Page 122 of The Fourth Option
DETECTIVE HOWARD GORMLEYnosed the black Dodge Charger over the railroad tracks, his headlights sweeping the trees.
Night had descended on the river like a curtain falling on a stage. The boat traffic had stopped. There were no cars parked along the road. Even the freight trains were quiet.
This was the spot, Gormley thought as he put the Charger in park. This was where they said to look, down there in those trees.
The NOPD’s tip line had gone digital and was state-of-the-art. Calls that came in were recorded and summarized by an AI agent in a speech-to-text procedure. The transposed data was then housed in the cloud, available for detectives’ queries.
After the hit in the Ninth that left Rayne and Hendrick dead on a rotting floor, Gormley had ordered a surge of COPE uniforms into the streets. Bates wanted pressure, making sure the neighborhood knew that law enforcement was going to respond. Gormley was on board with that. He wanted answers. The boys wanted payback.
Most of the COPE officers were straight arrows. Gormley and Bates had pulled the ones with promise out forspecialtraining. With Rayne and Hendrick dead, they would need replacements.
Sure enough, one of those candidates, Officer Paul Nickerson, found a man with stitches in his face, who admitted to trying to rob someone in what he described as an “old shitty camper” by the swamp, only to turn around and get his ass kicked. A dog had mauled his face, and the guy in the van had snatched his shotgun.A blue van.
Gormley then set up an evergreen query in the NOPD automated tip-line system with search words equating to VAN + BLUE + WHITE MALE + DOG.
His phone had beeped a few hours later with an alert. The system was as good as advertised. Somebody walking along the river had seen a bluevan in the trees and called it in as a homeless person setting up camp. The caller did not like the idea of homeless running roughshod over the river.
Gormley didn’t mind homeless camps. They kept the drug trade going. Job security.
A blue van down by the river.He chuckled thinking of the old Chris FarleySaturday Night Liveskit.
Ten minutes after the alert, Gormley logged into the system and marked the tip as cleared. No threat. No follow-up required. He might mention it to Nickerson, to test how he responded, see if he wanted in on a little extra money in the future.
Gormley killed the Charger’s engine and stepped out, careful not to scrape his rubber-soled oxfords on the railbed gravel. The river whispered beyond the trees. He moved slowly, his Glock drawn and low. If the dog was still around, he would be ready. He tightened his grip on the pistol thinking of that dirtbag with the hole in his face.
The predawn air was cool with a slight breeze. Gormley paused, listening. No voices. No footsteps. Just the rustle of leaves and the distant hum of a barge.
Then he heard a scratch, a branch brushing against metal.
He froze.
There it was again.
Gormley crept forward, eyes scanning the shadows, pistol at the low ready in his sweaty hands.
His heart beat faster, and a few steps later he noted the absence of light, a void against the moonlit river. The shape was wrong for a car. Too tall. Too rectangular and something even stranger: a triangular pop-top, barely visible above the brush. Camper van.
For a moment he worried its occupant would be able to hear the pounding in his chest. He forced himself to turn and retrace his steps as quietly as he possibly could. On the other side of the tracks, he started up the Dodge Charger and drove a quarter mile down the street before pulling into an abandoned lot. He fought to control his breathing and only then did he call Cornelius Bates.
“I think I found our guy,” he said quietly, passing along the plate number. “What you want me to do, Corn?”
Bates took a few seconds to answer. Gormley had woken him up, surely, but Bates sounded alert.“Nothing. You and Dupuis keep an eye onit. No reports. I’ll run the plate quietly and find out who we’re dealing with. Good work, Hound.”
“You want to hit him tonight?”
“I want to see who else might be involved. See if he’s got a network in play. Let’s give it a day or two.”
“You got it, boss.”
Gormley hung up and stared into the darkness, suppressing visions of a dog attacking him from out of the night.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
STANTON’S CONFERENCE ROOMsmelled oddly perfumed, a result of the carpet powder that the cleaning crew had used the night before. He had noted it in the past but hadn’t really minded it. This morning, it bugged him.
Outside, the sun was rising over Lake Pontchartrain, chasing away the stars. Inside the FBI Field Office, the mood was grim. The special agents around the table read people for a living and they had caught the boss’s mood immediately.
Twelve agents, each with a manila folder or a laptop open in front of them, stared at the big TV screen following the presentation. It was 6:30 a.m., and the meeting was already a half hour old. Stanton kept his hands flat on the table, fingers splayed, listening.
