Dragons Wild (15 page)

As soon as Griffen rolled into Yo Mama’s, Padre caught his eye and jerked a head toward the back booths. Detective Harrison was already there, nursing a cup of coffee and studiously ignoring the other customers.

Griffen briefly considered reversing his course and easing back out, but it was too late. Harrison had already seen him and beckoned to him with a small motion of his hand.

Heaving a silent, inward sigh, Griffen complied. He really wasn’t feeling up to dealing with the detective tonight, but it seemed he didn’t have much choice.

“Okay, McCandles,” Harrison said without preamble. “I think we’ve gotta plan here. I’ve been talking to a couple a boys down at the precinct, and they’re willing to give a hand. Lucky for you they don’t like the Feds any more than I do.”

“Okay. Lieutenant.” Griffen nodded. “You have my undivided attention.”

The detective glanced around, then slid a slip of paper across the table.

“That’s my own cell phone number,” he explained. “When you spot one of these jokers following you, give me a call with the location and a description. I’ll relay it on to whoever’s closest, and we’ll handle it from there.”

“Wait a minute,” Griffen said. “I have to call you? How am I supposed to spot these guys? They’re professionals. I don’t know anything about tailing people or how to spot someone following me.”

“It’s not all that hard.” Harrison shrugged. “It’s actually pretty hard to tail someone if they’re watching for it. Ask your buddy Padre there for a few pointers. He used to be a private investigator. I’m more worried about what we’re going to do with them once we catch them. I mean, we can always find some reason for bracing them, but unless they declare themselves to be federal agents, it might be tough to tell them from some of our homegrown muggers.”

“I might be able to help you there.” Griffen dug into his pocket and produced his own cell phone. “Remember I told you I talked with Stoner? Well, before he walked up on me, he called me on his cell phone. That means I’ve got his number.”

“Okay. What does that get us?” the detective said.

“Well, I figure these people watching me have to report in somehow, and it’s my guess they’re using cell phones themselves. When you stop them, see if they have Stoner’s number in their directory. Even if they don’t, there should be one central number they all have to report to.”

“That could work,” Harrison said. “Not bad, McCandles. Well, let’s see what we turn up in a week.”

He rose to leave, then hesitated.

“I know I’ve asked this before, Grifter,” he said, “but do you have any idea why this Stoner guy has it in for you? I mean, this whole terrorist thing stinks on ice. What’s his real problem?”

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” Griffen said with a smirk.

“Try me.”

Griffen looked at him levelly for a moment, then shrugged.

“The way it was explained to me,” he said carefully, “Stoner is a dragon. As such he collects power and has done a pretty good job so far. The problem is, he has it in his head that I’m a dragon, too, and am just coming of age. He’s afraid that I may be more powerful than he is, so he’s having me watched and tracked in case I become a threat. I try not to think about what he would or could do if he decided I was dangerous.”

Harrison stared at him.

“This is a joke, right?”

Griffen leaned forward and blew gently on the detective’s now cold cup of coffee. A small column of steam rose from the cup. He looked at it, then back at Harrison.

“I know,” he said. “I have trouble taking it seriously myself.”

“I didn’t know you had been a private eye,” Griffen said.

He was still finding that a little hard to believe. Even though he was getting used to the idea that almost everyone he met in the Quarter had a story behind them, Padre just didn’t seem the private-eye type. He was in his mid to late forties with longish hair pulled back in a ponytail. It had some streaks of gray, as did his mustache and goatee, and combined with his thin, wire-frame glasses, he looked more like a hippie than like anyone vaguely connected with the establishment.

“That was a while back, while I was in Texas,” Padre said, wiping down the bar.

Griffen had gone cruising for a while and was now back when the place was nearly empty. Early evening, Yo Mama’s was usually jammed with people ordering burgers, but if one came by late enough, after the grill was closed, say after three in the morning, the action had usually died down and conversation with Padre was easier.

“I don’t know what you said to Harrison before you took off,” Padre continued, “but it made an impression. He must have stood there looking at his coffee for five minutes before he finally left.”

Griffen ignored the unasked question.

“So, can you give me any tips on how to spot someone who’s tailing me?”

“It depends on who’s doing the tailing,” Padre said. “When I was a PI, it would pretty much be a one-man operation. Usually, they weren’t expecting it, so the main trick would be to keep them from noticing you.”

He paused to gather the dirty ashtrays along the bar.

“There are ways to make small changes in your appearance. You can wear a jacket you can take off, even better if it’s reversible. Sunglasses are good, and so are hats. You can also switch sides of the street every so often, so if they glance back, they aren’t always seeing someone behind them at the same distance.”

He gave a quick bark of laughter.

“Of course, all that doesn’t help much if something happens to bring you to the attention of the subject. I remember once I was tailing a guy through the downtown strip joints during his lunch hour, and a bunch of kids came up to me and asked if I was Weird Al Yankovic. Of course, I told them I wasn’t, but they kept crowding around and asking for my autograph. In no time flat a crowd had formed…including the guy I was following who turned around and came back to see what the commotion was about. Talk about blowing your cover!”

Griffen laughed along with him, enjoying the joke.

“Okay. I can see that,” he said finally. “But what if it’s a larger organization following you. Say, the Feds, for example.”

Padre shot him a narrow-eyed glance, then turned his attention again to washing the ashtrays.

“That’s a rather interesting example,” he said. “But…okay. Outfits like that have a lot of manpower. If you’re playing in that league, they’d be expecting you to be on the lookout, so they’d probably assign a whole team to the job. They’d probably have radio or cell phone hookups and use rotating front and back tails.”

“Whoa. Hold up for a minute,” Griffen said, holding up a restraining hand. “Rotating whats?”

“Front and back tails,” Padre said. “People following you from ahead of you as well as from behind you.”

“How could they do that?” Griffen said. “I mean, how could the ones ahead of you know where you’re going?”

“Easier than you think.” Padre smiled. “Let’s take an example. If they were on you tonight, they’d probably have teams spotted in bars or in one of the fast food places…except most of those are closed right now. Unless I miss my guess, they’d have window seats and be ordering their drinks in go-cups. As soon as you leave here, they all put it in motion, pausing in the door or on the sidewalk, say to light a cigarette. If you turn right toward Bourbon Street, they start moving in that direction and have you bracketed. The same thing if you turn left toward Royal.”

“But how do they know which way I’ll turn when I hit an intersection?”

“They guess, but it will be an educated guess. If they’ve been on you for a while, they already know your main stops and the routes you take to get to them. This time of night, they’ll probably be expecting you to head to your apartment, which means you’ll turn left and head toward Royal, then left again on Royal. Even if the front team guesses wrong and you keep going toward the river, there’s no problem. Either the back team keeps in touch with them and they run parallel for a while, or the back team passes you and the old front team falls in behind as the new back team.”

Griffen sighed and shook his head.

“The way you put it, they’d have me in a box,” he said. “So what could I do to deal with it?”

“That depends on whether you want to shake the tail or spot who’s following you,” Padre said. “If you want to shake them, vary your routine. Go different places or hit the same places at different times of the day or in a different order. Go to a movie and leave partway through it by a side exit. Hop a trolley car and ride it up to the Canal Place shopping center, then ride the elevators and escalators at random.”

“And if I’m trying to spot them?”

Padre favored him with a long look before answering.

“Some of the same things apply,” he said. “Vary your routine, but lean toward more isolated places where they can’t hide in a crowd. Take a stroll along the Moonwalk at night when there aren’t many people around. Walk it partway to the aquarium, then turn around and reverse your course. Keep an eye out for people you’ve seen before, or people who suddenly stop when you come back at them. Sometimes grab a cab and go to a bar off your usual prowl pattern. Then grab a window seat and see who pops up that you’ve seen before…particularly if they’re getting out of a car or cab. Oh, and do all those things a bit at a time, so it just looks like a blip in your routine. If you start doing a lot of evasion or backtracking all at once, they’ll know you’re on to them and bring on extra team members to make it harder for you.”

Padre paused to pour Griffen a fresh drink, then leaned his elbows on the bar.

“Of course, there’s another way they could be handling it,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“The easiest way to tail someone is from beside them,” Padre explained. “You could pick up a new friend or two while you’re hanging at the bars. Someone who laughs at your jokes and buys you drinks, then asks to tag along to your next stop. Someone, say, like a good-looking woman who finds you fascinating. Then they don’t have to follow you at all. You’ll be looking for them to hang around with and will probably tell them what your plans are for tomorrow…or the next week. That makes their job real easy and it’s a lot harder to spot.”

Griffen started to protest, but then he thought of Fox Lisa. What Padre was describing was exactly how Jerome had set him up with her originally. If Stoner was keeping an eye on his group, wasn’t there a chance he already had it in-filtrated? How many people was Fox Lisa doing favors for…maybe at the same time?

“One more example, Padre,” he said. “What if, instead of a surveillance team, I had a hit man after me. What would be the story then?”

Padre stared at him hard before answering.

“You do come up with some unpleasant examples,” he said slowly. “Could make a body nervous about hanging out with you. If a hit man was after you, he wouldn’t have to track your every move. Instead, he’d try to identify your usual patterns…what bars you hang out at, where you live, what routes you walk between them. Then, all he has to do is sit and wait and pick his time.”

Suddenly, Griffen’s drink didn’t taste as good as it had originally. He drank it anyway.

The next day, Griffen decided to try out some of the tactics Padre had coached him on. As far as routines went, Tuesdays were when he usually hit both Virgin and Tower to shop for new DVDs, so it would make a good test.

As he emerged from his apartment complex, he paused to look around with new, suspicious eyes.

There was a street entertainer sitting on the far side of the avenue playing a guitar. Griffen had seen him there often, but had usually ignored him as the man really wasn’t that good a musician. This time, just to change his pattern, Griffen crossed the street to speak with him.

“Keep seeing you out here,” he said, dropping a five into the open guitar case, “but never had the time to stop. You work hard for your money.”

“Hey! Thanks, man. Really appreciate it.” The guitarist smiled back.

The man had a cell phone in his guitar case, and his hair was noticeably shorter than the norm for the Quarter. Also, even though he was wearing denim pants and jacket, they seemed very stiff and new.

Griffen strolled toward the Square, but glanced back before he had gone half a block. The musician had stopped playing and was talking on his cell phone.

Uh-huh.

There was a moderate crowd of people on the street, a mixture of tourists seeing the sights along with a scattering of locals going about their daytime errands.

Griffen strolled along at a leisurely pace, pausing occasionally to look at the displays in the shop windows, then took advantage of the cover of a knot of tourists to duck into a used bookstore he had never been in before. With a quick glance around, he selected a place where the shelves hid him from the street, but he could see out. Then he selected a book at random, opened it, and waited.

In the next several minutes maybe two dozen people passed the store headed for Jackson Square. Again, they were mostly tourists, but a few stood out. A trio of gutter punks went by with a small puppy on a rope arguing about something with exaggerated gestures. One young woman, a tourist by the look of her, was pausing every four or five steps to snap a picture of something…anything apparently. Lampposts, Dumpsters, storefronts, anything. A delivery man from one of the delis or restaurants came by with a basket on the front of his bike. He was walking the bike instead of riding it, which was a little strange, but Griffen realized he recognized him and turned his attention elsewhere.

A Latino male caught his eye, walking by at a normal pace wearing the uniform black pants and tuxedo shirt of the service industry. A green jacket topped his ensemble. A waiter. From the Court of Two Sisters, by the jacket. What was unusual was that it was the wrong time of day for him to be going to work. Too late for the breakfast and lunch crowd, but too early for the dinner crowd. Still, maybe he had gotten a call to fill in for someone.

Finding nothing he could definitely label unusual, Griffen was about to give up and move along when he spotted the Latino again. The man was returning on the far side of the street, but moving slowly and looking through the windows of la Madeleine, a restaurant Griffen sometimes stopped at for a late lunch. He reached the end of the windows, then turned and stared back toward Jackson Square. Finally, he produced a cell phone, keyed a number, then spoke into it briefly.

Within minutes, another man appeared. This one was wearing a suit complete with a convention badge displayed prominently on the lapel. The only thing that made him vaguely distinguishable was that he wore a wide green tie and was carrying a bright orange shopping bag. Normally, Griffen wouldn’t look at him twice on the street. The man went into a brief huddle with the Latino, then they both walked hurriedly toward the Square and the video stores, splitting so that they were moving some fifteen feet apart.

Bingo!

Griffen smiled and reached for his own cell phone.

By the time he reached Yo Mama’s, Griffen was in a foul mood. After waiting on pins and needles for over six hours for some kind of word as to what, if anything, had happened, this summons to meet with Harrison seemed almost anticlimactic.

The detective was there ahead of him, holding down a booth, and waved him over as soon as he walked through the door. The fact he seemed to be in a good mood did nothing to ease Griffen’s disposition.

“Sit down, Griffen,” the detective said. “You got a steak dinner coming to you courtesy of the NOPD.”

“I didn’t know they served steaks here,” Griffen said.

“They do,” Harrison said. “They’re just not as popular as their hamburgers. Mostly, the hoi polloi prefer to eat cheap.”

“Actually, I’ve already eaten,” Griffen said.

“Well, it’s paid for in advance,” the detective said. “Just tell Padre the next time you’re in the mood for a steak.”

“I’ll remember that,” Griffen said.

Harrison peered at him.

“Are you okay?” he said. “You sound kinda peeved. We don’t buy steaks for people every day, you know. As a matter a fact, that steak dinner bonus was supposed to be for me. I decided to pass it along to you instead.”

“It’s been six hours,” Griffen said. “You could have called.”

The detective leaned back in his seat and scowled.

“Did I miss something here?” he said. “Am I reporting to you now on the chain of command? Jeez, you sound like my wife.”

Even though he was young, Griffen knew enough to be aware that when someone compared you to his wife, it wasn’t a compliment. He decided it was time to lighten up a little.

“I didn’t know you were married,” he said.

“I’m not. Not anymore.” Harrison sighed. “I’d forget to call her, too. She didn’t like it either.”

All of a sudden, the detective seemed more like a man and less like a cop. It made Griffen uneasy. He preferred to think of Harrison as a cop.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “So what happened after I called you?”

“Oh, it was beautiful!” Harrison said, regaining his good mood. “First of all, we managed to pick up all three of them…good descriptions, by the way. I was a little worried about the Latino…afraid we’d get tagged for profiling…but they were all carrying, which made it real easy. Seems that someone told them that this town of ours is dangerous.”

“Slow down a little,” Griffen said, holding up his hand. “Profiling?”

“Sorry,” the detective said. “I keep forgetting you’re not in the business. Profiling has been all the rage ever since 9/11. Homeland Security is real big on it. Basically, it means keeping a special eye on people who fit the profile of a terrorist or a career criminal. It’s not a bad technique, and you can build up a nice case against a suspect using it, but the civil rights groups don’t like it. All too often, the profile includes a reference to a racial or national group, so we get accused of treating anyone of that group as a criminal. Now, I’m sure not going to try to say that
all
blacks are criminals or that
all
Arabs are terrorists, but the records do show that a disproportionate percentage of criminals or terrorists do come from those groups. Trying to ignore that fact when you’re looking for potential perps is just plain silly.”

Griffen actually had a fair idea of this from reading the newspapers, but after having gotten off on the wrong foot with Harrison, he figured it wouldn’t hurt things to give the detective a chance to show off a little. From the extent of the speech, the longest he had heard from the otherwise gruff cop, it worked.

“So the fact that one of them was a Latino was a problem?” he said.

“As I started to say, it never came up,” the detective said. “All the boys did was stop them and ask for some identification. We had plausible stories for doing that if they had raised a hassle, but the fact that they were all carrying firearms moved everything past that point in a hurry. That meant they had to show not only identification, but their permits to be carrying, so it became readily apparent that they were federal men from the get go. Then the only question was what they were doing in New Orleans.”

“What did they say?”

“One of them…the street entertainer…tried to bluff his way through, saying he was just here on vacation. Yeah, right. Like federal agents always spend their vacations standing on the street in the French Quarter playing guitar for loose change. The other two admitted they were on assignment, but wouldn’t say what it was. That’s when things really got fun.”

“What did you do?”

“Took ’em down to the station on Royal and let them talk to the chief. He had them get this guy Stoner on the horn so he could confirm their story. Stoner admitted that he had an operation in place down here, but refused to tell the chief any more about it claiming it involved national security.”

The detective broke off and laughed.

“I wish you could have seen it,” he said with a grin. “If there’s anything the chief hates more than Feds on his turf, it’s being told that it’s none of his business.”

“He told Stoner in no uncertain terms to get his team the hell out of town, and that if he ever ran an operation down here again without going through proper channels, the chief would personally see to it that any agents he caught would do time as well as getting their pictures plastered all over the
Times-Picayune
.”

“What did Stoner say?”

“He didn’t like it, no. Not one bit, but there was nothing he could do but agree. With the chief in the mood he was, if Stoner had tried to bluster his way out of it, the chief would follow through, startin’ with the three already in custody. Of course, he had to get in one good lick before he hung up.”

“What was that?”

“He said something to the effect that the chief had better hope that Homeland Security never got the chance to return the courtesy that the NOPD had shown them.”

Griffen scowled and shook his head.

“That doesn’t sound good,” he said.

“Just a little face-saving bluster,” the detective said dismissively. “There isn’t much he can do against the whole city…or the police force, for that matter. If he tries, he’s in for a surprise. The chief had him on the speaker phone and taped the whole conversation.”

Griffen sighed and shook his head again.

“What is it?” Harrison said.

“I don’t know,” Griffen said. “I mean, I’ve heard about how local cops don’t like the Feds coming into their territory, but it all seems…I don’t know, a little petty is all.”

“You’ve never had to deal with them like we have,” the detective said with a snort. “Come in throwing their weight around and treating us like dirt. They act like the whole force is incompetent, on the take, or both.”

It occurred to Griffen that he had met Harrison when the detective was growling at him about having to put up with protected gambling operations, but it didn’t seem like a good time to point that out.

“Well, enjoy your steak,” Harrison said, sliding out of the booth. “I’ve got to run. The boys are getting together for a little celebration, and I told them I’d stop by. We owe you one or two for this one, McCandles.”

Griffen sat staring for a long time after the detective had left. He was still staring when Padre came up to the booth.

“So, do you want that steak now?” the bartender said.

“I’ll take a rain check on that,” Griffen said. “Sit down for a second, Padre. What all did Harrison tell you?”

“Enough that I could tell they caught the ones shadowing you and that they were Feds,” Padre said. “He seemed really happy about it.”

“Yeah,” Griffen said, making a face. “Tell me, is it just me or does all this seem a little too easy to be true?”

“It’s not just you,” the bartender said. “Remember what I said about the possibility of an infiltrator? It could be that whoever’s running this show is pulling a little misdirection. Let you catch the obvious tails so you relax and don’t look around internally.”

“I remember, and I’m keeping an eye out,” Griffen said. “Of course, it doesn’t really matter.”

“It doesn’t?” Padre said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Griffen said. “We really aren’t doing anything that merits federal attention. The only reason I said anything to Harrison was to switch his focus from our operation to the Feds, and that seems to have worked out just fine.”