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

concrete overpass. Daylight barely penetrated the swirling off-ramps and access roads. Junkers and undergrowth soaked up the traffic noise. The traffic cameras were blind, shot out by sharpshooting rat killers and good old boys. McNulty came to the cloverleaf on surface roads through Auburndale. He drove slowly and parked halfway up the on-ramp as the sun dipped below the horizon.

“You ever wonder why you keep finding dangerous situations to put yourself in? The fights you keep picking?” McNulty wasn’t picking a fight but this was definitely a dangerous situation. Angry-man survivor guilt was kicking into overdrive. He popped the hood and left it open, then stood behind the little warning triangle fifty yards down the ramp. He found a good angle alongside the highway, and using a pair of binoculars from the props department, settled down to watch.

Left to right and top to bottom. That’s how most people view things. The same way you scan writing on a page if you’re English or American. Left to right. Top to bottom. McNulty was a Yorkshireman and an ex-cop. The first thing he looked at was the potential threat. The threat would come from the cabin or the workshop. He adjusted the binoculars and viewed the cabin first.

The uneven structure leaned to one side and sagged in the middle. The porch was still made of splintered wood and the steps would still creak when you climbed them. Smoke drifted out of the lopsided chimney. Light showed through the windows on the front and side that overlooked the rat pit. The tattered curtains were open but McNulty couldn’t see any movement inside. It was the third of July, so the fire wasn’t for heat, it was for cooking. If they were cooking they intended to eat. A family as close as the Cloverleaf Boys would no doubt eat together. Question was, were they already in the cabin?

McNulty swung the binoculars down and to the left. The two cars that had come down the track when he’d been there two days earlier were parked out front of the cabin, front end to the porch railing like horses at a hitching post. That meant there were likely to be five men in the clearing. Minus the cook, the other four could be anywhere. Next place to check was the workshop.

The workshop was bigger and more solid looking than the cabin but it still leaned and sagged. There were no windows but the full-length front doors were partly open. Yellow light spilled out onto the dusty turnaround in the gloom. There was some banging coming from inside, the whine of an electric drill or power screwdriver. Sparks danced across the door space and brilliant blue-white light blinked and flickered. Somebody crossed the work floor and disappeared beyond the opening. McNulty could just make out the trunk of a dark-colored car up on ramps or a hydraulic lift. He wasn’t sure how hi-tech the mechanics here were. They certainly made enough noise, despite the muffling effect of the clearing. He kept the glasses on the open door and saw shadowy movement at the back of the workshop. Probably two or three of them were working inside. Maybe the other two were in the cabin. Or just one.

McNulty lowered the binoculars and used wide eyes to get an overview of the junkyard, looking for movement amid the wrecked cars and carnival floats. There was nothing obvious. He was about to turn back to the cabin when something caught his eye in the gap between the headless dinosaur and the spaceship. He brought the glasses up and quartered the empty space. The movement was small but deliberate. Not random. He adjusted the focus. A big black rat darted across the turnaround toward the cabin. It stopped in front of the porch steps, sniffed the air, then turned right toward the covered well. It could smell food. Not the stuff being cooked in the cabin but the dead meat waiting to be eaten in the covered well. McNulty wondered if the rat knew the dead meat was fellow rats.

He put the binoculars down and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He blinked several times and opened his eyes wide to ease the strain of staring into darkness. It sometimes felt like he’d spent his entire life looking into darkness, from Crag View to Northern X. The evil that men do. He wondered what evil the gunmen were prepared to do for a million dollars. He thought about the Battenberg and the half-eaten cake and the sickly-sweet smell of marzipan and plastic explosives.

“What are you cooking in there?” Talking to himself again. “What have they got you doing?”

Because he was sure the Cloverleaf Boys weren’t doing this for themselves. They hadn’t been the gunmen at the courthouse set and they hadn’t been involved in searching Randy Severino’s motel room. They were known to the police though, and as such would be ideal camouflage for the main event, the million-dollar heist on the Fourth of July.

July 4th Parade

www.waltham.ma.gov

10 a.m. Banks Square, Waltham

It wasn’t the advertising posters that stuck in McNulty’s mind but rather the preparations that would be going on all over Waltham. Kids would be getting their costumes ready. Bands would be practicing. Local organizations would be putting the finishing touches to their carnival floats, missing two floats from the past, a dinosaur without a head and a spaceship too rusty to fly.

McNulty brought the binoculars up and turned them onto the gap between the two floats. The rat had scurried across the open space without leaving a trail but something had left its mark when it had been dragged away. Something big and heavy and carnival-related. Fresh tracks. Just before the Fourth of July. Why would you move a dilapidated carnival float unless you were going to renovate it and use it in the parade?

Several thoughts ran through his mind and coalesced. John Wayne throwing a punch that missed but looked like a strike. Larry’s movie car