She turned back to him. “Why did you do that, Frank? Why that whole confession thing on TV?”

Looking into her angry eyes, he wondered how much he should say. “Listen, they were trying to blackmail me. Apparently that little prick Barnes is going to do a big spread this weekend with a lot of dirt. And they were threatening to give him a lot more dirt if I didn’t drop the story. So I did the confession to counter all that.”

She gazed at him for a second. Were those hazel eyes maybe softening a bit? “You know, Frank, your trouble is, you’re so good at delivering a message after all these years of working over your audience, even you don’t know whether or not you’re telling the truth.”

No, her look had not softened, but he thought there might be an opening here. “If anybody knows, darling, it’s you.”

She glanced at Bobby in the car. Their son was obviously hanging on every word. “No, I’m as clueless as everybody else. I also have no idea why I should, but I still love you, Frank.”

He kissed her delicately on the mouth, then gave her a grateful grin.

She said, “Please be careful.”

He nodded. “Of course. Just don’t worry.”

She climbed into the Navigator. “Yes, silly me. What’s to worry?”

He leaned down and winked at Bobby. “Take care of your mom.”

The boy answered with an obvious effort to stay cool. “Yeah, drive carefully, Dad.”

Jen didn’t wait for him to turn her way. “We love you, Daddy.”

“
I love all of you, baby. See you soon.”

As the SUV rolled down the drive, he moved to the Viper, dropped the garment bag on the passenger seat and got in. Turning the ignition, he watched his family turn right and drive past Officer Jerry.

A moment later he rolled up next to the patrol car and lowered his window. “Hey, thanks for this, Jerry. Can you make sure they get to I-75 without being followed?”

“
Sure thing, Frank. No problem.”

On the road that twisted away from the lake, he came to the 4-way stop where Officer Jerry had been waiting that night three months ago, hidden partially behind that huge elm on the left. When Frank had cruised through the stop, then stepped on it, weaving home after way too much wine with Sherie, Jerry had stopped him two blocks later. Face to inebriated face, the young officer could have put him in a world of trouble that night. Instead, the guy had urged him to negotiate the last few blocks home with care, get himself to bed and sleep it off.

He already owed Officer Jerry big time. And now his help tonight. Maybe a nice box of steaks when all this was over.

The base of the elm was not occupied tonight, but with only a quick glance to his right before taking off again, he missed catching a glimpse of the black Taurus waiting in the darkness up a side road to the left. Its lights off, the Taurus moved promptly to follow Frank.

For a while it kept a considerable distance from the red tail-lights of the Viper rolling through residential streets and heading for Woodward Avenue. But when Frank turned south onto the divided boulevard and merged with the flow of traffic, the Taurus had it easier. And easier still on I-696 east and I-75 south.

Ten minutes later as he moved through heavier city traffic, Frank continued checking his rear-view mirror. Any chance he’d caught a tail? Not likely, but this was no time for guessing.

When he pulled up to the entrance of the Black Knight and spotted his favorite car jockey running toward him, he climbed out and tossed the car keys high in the air. The kid arrived just in time to grab them.

“
Hey, Andy, this is your lucky night.”

“
Whoah! How you doin’ Mr. D.?”

“
I got a deal for you, Andy. You keep those, and we trade rides until, say, 10 am tomorrow. Deal?”

“
Until tomorrow? Deal!”

Rolling slowly into the restaurant’s drive, the black Taurus paused for a moment, then continued moving toward the back parking lot as Frank walked with the valet kid into the vestibule. Rolling into a spot near the back end of the lot, the Taurus shut down. A minute later the Viper appeared and nosed into a spot reserved for the valet service. The valet kid got out and ran back to his duties.

One more minute and Frank emerged from the Knight’s service entrance and walked quickly into the lot. From the Viper he pulled out the garment bag, then searched the vehicles parked against the back fence. Finding a dirty, 10-year-old Ranger pickup, he opened the door, tossed in the bag and slid behind the wheel. He had to turn the ignition twice before the Ranger’s engine kicked in, then he moved toward the lot’s back exit.

The Taurus was once again on the move.

The take-off roar of a 747 actually rattled the window of Room 17 at the Airport Ramada, a long, two-story building with an exterior entrance to each room. At the door to 17, two armed, uniformed security guards sat on straight-backed chairs.

One of them tilted back on two legs, leaning against the motel wall. “What’s he doin’ with an old pickup? I thought he drove one of them Vipers. Like supposedly they only made 200 of them suckers last year, and he got one.”

His partner sat forward, hunched over, forearms on knees, smoking a cigarette. “Who the fuck knows? They say he’s fuckin’ nuts.” He took a long slow drag, then lifted his head and blew. “Anyway, this is gonna be one long-assed night.”

“
Hey, last time you looked was they payin’ you?”

“
Yeah, almost enough to buy his gas.”

Inside, 17 was a long, narrow room brightened somewhat with four large prints over the two beds, tracing in abbreviated fashion the history of commercial aviation. Frank was paying them no attention as he sat in his undershorts on one of the beds. He was also ignoring Letterman chatting away with Madonna about where she learned to play baseball for “A League of Their Own.”

Instead, he was gazing at a wallet-sized snap shot of his dead son Tom. And then seemingly out of nowhere, an image suddenly popped into his head of Tommy at 21 months, clamped in his car seat in the back of their old Pontiac, watching with those big brown eyes out the window at a brilliant autumn afternoon as they cruised through their old neighborhood in suburban Pleasant Ridge. It was lined with modest homes and all those big red and yellow Oaks and Maples. And filled with the boy’s delight, his little voice had announced, “Daddy, the trees are flowers!”

He had known then that his first-born son had the soul of a poet.

And now following immediately was an intensely vivid memory of how he had so often felt at moments like that, with Tommy and, of course, with the other kids as well. A totally desperate and hopeless love that let him know without a doubt that he could not survive the news of something awful happening to one of his children.

In those days, if some random, nightmare thought occurred involving one of the kids, he was simply not able to hold it in his mind. His brain would reel away in terror. He could not bear it. Over the years, as the children had grown older and seemingly a bit less vulnerable, that feeling had abated slightly, or at least occurred a bit less often.

Until that unthinkable August day a year ago when the nightmare had actually happened. And he had, in the end, not fallen apart.

Over the next days, weeks and months he had continued to hold it together, for Marci, Jen and Bobby, for friends too moved or worried to know what to say, and yes, for the tough, unyielding public persona that over the years had actually become part of how he saw himself.

In the end, perhaps, the most powerful motive force had been a fear that never left him, that had simply not allowed thinking or feeling much about his son, that had always threatened to confirm the haunting old certainty that losing a child was something he could not endure.

So many times in the past year he had stopped himself from replaying memories like, “Daddy, the trees are flowers!” Until just the past several days when on the island that locked door had begun to crack open.

Now his first tears since the funeral were running on his cheeks. And he simply let them come.

The bright mid-morning sun’s gleam on the Airport Ramada’s once-white walls only revealed their grime. Next to the dirty Ranger pickup in the parking area in front of Room 17 was the blue, unmarked Channel 5 van. And moving into the parking lot now was the red Viper. Rolling slowly until it got close to the pickup, it then wheeled into an adjacent empty spot, roared and shut down.

Out of the roadster popped Andy in jeans and a windbreaker. He looked around, then called to the security guy, who was up out of his chair with a cigarette, “Frank told me to bring it here.”

The guy took a drag. “Yeah, he said.”

Andy looked back one last time at the Viper, then climbed into his pickup. He leaned down for the keys under the seat and then took three tries at the ignition to get it started.

The good-sized interior of Room 17 was so jammed with people and equipment that it now seemed only a small, cramped space. In his navy suit and red tie, Frank leaned forward on a straight-back chair, leafing through pages of notes. On a tripod over his right shoulder was a Beta Cam, manned until two minutes ago by Marty, who had announced he had to take a leak.

Two stand lights were shining at a second straight-back chair occupied by Anthony Peoples, his long, narrow hands fidgeting in his lap.

The bulky black audio tech James had clipped a mike to a lapel of the frayed brown sport coat Peoples was wearing over a black t-shirt. Sitting on one of the beds next to his audio equipment, tape boxes and colored lighting gel, James put his headset on and gazed at the portable monitor occupying the other bed with the image of Anthony Peoples on screen. Also on that bed sat the second security guard, hunched over but keeping his eye on the door. Marty finally came back to his camera, gazed into the eyepiece and made sure of his focus.

Frank was still looking at his notes. “How we doin’, Marty?”

“
Give it five seconds, Frank, and I’ll have speed.”

Frank glanced up at the security guard. “Luke, for this part I’d like you to sit outside with your partner and keep us safe and sound.”

Luke nodded and went to the door. “Okay, Frank.”

Once the door closed, Frank picked up a Hi-8 videotape cassette from the bed next to him. “So, Anthony, let’s get to how this videotape was made.”

Anthony nodded but said nothing.