Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy (24 page)

What she thought was:
Yes, I wonder . . . but I suspect it was after all just me being angry, feeling desperate, looking for a way to get through to you. Can’t you see? If I want to get
through
to you, I am not about to
drown
you. I didn’t even want to
hurt
you. I only want to help.

What she
said
was:

“At last we understand one another.”

And on that note, the
Leethaag
continued.

T
RAFFIC OUT OF
downtown Los Angeles that late morning was gridlock purgatory, the worst for keeping up single-car surveillance on a moving vehicle. Sikes and Francisco had yet to discover that their man would be heading south.

The good news was that in a gridlock tail, the perp’s car is always just as jammed up as yours is. Maintain a healthy distance and together you can crawl along or idle in neutral forever. Probably he’ll never be any the wiser.

The bad news was that “probably” isn’t always good enough. If the perp is especially on the ball, he’ll notice the same car in his rearview mirror once too often, especially if his route is idiosyncratic. So naturally, part of the trick is deciding the precise parameters of “a healthy distance.” You don’t want to maintain
too
healthy a distance because you don’t want to remain stuck in traffic when up ahead it’s finally starting to clear for the car you’re tailing; suddenly he takes off and you’re stuck between a seventy-five-year-old grandma and a kamikaze computer operator from Taiwan, their horns blaring louder as the beep on your tracer device fades to nothing.

Now, if the traffic is
free-flowing
. . . well, then you have all kindsa tricks at your disposal—varying the car lengths between you and him, ducking onto and off of the main route, changing lanes,
any number of things
to vary the perp’s rearview visual. But on congested streets, these strategies are simply not an option. You have to maintain a holding pattern, hope you can appear to be just as stuck and frustrated as everyone else (because all a perp has to do is catch your eyes to grok that you’re being too attentive, that you care more about where
he’s
going than about where
you’re
going) . . . and pray.

Anagrams wore thin ten minutes into the ride, and the cruiser’s air conditioner kept threatening to fail, so the trip managed to be boring and suspenseful at the same time.

But, in the end, it was a good day for prayer, at least where George and Matt were concerned, because after “twenty-five minutes of this crap” (as Sikes called it), traffic broke and they were sailin’ smooth onto the San Diego Freeway, their man in the Mazda never suspecting.

Heading south.

Which caused George to muse, “I wonder where he’s going.”

On one level stating the obvious, that’s the whole reason for tailing a suspect in the first place: You wonder where he’s going.

But then again, they were heading south.

George spared a brief glimpse at Matt, who was reading his book on and off. “Matthew.”

“Um?”

“Do you suppose he knows of our investigation? Do you suppose that’s why he ended his ‘business relationship’ with Mr. Sled?”

It was, of course, the first question that had occurred to either of them the minute they heard Bob Sled’s account of events. But neither had wanted to speak it out loud, to acknowledge the possibility that the investigation had been compromised.

“Hard to say,” Matt replied. “It’s not like we’ve been top secret. Anybody who’s learned what we’re after could have alerted this guy. The hospital staff where Fran’s staying, Dr. LeBeque, someone connected with the theatre . . . hell, people we can’t even know about.”

At the moment, they didn’t even know about the guy they were tailing. They had called in the model and license plate number of his car, and DMV records had identified it as belonging to a sixty-eight-year-old woman, Anna Maria Corigliano of La Jolla. But there was no record of it having been stolen. Calls were being made to her home, to see about trying to get an ID on the driver—assuming the car had been legitimately borrowed—but so far there had been no answer. Other public records could be researched, based on this slim bit of information alone, but it was too soon to make that request of police department manpower; the two detectives, their hunches notwithstanding, simply didn’t have enough to go on yet. This was a specialized case, nothing politically attractive enough to give it “sexy” priority, and unless the videotape bore fruit (which they wouldn’t know for some hours), the fellow they were following could be officially suspected of exactly nothing.

And he was still heading south.

“Maybe it’s coincidence,” George hypothesized. “Maybe he felt the need to be represented by new outlets, precisely as the druggist reported, and we just happened to be there on the day he broke the news.”

“Maybe. But I’ll tell you what bothers me about that one. Why was he there at all? Sled couldn’t identify him by name or affiliation, didn’t have the wherewithal to track him down if there was no further delivery. The guy didn’t owe Sled a
thing.
Why not just find a new outlet to do business with and screw ’im?”

“Because there are too many variables. The drug is predicated upon
dependence,
the customers who use it
need
it. They depend, in turn, upon Bob Sled to make it available. If we apply your scenario, though, our round little apothecary wouldn’t know his supply had dried up since no one would have told him. So he’d advise his regular customers to be patient, thinking delivery imminent.”

“. . . and the customers would stay patient until it became too late?”

“Or they’d register complaints—with us or with the Better Business Bureau—about the way their druggist failed to make good on his assurances.
They
aren’t guilty of anything, what have they to lose?”

“Their anonymity, if they’re passing for human.”

“Which they lose in any event if they can’t get the drug. My point being that the clientele would become unpredictable, create too many waves that might be noted by the authorities. How much simpler to merely
tell
the druggist that you’re moving on so that he can alert his customers to look elsewhere while they have time.”

“That all makes sense, but it still leaves me with one big question. Bob Sled told us that as far as he understood, he ran one of only four phony Stabilite outlets in the Los Angeles area. I mean, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, the supplier could have been yanking his chain. But if we assume it’s the truth . . . Sled doesn’t know who the other current distributors are; the dealer isn’t about to tell him who the
new
distributors are gonna
be;
he can’t pass the information on to his customers. How the hell are the customers gonna find out where to go to get their stuff?”

“Big question, indeed, Matthew. Easy answer, I think.”

“Enlighten me.”

“The same way they found out about Bob Sled. Ask in the right—or the wrong—places. That kind of information is always available on the street if you want it badly enough.”

“True,” Matt nodded after a beat. “True.”

And then he looked at his watch, registered that they had been driving for over a half hour since clearing the gridlock, noted by the road signs that Los Angeles was now officially behind them, gauged by the landscape that they were running out of United States territory in which to follow their man, realized that the term “jurisdiction” was threatening to become a cruel joke, and exclaimed:

“Jesus,
I hate it that he’s going south!”

Because it probably meant that their man could
afford
to go south.

In drug cases, suspects under surveillance, if they
knew
they were under surveillance, tended to do one of two things.

If they were low-level types, or scared, or stupid, they ascribed to what Matt Sikes called the cockroach theory: hit ’em with light, they scuttle for cover of darkness. That darkness was either their lair, full to brimming with damning evidence they would try to destroy before the cops got to it; or the lair of a perceived “protector,” someone higher up in the operation. The flight toward darkness didn’t always lead to immediate arrest but it almost always added to your chain of evidence, gave you new places and people to check out; and the more you had, the more opportunity there was for the Bad Guys to slip up.

But if they were smart, careful and cool . . .

. . . they simply went home. And south was a grand direction to travel if they wanted to go home. The scenery got prettier, the real estate values went up, the mountains were more impressive, you were closer to the ocean. And in that relative comfort, they waited you out. They kissed their wives, played with their kids, made like nice neighbors, and didn’t give a shit about your impatience. Because they had all the time in the world.

The woman who owned the car they were following—DMV identified her as a resident of La Jolla. If their guy was behind the wheel legitimately, maybe he was taking the car back to La Jolla; maybe he
lived
in La Jolla.
Way
the hell south, rural and rustic, featuring two beautiful theatres run by a fellow named McAnuff just off a remote university complex, and brisk, briny sea air. Crime? What crime? Not a lot of drug action there.

Now, of course, La Jolla was a hop, skip, and a jumping bean away from the Mexico border. And there was so much drug action down
there
it made your teeth ache. But Mexico didn’t seem a likely locale for designer drug operations. And if it was—what difference? Sikes and Francisco had no hard evidence. If their guy crossed the border and the drugstore tape showed nothing and his use of the car was legit . . . they’d never be able to get him back. They didn’t even want to
think
about Mexico.

Better the guy should go home.

After Matt’s comment, the next two minutes went by in silence and despair.

George and he were beginning to think,
That’s it, endgame, over.

And then their man got off an exit ramp that led into Carson County.

Exactly thirty-five minutes out of Los Angeles.

Taken by surprise, George nearly missed the ramp. He fishtailed a bit to adjust, suffering the angry car horn that blared past him down the freeway, and tolerating Sikes’s sardonic, “Nice one, George, way to be circumspect,” as his partner reflexively jammed both feet on an imaginary brake and leaned back into his seat. But the Mazda was too far ahead of them (George hoped) for the driver to pay any heed.

Carson was a suburban community. Just off the ramp were rest stops and fast food places, and a little further down, the residential section and a couple of modest shopping malls. But if you drove far enough, commercialism thinned out and gave way to open spaces, wooded areas, and a few large clearings.

Some of the clearings were occupied by smaller industrial firms that had made Carson their base. You could, Matt thought, work in worse surroundings. Nice to be away from the congestion of the city, but still be close enough for relatively quick access.
Now why didn’t I ever think of that?
he asked himself. And then answered,
Because by the time you were old enough to appreciate the sentiment, it was too late.

The Mazda crested the rise of a little valley, turned left into it; George slowed, pulled to the side of the road, waiting, not wanting to be spotted by their quarry; with the tracer device, there was no chance of losing the fellow, not in this semibucolic environment. After about forty-five seconds, he moved the cruiser forward again, crested the hill himself, turned left.

The road followed a gentle, unpaved, downward curve about a quarter of a mile, surrounded on both sides by trees and greenery. Then all at once, the greenery opened up and gave way to the entrance of a medium-size parking lot, fronting an impressively large two-storey building with a mauve and white facade, and an efficient, no-nonsense, no-frills architectural design.

Set just above the thick glass doors of the main entrance was a large, wide, flat metal awning. It jutted out about five or six feet, sheltering the walkway leading into the building. Today in particular its shelter might come in handy. There was a developing nip in the air, the sky was becoming overcast. It would rain soon.

Along the forward edge of the awning, metal or plastic red letters two feet high proclaimed the name of the company:

RICHLER PHARMACEUTICALS

George slowed the car, stopped. Staring.

Matt was staring too.

It didn’t make any sense.

But there it was.

RICHLER PHARMACEUTICALS, the sign said.

Richler.

Which was, according to Steinbach, the authorized manufacturer of the legitimate, patented,
and entirely legal
Stabilite.

The last place in the world that might benefit or profit from the sale of counterfeit merchandise—and faulty merchandise to boot.

What the hell was going on?

They watched as their man, having gotten out of his car before they’d entered the lot, entered through the glass doors, looking very much at home, nodded to the fellow at the security desk, who nodded back, and continued on his way.

Their guy
worked
here.

No sense.

No sense at all . . .

T
HE ROUGH STORYBOARD
preliminaries in the large spiral sketch pad laid out like this:

PAGE ONE: Our heroine, the prim Tenctonese librarian, is waiting for a bus. Little glasses sit on her nose, and one arm is laden with library books. The bus stop is in front of a fast food place that caters to Newcomers; with her free hand she’s alternately wolfing down some raw weasel on a bun and looking nervously at her watch. The visual tells us right away who she is, what she’s eating, where she got it, and how little time she has for the amenities of life. Clearly she’s late for work.

PAGE TWO: From another angle: the bus pulls up and she boards, putting the rest of her sandwich in the fast food bag whence it came, juggling her books a bit to do it.