The Cat Dancers

63

They waited for another hour, but there were no calls. Cam finally called his own voice mail at home. One message, and not the one he had left. He listened carefully, played it again, and then saved it. “Sounded like a tape,” he reported. “A trucking terminal on the south side of I-Forty, off the airport road. We’re apparently looking for a trailer. They said for me to go alone, or they’d fire the chair.”

“No,” Bobby Lee said. “No way.”

“I got her into this mess, Sheriff,” Cam protested. “Least I can do is get her out.”

“What you’d do is get yourself killed. No, I’m sorry, but there’s a hostage. I’m always sorry there’s a hostage. But we go in force.”

“How about that Owl thing?” Pierce asked. “Send it overhead with some thermal-imaging gear, see if they can find a trailer that’s different from all the others?”

“How long will that take?” the sheriff asked. Pierce didn’t know, but he went to find out.

Thirty minutes later, they had a plan. The Owl would make its sweep and report any targets of interest. The SWAT team would deploy in the rail yards behind the trucking terminal. Cam would drive through the terminal in a lone cruiser, wearing full combat gear, and pretend to scan the trailers with a handheld thermal-imaging device. He’d drive around long enough to allow the SWAT team to get in position behind the trailer, and then they’d pounce. If the Owl didn’t find anything, they’d regroup and try something else.

It took another hour to get the aircraft in position above the terminal. Cam rode out with his MCAT guys in a Suburban to a location three blocks away from the terminal. Then he shifted over to a cruiser while the guys went to join the SWAT team at the command post. The sheriff and Mike Pierce went directly to the command post in the sheriff’s personal cruiser.

Cam reached the terminal in five minutes and drove in past the security gates. The place was a medium-size terminal by Triboro standards-ten warehouses equipped with mechanized truck-loading docks. Some of the warehouses were inactive, but half had trucks and trailers backed up and forklifts operating in lighted doorways. The sergeant at the command and control vehicle announced over the secure tactical frequency that the aircraft was overhead, scanning the empty trailers parked at the back of the terminal. He said there were sixty or seventy trailers out there.

Cam drove around with his window open. The dock workers didn’t seem to pay any attention to the lone cruiser prowling the area. Cam could communicate with the war wagon but not with the SWAT team. The aircraft reported that the roofs of the warehouses appeared to be clean, no lurking shooters. Ten minutes later, it reported one trailer had a different thermal signature from the trailers around it. They pinpointed its location along the back fence of the terminal, and the SWAT team went into motion.

Cam continued his prowl, occasionally sticking the thermal-imager gun out the window as he waited for word that the team was in position behind the target. Finally, he was told to drive to the very back and begin a slow sweep of the trailers parked against the back fence. He started using his spotlight now, shining it under the parked trailers, which was the one place the Owl could not see.

He drove the full length of the line, hoping like hell that there were no long-gun shooters in the trees, then switched off the spot and turned around. He started back along the line, imaging each trailer carefully as the tactical controller counted down the time on top. He pretended to be interested in one trailer until the war wagon announced that the team was in position in a line of trees behind the trailer park area and that the fence had been cut.

Cam kept driving until he arrived at the trailer designated by the aircraft. He pointed the imager at it, but nothing came up in the viewfinder. The aircraft confirmed he was pointing at the right trailer. Now it was time to get out of the car. He wanted to do another spotlight sweep under the trailer, but that might illuminate the SWAT people on the other side. The trailer, like all the others, was parked with its foot stand facing the road and the cargo doors facing the fence at the back.

He used his own headlights instead, parking at an oblique angle in order to throw some light under the trailer. He wished he had his shepherds with him-they’d have been able to find anything and anybody lurking out there.

“In position,” he announced quietly to his shoulder mike.

“Exit the vehicle and go around to the back of the trailer,” the voice in his earphone said. “ Owl reports no sign of ambush.”

Cam swallowed, put the cruiser in park, and got out. The terminal lights did a fair job of illuminating the line back here, but there were lots of shadows. He just hoped that aircraft could see everything for a good five hundred yards around, because any competent sniper could take him out from that distance, body armor or no body armor. He walked carefully around the back of the trailer, shining his flashlight everwhere but back at the fence. He listened for any sounds of the Owl, but he heard only a soft wind in the tree line. He could see that the trailer was a refrigeration model, with a squat generator up top and heavy insulated sides. There was maybe twenty feet of space between the fence and the back of the trailer.

The doors on the trailer were locked when he reached the back, so he made another circuit of the trailer while trying to suppress the creeping tingle he felt on his back. Were they here? Had they tumbled to the SWAT team? Was the guy in the Owl one of them?

He came back around again to the rear doors. Nothing happened. “Clear,” he said to his shoulder mike.

“Team go,” announced the controller, and then the whole area lit up as the SWAT guys, looking like storm troopers from a Star Wars movie, came swarming through the fence, followed by some portable spots, which soon had the entire area ablaze in blue-white light. More vehicles poured through the front gates of the terminal area and set up a perimeter. The sheriff drove up in his cruiser, followed by the command and control van.

They walked back to the rear of the trailer. “I’m scared to death of what we’re going to find here,” Cam said.

The sheriff didn’t say anything. Cam figured Bobby Lee had already framed Mary Ellen in his mind as being dead, which realistically was the way most cops visualized hostages. That way, when they got them back alive, it was a pleasant surprise. Mike Pierce didn’t say anything, either.

The access crew brought over a large bolt cutter to open the doors of the trailer. Cam and the sheriff peered in as the noise suddenly subsided. Two portable spots were rolled up to the fence and their generators started up. The doors were swung open.

Front and center was the electric chair from the Web videos. There was a flat table in front of that, and behind it a one-man tent had been erected in one corner. A brand-new welding machine was set up to one side of the chair, and heavy wires led to the back of the trailer and up the inside front wall toward the refrigeration unit’s generator at the top of the trailer. There were empty water jugs, a portable camp toilet, and a pile of army MRE ration containers piled in a trash heap. The generator switched on once the doors were opened.

There was no Mary Ellen Goode.

Cam swore silently.

Two members of the team went in, being careful not to disturb any of the items lying around the floor. They checked the tent, where they found a mummy-style sleeping bag, an old duffel bag, and several scraps of duct tape. After a quick initial exploration, they backed out to wait for the CSI people. Cam could only shake his head in total frustration. Where the hell was Mary Ellen?

“From all appearances,” the team leader said, “there was someone being held hostage in this thing. But not now.”

“Any signs of violence?” the sheriff asked.

“No visible bloodstains,” the lieutenant replied. “CSI will have to confirm that. That chair doesn’t smell so good, though.”

“Did you see a cell phone in there?” Cam asked. The lieutenant was about to answer when a chirping noise started up inside the tent.

On the third ring, they all heard the trailer’s generator ramp up. Red and green lights blinked on across the control panel of the welding machine. Cam and the sheriff exchanged glances and then the sheriff yelled for everyone to back out. The SWAT guys jumped down out of the trailer and joined the general exodus. The generator suddenly went to very high rpm as they swarmed back through the big hole in the chain-link fence. Cam and the sheriff were the last to get through the hole, and as they turned to watch, the chair turned into one massive arc as current flowed through wires attached to the the welding machine. With no one in the chair, its metal arms and legs dissolved in a blazing ball of directcurrent lightning, blinding all the cops as they stared in fascination. Then there was a deep red glare at the deep end of the trailer and then it blew up in one enormous fireball, blasting bits of metal, tires, and decking all over the parking lot. The two trailers on either side caught fire from the blast, and half the SWAT cops found themselves sitting on the ground, their ears ringing despite their helmets. Cam had turned away from the searing light and was thus standing partially behind the sheriff when the trailer went up. When he regained his balance and turned back around, the sheriff was sitting on the grass, looking curiously at a foot-long wooden shard that was sticking into his upper chest.

“Medic!” Cam shouted as he knelt down beside the sheriff. His ears were ringing from the blast and he couldn’t be sure he’d made himself heard. The sheriff was bleeding, although not very much. He had been wearing his protective vest, but the piece of wood had gone right through him. The part of it sticking out of his back was blackly slick in the harsh light of the portable spots. Bobby Lee coughed weakly and Cam had to hold him upright as he swayed dangerously.

The team’s medic came on the run, saw the shard, and called for an ALS ambulance. Cam backed away as a second medic knelt down and helped keep the sheriff upright. Cam could see that there were other SWAT team members down, but they were all in full body armor and none of them looked to be seriously injured. Most were being tended by other members of the team. The ambulance came through the perimeter, its lights flashing. A heavy pall of bomb smoke lay over the parking lot, and Cam was pulled back to the sights and sounds of Annie Bellamy’s yard. It even smelled the same. C-4 again, he thought. So these bastards never hurt other cops, huh?

Mike Pierce came over and watched with Cam as the medics loaded Bobby Lee onto a gurney and then pulled it through the fence to the meat wagon. While some of the cops were spraying the burning tires of the nearby trailers with fire extinguishers, other SWAT team members were standing around the back of the ambulance, saying encouraging things to the sheriff, which meant that he was still conscious.

“That looked bad,” Pierce said.

“It was high up,” Cam said. “Maybe clipped a lung, but there wasn’t much bleeding.”

“Not outside anyway,” Pierce said, confirming what Cam had been thinking.

“This changes the equation,” Cam said.

“We sure that ranger wasn’t in there?”

Cam nodded. “It was empty, but somehow they knew the trailer had been opened up. Either they had someone here or it was electronic.”

“They told you to come alone. This wasn’t aimed at the SWAT guys.”

“They had to have known we’d bring a crowd eventually,” Cam said. “They might have expected I’d open the trailer, but they must have figured there’d be backup.”

“Sheriff’s Office bad guys would know,” Pierce said. “Federal bad guys might not.”

“And where’s Mary Ellen Goode?”

Several of the SWAT guys were looking up at something. Cam did the same and saw a small airplane with an oversized Perspex bubble cockpit and ridiculously long wings swoop low overhead.

“ Owl says something blew up,” the controller announced in a dry tone.

“Go, Owl, ” Cam said glumly.