parking garage and wander back over to the courthouse and hang out, hope I run into Melody in an elevator?
Had I formulated a plan on my way down from New York, it would have gone dim. Were I not truly hunting her, here is where I would’ve returned home and shrugged, offered up a better luck next time attitude as I plunged a hunk of bread into whatever sauce my father had going in the kitchen. But if I returned home right then, it would have been certain doom for Melody. Gardner would probably get her new locale within a day or less, and the enough is enough attitude would have been paired with a seasoned killer fast on her heels. After all, this was business now, and Melody had shot back to being one of our top priorities.
So I did what any gambler would have done—Gardner would’ve been proud: I played the long shot. I parked my sore thumb of a car between two other red vehicles in a parking lot reserved for the medical center behind the courthouse, in a space reserved for a Dr. Bajkowski, and waited for one or both of those Explorers to emerge from the gated garage adjacent to my parked position. I figured the odds of the marshals moving Melody out of Baltimore in the same vehicle in which they’d brought her in were about the same as them transporting her by way of the same marshal: maybe four to one.
An hour of nothing and I called Gardner, figured I’d milk him for any possible data that might offer some direction. Or hope.
“Give me anything you’ve got on this transition plan,” I said.
He gave me this meld of a grunt and sigh, then said, “Hold on.”
Three minutes passed along with a series of clicks, and when he came back on the line a hum draped his words, as though he was sitting next to an air conditioner. Then, as if I had just said the words, “What do you mean transition plan?”
“She’s on the move.”
“Geez,” he said, loud enough I was certain he was alone, “can’t wait till someone unloads a clip into that stupid scag.”
I tightened my fist around my steering wheel, decided not to remind him her life was the only thing guaranteeing his. “Where is she going?”
“You know I wouldn’t know that yet.”
“What can you tell me? And what is that friggin’ noise?”
“I came down to the server room. I’m using a wall phone and the administrator ID and password, so no one knows who is logging in to the database, so no one could ever track this call to me. And I can’t tell you much. You know that.”
“How about the vehicle transporting her? License plates? Anything?”
“We’ve had this conversation before. Everything here is compartmentalized. I don’t have access to any of that data.”
I stared at the gate, blanked out. “This is a bad time to become useless.”
“What’s the big deal? The information will get updated a few days after she arrives at her new destination.” I could hear him tapping the keyboard, mumbling to himself. “Only thing that might be useful is the name of the marshal assigned to her. Sean Douglas.”
I sat up. “What else? What does he look like? Experience level?”
“No, this is just personnel data. I can tell you he’s thirty-three, birthday is October thirtieth, makes about fifty-three K a year. Lives in Towson, Maryland. Unmarried.”
Randall blathered on with more subpar data, then mentioned something about the Red Sox and coming up short. Something about covering his losses. So the cycle would go for pathetic Randall. I was stuck on the grainy information I had about this marshal, my new foe. An unmarried guy making fiftysomething a year to protect people—certainly a better deal for protection than you might get from my family—could mean only one thing: I was dealing with a true believer.
Yeah, well… so was he.
I remained in that position for eight hours, the car on and ready. I idled through a quarter tank of gas, survived on one bottle of water and two packs of cigarettes, completed all the tasks I could with stuff from my glove compartment: flipped through my CDs, read through my user manual for the Audi, shaved my face with my near-dead electric razor—a decided benefit after looking in my rearview and realizing just how scary and intimidating I looked with a shadow.
Dr. Bajkowski never showed. I kept hoping he or she was buried safely in a kidney