Final justice - W.E.B. Griffin [61]
"I have the feeling I'm about to hear something I shouldn't," Matt Payne said, coming into the passageway from inside one of the stalls.
"What the hell were you doing in there?" Pekach asked, curiously.
"I'm gone," Matt said. "Sorry."
"Stay," Eileen said. "There's no reason you shouldn't hear this. Maybe you should."
"What were you doing in there?" Pekach pursued.
Matt looked between them and decided that when you don't know what the hell to say, tell the truth.
"You remember the scene in The Godfather, the wedding, where everybody handed the bride an envelope? As a tribute to the Godfather, not because they gave a damn about the bride?"
"Yeah," Pekach said. "So?"
"I felt like the bride," Matt said. "Out of respect to you and Martha and/or my parents and/or Denny Coughlin, everybody was coming to the table and saying, 'Congratulations, Sergeant.' And then Amy would snort. So I came to hide in here."
"You should have waited until Ben and I finally got here," Eileen said. "Our congratulations would have been absolutely sincere."
He looked at her for a moment.
"Thank you," he said, and then added: "Like I said, I wasn't trying to eavesdrop and I'm gone."
"You're not interested in Fort Festung?" Eileen asked.
"I'm becoming fascinated--"
"Okay. Stay. Latest bulletin," Eileen said. "Tony Casio . . ."
"He's Eileen's fugitive guy," Pekach explained.
". . . had a call from the State Department this afternoon. The French are going to rule on the statute of limitations tomorrow, and their 'legal counsel,' read FBI guy, heard that it'll go our way."
"Which leaves us where?"
"We start the extradition business all over again. If the decision comes down tomorrow in our favor, we start the extradition process again tomorrow."
"And this time?" Pekach asked.
"The French can stall only so long, David," Eileen said. "We'll get him."
Pekach looked at her a long moment but didn't say anything.
"Okay, birthday boy," Eileen said. "Back to the table. And smile nice when somebody says 'congratulations.' "
"Yes, ma'am," Matt said.
[FIVE]
At just about the time the last of the unmarked Ford Crown Victorias was leaving the Peebles Estate--somewhere around 1:15 A.M.--Homer C. Daniels, a six-feet-one-inch, 205-pound, thirty-six-year-old Caucasian male, who had once been a paratrooper and still wore his light brown hair clipped close to his skull, was standing in the shadow of a tree in the 600 block of Independence Street in Northeast Philadelphia, in the area known as East Oak Lane.
He was looking up at the second-story windows on the right side of what had been built as a single-family home-- not quite large enough to be called a mansion--not quite a century before. It had been empty for a while after World War II, and then had been converted to a "multifamily dwelling" with two apartments on the ground floor, two on the second, and a third in what had been the servants' quarters on the third.
Daniels, who was wearing a black coverall, thought of himself as a businessman rather than a truck driver, although in each of the past several years he had driven a Peterbilt eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer rig 150,000 miles all over the country.
For one thing, he was a partner in Las Vegas Classic Motor Cars, Inc., the company that owned the Peterbilt. And he almost always had the same partner's interest in the truck's cargo, and sometimes he owned all of the cargo.
Las Vegas Classic Motor Cars, Inc., as the name implied, dealt with what they referred to as the "Grand Marques" of automobiles, ranging from the "vintage"--such as Duesenbergs and Pierce-Arrows, no longer manufactured--to the "contemporary"--such as Ferrari, the larger Mercedes-Benz, and Rolls Royce.
As a general rule of thumb, if an automobile was worth less than $75,000, Las Vegas Classic Motor Cars, Inc., was not interested. A boat-tailed Dusey, in Grand Concourse condition and worth, say, $1,250,000, had the opposite effect.
They bought and sold some cars themselves, and accepted some cars on consignment. Often they would buy a "decent" classic, and spend up