Prey

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Monday September 13th

The call came in at seventy-thirty that Monday morning. Carl Scoby tried to beg off because he had planned to spend the day with the resident-agent staff of the Marana Law Enforcement Training Center on a tour of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation.

But the woman was insistent that someone had to show up. She knew where twenty-four bear carcasses had been buried after their paws had been cut off, and she could show him where at least fifty bear gallbladders were being dried in preparation for sale.

Scoby tried to explain that he was new to the area, already had plans for the Indian reservation, and would much rather make an appointment to talk with her on the following day.

"But don't you see," the informant said, "the bears are from the reservation." The woman, who sounded like she might be German, added with a nervous edge to her voice: "My boyfriend is planning on making a big sale this evening, and if the bastard ever finds out I've squealed on him, he'll really beat me up bad the next time."

Scoby finally agreed to meet the woman at ten-thirty that morning at her cabin on the Simon River. If it turned out to be something worthwhile, he told himself, he and the other resident instructors at the Marana Training Center could always set up a surveillance and track the boyfriend back to his customers.

So at exactly ten-thirty that morning, Carl Scoby drove his Jeep to the cabin, got out, and looked around briefly at the surrounding forest.

"Mrs. Hoffstedler?" he asked when an attractive young woman opened the door slightly and looked out over the stretched chain latch.

"Yes, I am Carine Hoffstedler," Carine Mueller acknowledged in a thickly accented voice. "Who are you?"

"I'm Special Agent Carl Scoby of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, ma'am," Scoby said, holding out his badge and credentials to the visibly nervous woman. "Is your, uh, husband home?"

"No, my boyfriend and his friends, they are not here," Mueller said as she unlatched the chain and then stepped far enough outside for Scoby to see the large, purplish bruise on the side of her cheek. "But I was afraid you might be one of their friends, checking up on me. Please, come in."

Responding to well-ingrained habits, Scoby entered the cabin cautiously, but it was immediately apparent that they were alone in the small two-room structure.

"Would you like some coffee?"

"No, thank you." Scoby smiled.

"Then let me take you there right now to show you the bears," she said as she strapped a small pack around her slim waist. She grabbed up a jacket and led Scoby out the back door to a narrow trail.

"This is one of my favorite places," Carine Mueller said as she carefully moved branches aside so they could pass. "I'm going to hate to leave it."

"Have you been here long?" Scoby asked, trying to concentrate more on the forest and less on the woman's tight jeans.

"You mean at this house?"

"No, I mean in the United States."

"Oh, not so long," Mueller shrugged.

"You speak English very well, but I couldn't help noticing your accent," Scoby said.

"Oh, yes. You like the way I speak?"

"Yes, I do," Scoby smiled. "It's very, uh, flavorful," he said, searching for the word.

Carine Mueller laughed, looking back at the agent. "I have never heard anyone say that before."

"Well…"

"My boyfriend thinks I am very sexy when I talk English, but then he is not so shy as most of you Americans," Mueller said. Scoby thought she had a great deal of composure for a supposedly nervous and abused woman.

"You think Americans are shy?" he asked.

Mueller nodded. "You Americans know the big talk, but not so much the gentle words. I think it is because you are too shy, and that is no way to impress a Fraulein."

"You're German, then?" Scoby asked.

"No, not German, but you are very close," Mueller said as she continued to push forward through the narrow trail. "I was born in Germany, but my father is Swiss and my mother is French, so I am what you Americans would call a hybrid. Is that the right word?"

"I think we would call you someone who shouldn't allow her boyfriend to give her black eyes," Scoby said seriously.

"Yes, you are right. It was stupid of me to let him do that," Carine Mueller nodded, glancing back at Scoby again. "Sometimes we hybrids are foolish about our men. But did I not convince you to come here to take my boyfriend and his friends away so that I can have the cabin all to myself? So maybe I am not so stupid after all, yes?" With that, she turned her attention back to the trail.

After about five minutes of hiking through the dense woods, they came to a small clearing alongside the riverbank.

"Over there," Mueller said, pointing to the opposite side of the clearing. "See those shacks? The one on the right is where he stores the paws and the gallbladders until they're dried. The one in the middle is their processing shed. And the larger one on the left, the one with the chimney, is where they drink and have their poker parties."

"How many people usually work here?"

"Usually it is my boyfriend and his three partners. But sometimes there are one or two others when they decide to play cards."

"But you're sure none of them are here now?" Scoby asked as he scanned the wooden structures with his binoculars.

"I am very sure they are not here. If they were, we would have seen one of their cars back at the cabin, or one of their boats tied up at the riverbank."

"Is that how they come here, by boat?"

"The buyers always arrive by boat, but then they go away somewhere else to make the exchange," Carine Mueller told him. "Do you think you can follow them to the place where they do that?"

"I'm sure we can come up with something," Carl Scoby smiled. "Shall we take a look at the galls and the burial site?"

"Oh, yes, of course," she nodded. "But first I wanted to ask you something. How will you prove that they are doing something illegal if you don't actually see them killing the animals?"

"When we make arrangements to buy wildlife parts or products from a suspect, sometimes we can get them to brag about how they're outsmarting all the law-enforcement people," Scoby explained as they walked to the storage shed. "If there happens to be a hidden tape recorder nearby, we can always play the tape back to a judge or a jury."

"Would you do something like that?"

"It depends on the situation," Scoby said as he surveyed the three shacks.

"I think it is so strange that a person like you could do something like that."

"Oh, really? Why's that?" Scoby asked as he moved cautiously up to the side of a door, slipping his left hand inside his vest and releasing the safety strap on his shoulder holster.

"Because you look so much like a policeman."

"Yeah, I know," Scoby nodded as he reached for the door with his right hand. "A lot of people tell me that."

"Which I find fascinating, because I hate policemen so much," Carine Mueller said softly as she stepped forward into a semicrouched position with a. 357 Magnum revolver she had withdrawn from her jacket extended out in two steady hands.

"What?" Scoby said, starting to come around when the first of six semijacketed hollow-points caught him square in the center of his chest.

As Scoby crumpled backward, Mueller continued to follow him with her sight pattern, smoothly triggering off five more high-velocity rounds into the rib-cage area of the agent's falling body.

None of the six bullets had actually penetrated Carl Scoby's Kevlar vest, but the sledgehammer-like impacts of the mushrooming. 357 Magnum projectiles had cracked or broken at least half of his ribs, and the agonizing pain made it almost impossible for him to draw the heavy SIG-Sauer automatic from his shoulder holster.

Stunned and nearly unconscious, Carl Scoby might have given up then. But the sight of Carine Mueller calmly dumping the expended brass out of. 357 Magnum, then reaching into her pack for one of her speed-loaders, gave him all the incentive he needed.

Functioning on instinct and training alone, Scoby had just brought his heavy automatic to bear on the blurry figure and was starting to squeeze the trigger when Kiro Nakamura stepped out of the shack and fired a single. 357 round right into the side of his exposed head.

"I can't believe it," Marie Pascalaura whispered as she slid her head up against Henry Lightstone's shoulder and closed her eyes.

"What don't you believe?" Lightstone mumbled, nearly asleep because they'd been up half the night before, packing and chasing each other around the bedroom.

"That you and I are actually flying to Alaska to see if we want to live there," she whispered against his ear. "And that you're willing to give up undercover work so that we can live almost like normal people."

"And we're going to get married?" Lightstone mumbled drowsily.

"Nope. After you get those transfer papers signed, and after you've worked for McNulty as a senior resident agent for a few months, then we can get married," Marie Pascalaura said firmly. "Until then, you're just going to have to get used to being shacked up."

"Nice trusting attitude," Lightstone said as he moved his head around to give her a gentle kiss.

"Attitude nothing," Marie Pascalaura smiled. "I just want to be sure you can do it."

"Do what, leave undercover work?"

"Uh-huh."

"You really don't think I can?" Lightstone asked, lifting his head and staring into the beautiful dark eyes of his girlfriend.

"I have my doubts."

"Well, I'll tell you what," he said as he settled his head down against the soft, aromatic mass of her long, dark hair. "I'll probably miss Scoby, and Paxton, and Stoner, and maybe even that crazy Takahara, but I don't think I'm going to miss the work at all."

At eleven-fifteen that morning, Special Agent-Pilot Larry Paxton was cruising over the Everglades National Park, looking for baited ponds and illegal shooters, when a scratchy voice broke in over his scrambled radio system.

"Super Cub November Two-Two-Seven-Four, do you read me?"

"This is Super Cub Two-Two-Seven-Four," Paxton acknowledged into his helmet mike. "Go ahead."

"Two-Two-Seven-Four, this is Florida State Fish and Game Officer A1 Cousins. You that new federal agent-pilot we heard about?"

"I guess that depends," Paxton replied. "What'd you hear about him?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, we heard a lot of things," the voice chuckled. "But ol' Brian Jacobs seems to think that the guy just might be okay anyway, if he's really as good with that airplane as he's supposed to be."

Paxton nodded and smiled. Brian Jacobs was the senior resident agent assigned to the Miami office, and also the man that Paxton was going to have to impress if he wanted to stay assigned to that office. But it wasn't going to be easy. Paxton had a lot of ground to make up.

Predictably, the idea of a black agent getting the Miami slot over the long-standing transfer requests of five other agents with higher seniority had not pleased the rest of the Southern Florida law-enforcement staff. Paxton knew he would have felt the same way if he'd been shoved aside by a political appointee with less seniority, regardless of the underlying reasons.

"Uh, did Brian happen to mention anything about how I ended up getting this assignment?"

"Yep, sure did. Told us a real interesting story about how you guys got bushwhacked and broken up by some hotshot political types. Course, to tell you the truth, nobody down here was all that surprised. We kinda expect that sort of thing out of the federal government."

"Well, maybe you can understand why I wouldn't mind getting the chance to show my stuff with this bird," Paxton said after a moment's pause. "Think you might have a target I could play with for a while?"

"Kinda hoping you'd say that," the voice over the radio drawled. "And, as a matter of fact, we sure do. Just got a report sayin' there's a couple of poachers out near Big Lostmans trying to nail themselves one of our Florida panthers. Now just between you and me, I really wouldn't much care if they shot every one of them hybrid bastards, but I guess if that ever happens, we're gonna have ourselves a mess of pissed-off Indians around here."

"If it's all the same to you, I'd just as soon stay out of an Indian war for the first couple of weeks," Paxton commented.

"You and me both," the voice agreed.

"Listen, I'm pretty close to Big Lostmans right now," Paxton said. "What do you want me to look for?"

"Supposed to be two hunters in a pirogue, working their way north toward Alligator Bay," the voice said into Paxton's earphones. "We got ourselves a floatplane waiting down at Whitewater, but we're still about a half hour out, and that's gonna make it a long way to go for a couple of poachers that ain't there. Thought maybe you could make a pass or two around that area for us, see if there's anybody worth talking to down there. You get lucky and then guide us in, maybe we can share the credit, make it one of them fancy state and federal joint investigations," the voice suggested.

"Tell you what," Paxton said as he banked the Super Cub. "If we get lucky, why don't we just keep it a state case, and then you and I share a couple of beers afterward?"

"Son, you sure you're an honest-to-God federal agent?" the voice drawled dubiously.

"Yep, that's what the badge says," Paxton chuckled.

"Well, Ah guess Ah'm willing to be convinced."

"Super Cub Two-Two-Seven-Four, be back at you in just a minute." Humming cheerfully, Paxton dropped the nose of the Super Cub down and roared in low over the edge of Alligator Bay.

"This is Two-Two-Seven-Four," Paxton spoke into his helmet mike as he looked back over his shoulder at the irregular shoreline. "Negative on the first pass. I'm going to… ooops, what have we here?"

Turning his head quickly, Paxton tried to focus on the blurry dark spot that had suddenly appeared and then disappeared under his left vertical stabilizer.

"Two-Two-Seven-Four, I think I've got something. Hold on a minute," Paxton said quickly as he pulled the Super Cub around into a sharp turn and then came back in low over the water. This time the dark, blurry spot was much easier to locate and identify.

"Two-Two-Seven-Four," Paxton spoke as he continued to scan the shoreline. "Confirming one pirogue located on the west shore of a small cove at the far south end of the bay. Looks like somebody tried to hide it in the tall grass."

"Two-Two-Seven-Four, we copy one pirogue, south end of the bay. You see anybody down there?"

"Uh, that's a negative, but I'm going to make another pass soon as I get a little more altitude," Paxton said as he throttled the Super Cub up into a steep climb and then brought the agile plane around to the left in a tightly banked turn.

On the ground, the two men in the concealed blind waited until the Super Cub was halfway through its turn and perfectly silhouetted on its side against the blue sky before they brought their M-14 rifles up to their shoulders.

The roar of carefully aimed semiautomatic gunfire was lost in the noise of the Piper Super Cub's engine as the ejected casings began to splash in the water. But the red flashes of tracer fire were clearly visible as the camouflaged riflemen sent round after round of 7.76mm ball tracer ammunition into the cockpit and engine cowling of the Super Cub, until the small, slow plane finally nosed over and dove straight down into the glistening blue water of Big Lostmans Bay.

High over the western shoreline of British Columbia, Henry Lightstone had finally managed to drift off into an uneasy sleep when Marie Pascalaura nudged him awake.

"Hummmph?"

"I've been thinking," she whispered softly.

"Yeah, me too," Lightstone nodded sleepily, keeping his eyes tightly closed as the heavy plane shuddered through a brief stretch of turbulence.

"Oh? How could you be thinking when you were snoring?"

"Um-hum, that too," Lightstone mumbled.

"What I've been thinking," Marie went on as she rubbed her fingers gently over the nicely healed scar tissue on Lightstone's left temple, "is that you and Scoby and Paxton and Stoner really got into helping each other out. You know what I mean?"

"Um-hum."

"So won't you miss that? That adrenaline rush when you guys get into trouble, help each other out, and then joke about it afterward?"

Henry Lightstone yawned and then shook his head slowly into the pillow resting against Marie's shoulder. "Scoby, Paxton, and Stoner are big boys," he whispered as he readjusted the pillow into a more comfortable position. "They can take care of themselves just fine. Don't need me as a baby-sitter."

"So you really don't think you're going to miss all that crazy undercover stuff if you and I decide to settle down, grow carrots, and have kids?"

"Nah, just a game," Lightstone mumbled softly. "Shit-pot full of rules. No referee. Last one standing wins."

"That sounds pretty dumb, if you ask me," she said quietly after a long moment.

"Uh-huh. Exactly what it is," Lightstone mumbled as he drifted back asleep. "Nothing serious. Just a dumb game."

Fifteen minutes after Alligator Bay was once again glistening like a blue, reflective mirror, one of the camouflage-dressed riflemen slipped into the hidden pirogue and slowly paddled out to collect the few pieces of wreckage that had bobbed to the surface from the Super Cub. As he did so, he kept a close eye on the half-dozen alligators that had begun to investigate the floating debris.

Back on shore, the second rifleman removed his ear protectors and slipped them into his jacket pocket. Then, after carefully changing the frequency setting on his scrambled radio, he brought the small electronic instrument up to his camouflage-painted face.

"Charley Whiskey Seven to Charley Whiskey Four," he spoke quietly into the radio microphone.

"Charley Whiskey Four, go," Paul Saltmann, the voice of "A1 Cousins, Florida State game officer," responded.

"Charley Whiskey Seven, mission completed."

"Can you see him?"

Gunter Aben looked out across the bay as Felix Steinhauser cautiously reached over the side of the pirogue and retrieved the bullet-punctured lid of a foam ice chest.

"That is negative. We can see nothing except the debris and the alligators."

"Charley Whiskey Four, copy. They can have him," Paul Saltmann said. "Two down and four to go."