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, face down, 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 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. Instead 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.
CHAPTER 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.