through the road in front of me just like he had the night his headlights had caught me on the stakeout.
“Headin’ your way, Freeman,” O’Shea said. “I’ll fall in behind.”
I pressed my head against the driver’s side window, using the frame strut to partially hide behind and watched as the cruiser swung around the corner and onto the street. Morrison pulled a rolling stop through the first stop sign and I had to come out fast to stay within a reasonable distance. Either he was so focused he wasn’t paying attention, or he was just arrogant. Both were good things. He wouldn’t be thinking of a tail.
We were heading west through a residential area, then he took a right back toward Sunrise Boulevard to catch a light. It was the same way I would have gone to get on the main strip west toward the expressway.
“O’Shea, head up the back way to the park so you can get in behind him,” I said into the Nextel. “I’m going to have to stop at the light with him and he’s going to get a good look at my truck and I’ll have to fall back to keep him from getting familiar.”
“Roger that, big man.”
“If he keeps westbound to I-95 you’ll fit in with the rest of the traffic heading that way. I’ll stay back a couple of blocks.”
“We got this one, Max. Not a problem.”
Christ, I thought. I’m partnered with Colin O’Shea. I could only hope he wouldn’t hold to form and somehow screw this one up.
Morrison stopped at the light. It was difficult to see his silhouette through the dark glass of his back window in the daylight. The advantage to police cars in Florida was that they almost all had tinted windows so they were obscured from the outside. The treatments used to scare the shit out of us as patrol officers, pulling over some van or tricked out ghetto cruiser when you couldn’t see if some banger inside was sighting up a shotgun at the window. Now law enforcement had followed the trend themselves. I again leaned into my driver’s door behind the strut, hung my elbow out of the open window like I was a tired worker going home for the evening. I didn’t think Morrison could have gotten much of a look at me when he slipped out of Kim’s that first time I glimpsed him, but I was trying not to underestimate the guy.
He took a left at the light change as I expected and I followed but fell back. We were heading into a setting sun, the flare of orange spraying strong up into the clouds, and there was enough white light left to cause everyone to drop their visors a couple of inches. It was past commuter time, but South Florida traffic never seemed to ease. It was good for cover, bad if Morrison got nervous and made any quick moves.
“I’m in behind him coming up on the Sears curve,” O’Shea reported over the Nextel.
“I’m three blocks back,” I answered.
I had to think that Morrison would believe most of what Marci had reported to him. I wasn’t exactly going out on a limb with this but maybe we could get lucky. If he wasn’t our guy, he’d go home, or to the station, or to some poker game for all I knew. But if he was our guy, I was betting the mention of somehow finding a woman’s body in the Glades would spook him. He wouldn’t believe it, but the thought of it would get into his head and twist it. If he was as careful as we made him out to be, he would have to confirm it. I was betting on the Glades. Marci had just added to it with her description of someplace off Alligator Alley. Dumping bodies in the Everglades was a tradition in South Florida. The Indians had done it to early explorers, the ruthless farm bosses to slave labor. The mob had done it with their enemies in the twenties and the myriad criminals from dope runners to child abductors had done it in the modern era. Two and a half million acres of open land, shifting water, canals and sawgrass and plenty of reptiles to eliminate all traces: a perfect disposal site. I figured he’d head straight for the Alley and use the failing daylight to his advantage.
But maybe I thought wrong.
“Freeman, I’m losing him up here,” O’Shea snapped into the Nextel. “Some asshole is