Tracking Shot by Colin Campbell (i can read book club .txt) 📗

Tall Skinny came over to the collapsed well and looked over the side. Billy Bob stayed back. The three heavies played defence, blocking McNulty’s escape. McNulty stood beside Tall Skinny and looked into the hole.

“You boys do a lot of hunting around here do you?”

The rotting corpses almost filled the pit. Most had been stripped of skin and fur and some were almost skeletons. Bright red blood highlighted the freshest kills. Some of the bodies were still moving. Rats and dogs and some other animals McNulty couldn’t recognise anymore. Tall Skinny waved a hand around the junkyard. “Dump gets lots of rats.”

McNulty thought about the targets he’d seen pinned up inside the cabin. “Gives you plenty of target practice, does it?”

Tall Skinny looked at McNulty and smiled. “Hell, no. We don’t shoot ’em. We trap ’em. Any killing, they do themselves.” He shrugged. “Everything’s got to eat.”

McNulty was about to let out a sigh but sighing entailed taking a deep breath. He’d smelled enough rotting corpses for one day. He was still uncertain what Billy Bob meant about the mattress in the van, but it didn’t look like any of these boys had been involved in the orphanage shooting. He doubted if the man who’d calmly walked in and shot five people would ally himself with such a bunch of losers.

McNulty stepped back from the edge of the well. “And we’re all going to die. Let’s hope you don’t find out what it’s like to die like that.”

Tall Skinny got serious. “Oh, I know people who died exactly like that. In the war.”

He didn’t say which war. McNulty wondered if he had been in the Airborne or the Marines. He knew lots of veterans who fell a long way after coming out of the service. This guy looked to be close to hitting bottom. None of that helped with how McNulty was going to get out of here. He waved a hand toward the concrete overpasses.

“Yeah, well. You’re pretty safe from drone strikes down here.” He got ready to run. “But you’re a long way from not being filmed.” He smiled and waved at a section of the spaghetti junction where the off ramp swept beneath the main highway. “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera.”

Everyone looked at the distant traffic cameras. There was a brief moment when nobody was looking at McNulty. He braced himself for the sprint to his car, then Billy Bob laughed.

“Ain’t no cameras we ain’t already shot out.”

Tall Skinny reached up and put an arm around his brother. He gave him a friendly squeeze then looked at McNulty. “I told you he weren’t dumb.”

He smiled and tilted his head again, as if talking to a child. “Was that supposed to be some kind of distraction technique? Get us all looking one way while you make a dash for your car?” He shrugged. “Shit.” And waved the three heavies aside. “Have at it.”

The three men came over to stand with Billy Bob, throwing play punches and messing around like a bunch of schoolboys. Billy Bob laughed and punched one of them too hard, dropping him to the ground. The other two picked him up and complained about the simple giant being too rough. Tall Skinny told them to stop messing about then turned back to McNulty. He jerked a thumb at McNulty’s car.

“Unless you really want to try for that dent in the roof.”

TWENTY-THREE

McNulty had a lot to think about on his way back to the set. It was mid-afternoon and he reckoned he’d taken enough of the slack that Larry had allowed him to conduct his own investigations. Slack was mostly being given because Larry wanted Titanic Productions kept out of the story as much as possible. The main reason Larry had employed McNulty was that McNulty still thought of himself as a cop, a fact that weighed heavily on the ex-cop’s mind as he drove toward the Cambridge Reservoir shooting location.

The encounter at the junkyard had rattled him. Up until then he’d never thought of such excursions as putting himself in danger. Just asking a few questions. Making routine inquiries. That was just normal police stuff that he could do in his sleep. Of course, when he was still with the police, there was the safety net of personal protective equipment and a radio. The radio had been the main protection. People didn’t mess with you when you could call for backup at any time.

There had been no backup at the junkyard. And that shook him up.

What had he been thinking? Putting himself in that situation. Five men with a gun locker and a rat pit in a secluded location under the highway cloverleaf. They could have killed him and dumped the body and nobody would ever have found him after the rats had feasted on his bones. And for what? What had he learned? Nothing. There was no evidence linking those men to the red panel van. The mattress suggestion had only been in response to McNulty’s tree-trunk comment. Even if they had a van with a mattress, it didn’t tie them to the shooting, and it was only McNulty’s past experiences that made him think about the orphanage. On top of that, none of the men looked even remotely like the shooter, and certainly none of them had displayed the cold-blooded calm the gunman had shown at the courthouse set.

Maybe he should leave it to the real police. Detective Harris seemed competent enough. The grey van would have been circulated after the shooting and the motel CCTV would have given an indication that it might now be red. There was nothing McNulty could do that the Waltham PD didn’t have the resources to do better.

No, the van was a lost cause. It was the Zapruder film he should be concentrating on. The film, the cameraman, and the dummy CCTV on the courtroom set. That’s what he was thinking about when he pulled into the parking lot