The Narrows - Michael Connelly [120]
But sometimes the risks you face dictate the other risks you must take. And my guess was that this was going to be one of those times.
40
THE RAIN MADE IT HARD to watch the store. If we had left the windshield wipers on, it would have been a dead giveaway. So we watched at first through the murk of water on glass.
We were parked in the lot of a strip shopping center on Tustin Boulevard in the city of Orange. Book Carnival was a small business between a rock shop and what looked like a vacant slot. Three doors down was a gun store.
There was a single public entrance. Before taking our position in the front lot we had driven behind the shopping center and seen a rear door with the store’s name on it. There was a doorbell and a sign that said RING BELL FOR DELIVERIES.
In a perfect world we’d have been on the front and back of the store with a minimum of four sets of eyes. Backus could come in either way, posing as a customer through the front or as a deliveryman through the back. But nothing was perfect about the world on this day. It was raining and it was just the two of us. We parked the Mercedes at a distance from the front of the store but still close enough to see and act if necessary.
The front counter and cash register were just behind the front window of Book Carnival. This worked in our favor. Shortly after we watched him open the store for business, we watched Ed Thomas take a position behind the counter. He put a cash drawer into the register and made some phone calls. Even with the rain and the blurring of the windshield we could keep him in view as long as he stayed at the register. It was the recesses of the store behind him that disappeared in the gloom. On the occasions that he left his post and walked back toward the shelves and displays in the rear, we lost sight of him and the tingling sense of panic took hold.
On the way down Rachel had told me about the discovery of the GPS tag on her car and the confirmation that she had been used by fellow agents as bait for Backus. And now here we sat watching a former colleague of mine, in a way using him as the new bait. It didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to go in and tell Ed the crosshairs were on him, that he should take a vacation, get out of town. But I didn’t because I knew if Backus was watching Thomas and saw any deviation in the norm, then we might lose our only chance at him. So Rachel and I got selfish with Ed Thomas’s life and I knew in the days ahead I would deal with the guilt from that. The only question was, depending on how things turned out, how much guilt there would be.
The first two customers of the day were women. They arrived shortly after Thomas had unlocked the front door. And while they were browsing in the store a man pulled up, parked in front and went in as well. He was too young to be Backus so we didn’t go to full alert. He left in a hurry and without purchasing a book. Then, when the two women left, clutching their bags of books, I got out of the Mercedes and ran across the lot to the overhang in front of the gun shop.
Rachel and I had decided not to bring Thomas into our investigation, but that wasn’t going to stop me from going into the store on a reconnaissance mission. We decided that I would go into the store with a cover story, nonchalantly reacquaint myself with Thomas and see if he might already be alert to the idea that he was being watched. So once the first customers of the day had come and gone, I made the move.
I first ducked into the gun store since it was the store closest to where we had parked and it would have looked odd to anyone watching the shopping plaza for me to park on one end and go