The Big Bleed
Part Three

After a torturous commute from Manhattan, Sheeba and Jamal had arrived at the spill site close to sundown, the worst possible time to conduct a visual investigation. Too bad we aren’t making a movie, Jamal thought. It was the golden hour, that last bit of the day when directors and cinematographers preferred to film the kissing scene or something equally romantic.

Not that Stuntman had been involved in many such scenes. But he had frequently found his shooting days rearranged around the need to have the crew ready for golden hour. “Something funny happened here,” Sheeba said, demonstrating her unfailing ability to state the obvious.

What was your first clue? Jamal wanted to ask, but didn’t. Surely it couldn’t have been the Warren Country Emergency Services unit parked halfway onto the shoulder of the two-lane asphalt road, and the crime scene tape delineating two squares-one large, one small-in the ditch.

The drive from Manhattan had taken twice as long as it should have. Sheeba Who Must Be Obeyed had elected to follow her Navstar, overruling the obsessive freak behind the wheel who kept insisting that it was taking them around three sides of a square. “Couldn’t we have booked a helicopter?” Jamal said, only half joking.

“Unavailable,” Sheeba snapped, meaning she had actually made the query.

The extra minutes they spent stuck in traffic allowed Sheeba to recount-largely for Jamal’s benefit-the flurry of text messages, e-mailed maps, and other communications that resulted from one simple fact: sometime last night a vehicle had gone off this lonely New Jersey highway and spilled a container of ammonium nitrate.

“Why did it take so long?” Jamal had asked, not, he thought, unreasonably.

“No one found the container until noon today,” Sheeba said. Her voice suggested that there was something lacking in the moral fiber of the residents of Warren County, New Jersey, that they would fail to note a container of dangerous material by the side of one of their roads.

Feeling a bit like an actor in a bad action movie, Jamal had felt compelled to persist: “And why are we chasing this and not DHS?”

“One of the locals said the whole thing felt joker-like.”

“Some kind of keen perception?” Jamal said. “The smell, maybe-?”

“The crash site.”

And so, yes, here they were, in the company of a pair of Warren County hazardous materials types, and Deputy Sheriff Mitch Delpino, a tall, hunched nat around forty who wore a gunslinger’s mustache that clashed with his old hippie manner.

“It appears a vehicle went off the road here,” Delpino said, spreading his hands and gesturing, as if the tracks could possibly have been mistaken for anything else.

“And it should have wound up nose-first in that ditch,” Sheeba said. “It’s pretty deep. How do you suppose it got out?” She turned to Delpino. “Any calls for tow trucks out here last night or this morning?”

Delpino glanced at Jamal, as if to say, you poor bastard, having to work with this. “Yes, we checked with all the services. No one got a call out here or anywhere near here in the past forty-eight hours.”

Jamal said, “Officer, assuming this truck was carrying something illegal when it ran off the road, how likely is it, do you think, that it would call a legitimate service whose destination could be traced?”

Delpino allowed himself a smile so faint that only Jamal could see it. “Quite unlikely.”

Jamal turned away and let his eyes adjust again. There was something odd about the tracks where they crossed the mud. “Any insights into what kind of tires were on this truck?” he said.

Delpino stepped forward like a grade schooler eager to recite. “These are not tire tracks,” he said. “They are narrower than any commercial U.S. brand or any European one we know. And there’s no tread.”

“In fact, it looks as though they were thin and solid, like wheels on a kids’ wagon,” Jamal said. “It does sort of feel like a joker thing.”

Ten yards off the road, its passage still obvious from crushed vegetation, a yellow plastic barrel sat upright in the weeds. “Was this how you found it?” Jamal said.

“It was on its side,” Delpino said, which was a good thing: neither haz-mat specialist seemed eager to talk. “It hit and rolled. You can’t see it from here, but there’s a small crack on one side. Some fluid spilled.” He smiled. “Which we were able to identify as ammonium nitrate, which is why we called you. Well, DHS.”

Sheeba reasserted command at that moment. “So strange truck rips along, loses a barrel, and then goes off the road? Seems wrong, somehow.”

“How so?” Delpino said.

Sheeba’s phone jingled. As she held up her finger, Jamal answered for her: “The logical sequence is, vehicle goes off the road first, spills its cargo … then gets out of ditch with no obvious help.” She gestured at the crash site. “With all the rain, there would be tracks if another vehicle helped out the first one.”

“So we have a mystery,” Jamal said. “First step, though, is to secure that material.”

“Where do you want it driven?” Delpino seemed eager to have this case off his plate as soon as possible.

“Let me check.” Jamal reached for his phone. “They’ll probably want us to cordon the place off.…”

Before he could make the call, however, Sheeba rejoined the conversation. “Get this,” she said, clicking off her phone. “Highway 519 is already cordoned off between Bergen and Hackettstown. New Jersey Highway Patrol.” Sheeba turned to Delpino. “What do you know about this?”

“Not a thing. Traffic here is light; the spill is minuscule. And we really don’t have the authority-”

Jamal looked down the road. Several sets of headlights burned. “Looks like an accident scene.” Christ, now he was stating the obvious. All these months with Sheeba must have affected him.

“What are the odds of two unrelated accidents at the same time on this stretch of road?” Sheeba asked. She turned to Delpino. “Do you know anything about this?”

“Not a thing. I got a call from dispatch just before noon and came straight here. Called in the haz-mat unit before one.” Delpino hooked a thumb toward the haz-mat truck. “This is Warren County.” He tilted an index finger toward the scene two hundred yards away. “One of those vehicles says ‘New Jersey Highway Patrol.’”

“Shoot,” Sheeba said, “not this again. Different jurisdictions.”

Jamal said, “The bane of SCARE’s existence. Wherever we go, we have to make sure the local PD and the highway patrol and the sheriffs are all in the same loop…”

Sheeba finished for him. “… and they never are!”

“Why don’t I go?” he said. It would be informative, and would get him away from Sheeba as her blood sugar drove her to more frequent rages. He chose to walk. The cars weren’t that far, he needed the exercise, and it saved him from a pointless discussion about being sure to bring the Explorer back. Maybe Sheeba suspected his eagerness to drive away and never look back.

Walking also allowed him to show up more or less unannounced, without adding that big movie moment of the black Explorer arriving at a crime scene.

Which is clearly what this was: a New Jersey State Police prowler half blocked the road, its flashing cherries clearly visible in the twilight. (Even in bright sunlight, the SCARE team would have seen them from the truck spill site, except that there was a small hill between the two locations.) A coroner’s van was next to it.

The yellow chalk figure in the middle of the highway told Jamal much of what he needed to know: they had found a body. And, from the apparent height and shape-not that a chalk outline was remotely reliable-some kind of joker.

As Jamal approached, he saw and felt eyes turning toward him, especially those belonging to one of the New Jersey cops, a tall guy with his right arm in a sling.

Stopping an appropriate distance away, he hauled out his shield. “Special Agent Norwood, SCARE.” As if the black suit didn’t give him away.

“Gallo,” he said, clearly not happy with Jamal’s presence. “What brings SCARE to New Jersey?”

Jamal jerked his head back up the highway. “We’ve got a crime scene. Ah, Federal issues. Controlled substances.” He quickly described the crash and the cargo. “And this might explain one problem we’ve found.”

“You think they’re related?” Gallo’s whole manner suggested skepticism, but, then, he could barely see over the hill to the next site.

As patiently as possible, Jamal explained the mystery of the crash-spill sequence. Perhaps because he began to concentrate on crime scene matters, or possibly because he had already made it clear he didn’t like a) Feds or b) aces or c) both, Gallo began to unbend. “We’ve got a DB here, male, joker approximately thirty years of age. Found here early this morning.”

“Cause of death?”

“Now, that’s an interesting question. First cut is, hit by a vehicle.” Gallo nodded toward the coroner’s unit. “But they say, not so fast. Indications are he was dead before that. Autopsy will tell us, I imagine.”

“And the time?”

“That we’ve got: twenty hours ago, give or take a couple.”

“But last night.”

“No question.”

“We don’t have two crime scenes here. We have one in two parts.”

“What do you want to do about it?”

Jamal thought about it. Have SCARE take it over? Their team numbered two and not only had to beg for any resources beyond an extra cell phone, but was at the mercy of DHS for its schedule: they would surely be detailed to a political event tomorrow. “Leave it where it is,” he said. “We’ll take custody of the ammonium nitrate. You figure out what happened with our dead joker.” He reached for a business card and found one in the clip where he carried his driver’s license and a single credit card.

Gallo took it, but didn’t offer one of his own. Which was fine with Jamal. Then, possibly realizing that he had been less than helpful, he said, “Agent Norwood, you got any ideas what this might be?”

At that moment, rain began to fall.

“We get reports of wiretaps or signal intercepts about vital ‘deliveries’ about five times a week,” Jamal said, wondering how long it would be before the gentle drops turned to a downpour. He could hardly expect Gallo to offer him a ride up the road. “They never amount to much.”

“Until the day they do.”

That sounded serious. “You heard anything?”

Gallo was shaking his head. “It is a little strange, though. Dead joker in the road, nasty shit spilled.”

“Well, let us know if the autopsy turns up anything we need to know.”

Gallo never turned back. Maybe he was eager to get in out of the rain, too.

Jamal retreated up the hill, back to the SCARE team. As he walked, he called Sheeba to report what he’d seen, trying to leave out Gallo’s bored unhelpfulness. What else did he expect from the New Jersey State Police, anyway?

Naturally, Sheeba told him they were about to leave, could he hurry? Apparently coming to pick him up wasn’t part of the plan. The instant he hung up and prepared to pick up his pace … with the Explorer and the Warren County team in sight … he suddenly felt weak, as if hit by a blindsided tackle.

He actually had to stop and bend over, trying to catch his breath. What the hell was happening to him? Blood loss, that was it. He had had blood taken-you were supposed to eat when that happened, or just take it easy.

The weak moment passed. It was only when he was feeling better and walking that he allowed himself to remember that the warning about weakness after blood work was for people who had been transfused … who had given a pint of their blood.

Not a few ccs.

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