looped all three crowbars over my forearm and went inside and
returned them to the old guy behind the counter. Then I got
back in the car and followed the only road out of town, all the
way to Washington D.C.
403
I took a short counterclockwise loop on the Beltway and
went looking for the worst part of town I could find. There was
plenty of choice. I picked a four-block square that was mostly
crumbling warehouses with narrow alleys between. I found
what I wanted in the third alley I checked. I saw an emaciated
whore come out a brick doorway. I went in past her and found a
guy in a hat. He had what I wanted. It took a minute to get some
mutual trust going. But eventually cash money settled our
differences, like it always does everywhere. I bought a little
reefer, a little speed, and two dime rocks of crack cocaine. I
could see the guy in the hat wasn’t impressed by the quantities. I could see he wrote me off as an amateur.
Then I drove to Rock Creek, Virginia. I got there just before
five o’clock. Parked three hundred yards from 110th Special
Unit headquarters, up on a rise, where I could look down
over the fence into the parking lot. I picked out Willard’s
car with no trouble at all. He had told me all about it. A
classic Pontiac GTO. It was right there, near the rear exit. I
slumped way down in my seat and kept my eyes wide open and
watched.
He came out at five fifteen. Bankers’ hours. He fired up the
Pontiac and backed it away from the building. I had my window
cracked open for air and even from three hundred yards I could
hear the rumble of the pipes. They made a pretty good V-8
sound. I figured it was a sound Summer would have enjoyed. I
made a mental note that if I ever won the lottery I should buy
her a GTO of her own.
I fired up the Ford. Willard came out of the lot and turned
towards me. I hunkered down and let him go past. Then I
waited one thousand, two thousand and U-turned and followed
after him. He was an easy tail. With the window down I could
have done it by sound alone. He drove fairly slow, big and
obvious up ahead, near the crown of the road. I stayed well back
and let the drive-time traffic fill his mirrors. He headed east
towards the D.C. suburbs. I figured he would have a rental in
Arlington or Maclean from his Pentagon days. I hoped it wasn’t
an apartment. But I figured it would more likely be a house.
404
With a garage, for the muscle car. Which was good, because a
house was easier.
It was a house. It was on a rural street in the no-man’s-land
north of Arlington. Plenty of trees, most of them bare, some of
them evergreen. The lots were irregular. The driveways were
long and curved. The plantings were messy. The street should
have had a sign: Divorced or single male middle-income government
workers only. It was that kind of a place. Not totally ideal,
but a lot better than a straight suburban tract with side-by-side
front yards full of frolicking kids and anxious mothers.
I drove on by and parked a mile away. Sat and waited for the
darkness.
I waited until seven o’clock and I walked. There was low cloud
and mist. No starlight. No moon. I was in woodland-pattern
BDUs. I was as invisible as the Pentagon could make me. I
figured at seven the place would still be mostly empty. I figured
a lot of middle-income government workers would have
ambitions to become high-income government workers, so they
would stay at their desks, trying to impress whoever needed
impressing. I used the street that ran parallel to the back of
Willard’s street and found two messy yards next to each other.
Neither house was lit. I walked down the first driveway and
kept on going around the dark bulk of the house and straight
through the back yard. I stood still. No dogs barked. I turned