Her fears arose less from likely threats to the boy than from weariness and from distress at how abruptly their lives had been turned upside down. She’d had no sleep the previous night; and the responsibility she felt for the boy stropped her nerves, until her anxiety was sharper than it had been since the war.
During their time in the first market, she hadn’t trusted her ability both to appear relaxed and to react quickly if a threat materialized. Her mind was fuzzy. Her reflexes weren’t what they should be. There was a real possibility that if she had to go for her gun, she might fumble with the sport coat.
Consequently, during the drive between markets, she had taken the Colt Pony .380 from the low-ride belt-fixed rig on her hip and put it in her purse.
The purse was now propped in the small fold-down basket that overhung the larger part of the grocery cart. The zipper was open, the pistol grip awaiting her hand, tucked between her wallet and a packet of Kleenex.
Even with the weapon better positioned for a quick draw and though everything had gone smoothly thus far, Jessie worried about Travis. They had hardly begun their tour through the second market, but already they’d been away ninety minutes. They wouldn’t get back to the house for at least another hour, which would be half an hour later than they had promised.
34
Immediately after spotting the suspects, Jergen and Dubose hurry to the back of the market, where deliveries are made. The door is unlocked. They step inside and stand blinking in the cool air as their eyes adjust to the low light.
This is the warehousing space behind the sales floor, and it is smaller than Jergen expected. You can’t call the market a mom-and-pop operation, but neither does it deserve the prefix super.
Here are three men in black slacks and white shirts, two of them wearing white aprons with the market logo on the breast. The one without an apron is cutting away the shrink-wrap from three pallets of recently delivered goods. The other two are transferring five-pound bags of sugar from one of the pallets to metal storage shelves.
The guy scissoring the shrink-wrap straightens up from his work. He has close-cropped hair, a scrubbed look, no face jewelry, no visible tattoos, neatly pressed pants, and shoes with a high shine. His just-so appearance suggests he might be a Mormon, which is a plus, as Mormons are people who are raised to be helpful. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”
“We need to speak with the manager,” Dubose says.
“Well, now, that would be me. Oren Luckman. What can I do for you?”
Jergen says, “IRS.” He looks at the other men, who are too interested in whatever little drama might play out here. “We’d prefer to keep this discreet.”
Oren Luckman’s office is in a corner of the warehouse space. Piles of invoices cover the desk, weighed down by a variety of colorful polished stones.
Indicating a red stone with black veining, Dubose says, “That’s a nice specimen of rhodonite.” He points to another. “And that’s an exceptional cabochon of chrysocolla.”
“You know stones.” Luckman’s face shines with the delight of a collector meeting someone who doesn’t think his peculiar enthusiasm makes him a class-A dweeb.
“It’s long been a hobby of mine,” Dubose reveals. “Oh, now, that’s a spectacular chunk of quartz-embedded rhodochrosite. A real beauty.”
“That’s from the Sweet Home Mine in Colorado,” says Luckman with an annoying note of pride.
This is the first Jergen has ever heard of Dubose’s hobby. Not to be outdone, he points to a stone. “Magnificent turquoise.”
Luckman and Dubose regard him with something like pity, and the manager says, “That’s stained howlite.”
“People who don’t know any better,” Dubose says, “buy howlite jewelry and pay a turquoise price.” Putting an end to stone talk, he withdraws his ID wallet from an inner coat pocket and flashes his National Security Agency credentials.
As Jergen produces his ID as well, Luckman is confused. “But you said Internal Revenue Service.”
“For the benefit of your two assistants back there,” Jergen explains. “We don’t want them talking about NSA agents to other employees on the sales floor right now.”
“We’ve spotted two suspects that just came into your store,” Dubose says. “If they are who we think, we’ll have to arrest them.”
“Oh, my,” says Luckman. “Nothing like this ever happens here.”
Jergen points to a large wall-mounted monitor on which is a view of what appears to be the area just inside the front door of the market. “How many security cams can you show us?”
With almost as much pride as when reacting to Dubose’s admiring words about the quartz-embedded whatever, Luckman says, “One at a time or four in quad-screen format.”
“And how many cameras altogether?”
“Eight.”
“Just eight?” Jergen asks.
“Two exterior, six in the store.”
“Just six,” Dubose laments. “Should be at least twenty-four.”
“Surely not for a place this size,” Luckman says. “Not around these parts.”
With Luckman using a remote, they need maybe two minutes to find the black couple. The manager is able to zoom in on them for a satisfying close-up.
Standing directly in front of the monitor, Dubose and Jergen study the faces, the attitudes, the way the woman moves.
“It’s them,” Dubose declares, and Jergen agrees.
They can wait until the Washingtons are leaving the store and pushing a cart full of grocery bags, draw down on them outside. But these two will be cautious exiting, alert for anything amiss. Going through a door, the husband will have his hand under his coat, on his weapon.
They will be somewhat more relaxed in the parking lot, on the way to their wheels. However, the parking lot is sizeable, and there aren’t many vehicles in it on this Sunday afternoon. The moment they see Jergen and Dubose moving toward them, the Washingtons will read the situation right, and there could be a firefight.
A firefight isn’t a risk worth taking, not when this situation allows Jergen and Dubose the element of surprise.
One stone fancier to another, Dubose tells Luckman what they need to do and what help they require from him. The manager pales, but although he surely would have been slower to concede assistance to Jergen, he is taken with Dubose’s folksy manner and agrees to the strategy.
35
When the Washingtons had their shopping cart fully laden and were nearly finished, one of its wheels developed a stutter and wanted to pull a different direction from the other three.
“Let me wrestle with it,” Gavin said.
“No, we’re almost done,” Jessie said, patting her purse in the fold-down basket. “Let’s just finish it according to plan.”
Maybe three minutes later, when they reached the front of the store and were approaching the cashier stations, a man working on a display of Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero noticed the mountain of groceries they were pushing. His shirt tag said his name was Oren and that he was a manager. “You folks best go to checkout three. Eddie there, he’s our fastest checker. He’ll have you out the door in no time.”
Eddie was a thirtysomething guy with blond hair and blue eyes. He looked a little like a shorter Robert Redford from the days when Redford was doing movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He had a smarmy smile that Gavin didn’t like, the kind of smile a bigot wore when he was pretending to like black people.
Gavin went ahead of the cart to unload it as Jessie pushed it into the checkout lane, and he sensed something besides Eddie’s smile that was wrong with the man. His shirt. Eddie was wearing a market apron over a patterned short-sleeve sport shirt. Hadn’t all the other employees been wearing white shirts?
And the name tag. It said EDUARDO. Not Eddie. Eduardo suggested Hispanic. This guy was about as Hispanic as the queen of England.
Gavin felt his right hand, powered by intuition, wanting to go under his coat for the Springfield Armory pistol. He glanced back toward the manager and saw him fading away from the Coke display, around the corner into an aisle, looking back with something like alarm.
He glanced at Jessie, and her expression said, What?