Dead Man’s List. Mike Lawson

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       Chapter 11

      Garret Darcy watched the man and woman in the cathedral garden through binoculars. The guy was dressed in a suit and tie but he didn’t look like someone who worked in an office. He was a hard-looking bastard. A cop maybe? Or maybe a hood. Yeah, he looked more like a hood than a cop. Now that would be interesting.

      It would be good if something interesting happened. It was great to be working again but following Ladybird was dull work. For one thing, she was so easy to follow. Not only was she a civilian but from what he’d seen, she drank quite a bit, not an activity that improved one’s observation skills. But even if she’d been teetotaler and trained to spot a tail, she never would have seen him. Darcy could tail a ghost; he’d spent an entire career following people.

      He sorta wished, though, that he’d been assigned to Big Bird. He couldn’t help but wonder if Phil and Toby had been given the primary target because of Kosovo. He had screwed up one time, one damn time, and that had been years ago—but he bet that was the reason that he’d been given the wife instead of the man himself.

      But what the hell. He was getting paid and it was easy work. Phil and Toby, they had to hustle to keep up with Big Bird because he was always on the move. Those guys, poor bastards, weren’t sleeping more than five hours a day and when they did sleep, half the time it was sitting in a car. By comparison, Ladybird was a piece of cake. She stayed in the house in Georgetown most of the time and, as near as he could tell, spent most of her day watching TV and sipping drinks. When she did go out, she’d meet a girlfriend and have lunch and more drinks, and at night, unless she was accompanying her husband to some function, she was usually in bed by ten, at which point Darcy would head on home.

      Today, however, was different, meeting this guy who looked like a hood in an out-of-the-way spot. He had to find out who the guy was. Maybe Phil and Toby knew already, but the boss, that tricky little shit, he liked to keep things compartmentalized. He’d ask Phil later if they knew the man, but for now, as soon as the hardcase and Ladybird quit blabbing, he’d follow the guy to his car and get a license plate number.

      If he’d had a parabolic mike he could have heard what they were talking about but he didn’t have one. That was the odd thing about this op. The boss didn’t seem to have access to the kind of equipment they’d used in the past. No mikes, no tracking devices, no night-vision goggles. They even had to bring their own cameras, which in his case was a little low-budget, piece-of-shit Kodak digital. And when Phil had asked if they should try to get a bug into Big Bird’s house, the boss had said no, not yet. Well, maybe that wasn’t so surprising considering who Big Bird was. But this op—it was just a little bit off. The boss was up to something.

      Now that was a laugh: that cagey bastard, he was always up to something.

      Hey, what the hell, it was an easy gig. When he’d enlisted in the marines, before he’d started working for the boss—a million years ago it seemed like now—he and some guys had been bitching about sitting around doing nothing, waiting all the time. An old gunnie heard them griping and said: “Boys, you get paid the same for marching as you do for fighting.”

      And he was getting paid. He thought when he retired that he and Sharon wouldn’t have any problem at all living off his government pension, but money ran through Sharon’s hands like water. They’d whittled their savings account down to nothing. So quit bitching, he told himself. You get paid the same for marching as you do for fighting, and a dull job was better than no job, and it was definitely better than being in the middle of a shit storm like Kosovo.