Lethal People: A Donovan Creed Crime Novel (32 page)

It was in public school that Charlie Whiteside first learned true pain and su
ff
ering. But that was a di
ff
erent issue, and his shrink, Dr. Carol Doering, had been satisfied early on that Charlie had made peace with his childhood. He’d overcome the neglect, the taunting, the bullying on his own, without therapy, and had somehow managed to put those terrible formative years behind him without carrying any serious emotional scars into his adulthood.

Which is why this whole depression thing about flying killer planes from a comfortable armchair five thousand miles removed from the action seemed out of whack with Charlie’s coping mechanism.

In the early sessions, Dr. Doering had found it di
ffi
cult to identify with Charlie’s condition because she had an emotional connection to the very subject of his complaint. She tried to keep her personal connection out of the therapy, but one day she let her guard down and it just popped out.

“Charlie,” she said, “let me tell you something. My brother’s an F-16 fighter pilot stationed in Iraq. He dodges enemy fire all day, and at night he sleeps in a tent in blistering heat under constant threat of attack.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Charlie had said. “I’m not meaning to compare my service to his. He’s a true patriot. While I love my country, I’m simply not physically able to serve overseas, so this is the only job I could take where I felt I could make a di
ff
erence.”

Carol Doering felt her face flush. “I didn’t mean to imply …”

“It’s all right ma’am, I know what you mean. Does your brother have a wife and kids?”

“He does. Let me just apologize for my temporary lack of professionalism and get us back to your situation.”

“It’s connected,” Charlie said.

“How so?”

“I understand that your brother is putting his life on the line every day to help preserve our freedom, and I mean him only honor and no disrespect.”

“But?” Carol said.

“But when your brother approaches a target at six hundred miles per hour, he drops his payload and keeps flying and never sees the result.”

Carol cocked her head while pondering the thought. She still didn’t have a grasp on his point. After all, no one was shooting at Charlie when he fired his missiles from a desk at Edwards Air Base.

“When I fire my missiles,” he’d said, “I watch them from release to impact. They’re quite detailed, ma’am. I see the actual result of what I did.

“I see them all,” he continued, “the bodies of the guilty and the innocent. The terrorists and the elderly. The women and the children.

“Then I drive straight from work to my daughter’s piano recital.”

That had been their breakthrough day, and Charlie punctuated the event by adding, “We all serve in our own way. I’m just having trouble with my way.”

Dr. Doering helped Charlie get reassigned to a civilian job, where his experience could be put to good use. Charlie’s attorney threatened the military into helping with the transition. They installed in Charlie’s guestroom, free of charge, all the computer equipment necessary for him to fly UAVs for the California Coastline Weather Service.

In return, Charlie signed a release. It had been a rare concession on the military’s part, but Charlie’s attorney explained what would happen if Charlie wound up on a witness stand: military records would be opened to public scrutiny, particularly classified photographic evidence depicting the graphic details of Charlie’s armchair service.

Charlie settled into his new career with enthusiasm but quickly found the job excruciatingly boring. While the horror of his military job had taken its toll on his emotional well-being, he now realized that being a significant part of the War on Terror provided a constant adrenalin rush he was not likely to find studying cloud formations.

Which is why when Charlie was o
ff
ered an interesting proposition by a fellow little person, it wasn’t the financial component that caught his interest so much as the idea of adding excitement to his professional life.

Two hours after accepting Victor’s proposition, Charlie verified his checking account balance and thought,
Now that’s what I’m talking about
! The next morning, he flipped the switches and fired up one of the company’s weather drones. His drone began the flight in the usual way, following a typical coastal flight pattern, filming video, capturing raw data for analysis by the weather crew. Charlie had been with the company long enough to know when the ground guys were just going through the motions, when they took their breaks, what they found interesting and what they didn’t.

He knew he could divert the drone ten miles inland, make several passes over the DeMeo estate, and be back chasing clouds before anyone was the wiser. Just to hedge his bet, Charlie had previously videoed thirty minutes of boring coastline that he now transmitted directly to the ground crew while his drone was recording footage of Joe DeMeo’s estate. The DeMeo job would take less than ten minutes, which would give Charlie almost twenty minutes to get the drone back to the area of coastline where the fake footage had been recorded. Then he’d replace the fake footage with live shots from the drone.

CHAPTER 43

“
I
t’s a large area to cover,” Charlie Whiteside said, “and there appears to be a lot of activity.”

We were at his place, reviewing the surveillance videos and stills he’d downloaded from the weather drone.

The photos revealed a nice setup for Joe, what I’d call a luxury fortress. His twenty-thousand-square-foot residence was situated on top of a prominent hill. If you’re picturing a target, the house would be the bull’s eye. The next ring of the target would be the ten-foot-tall reinforced concrete wall that protected the main house and two guest cottages and enclosed about two acres of land. The target’s next ring was cordoned o
ff
by a chain link fence that guarded roughly ten acres. That fence was surrounded by more than two hundred acres of wooded scrub worth tens of millions of dollars.

The land ranged from gently rolling to steep drop o
ff
s. The outer acreage was thickly wooded with sparse underbrush, a cleared forest with a carpet of soft grass and pine needles.

According to Lou Kelly, it had once been a top-flight corporate retreat due to its proximity to the old highway, its raw physical beauty, and its isolated, tranquil setting.

Joe’s residential compound was accessed by a dirt and gravel road maintained by the state. The entrance to the property was a scant eight miles south of Ventucopa, fourteen miles northeast of Santa Barbara, near the center of what most people think is part of Los Padres National Forest.

Charlie was right about the level of activity. Joe DeMeo was running scared, and the proof could be found in the number of gunmen guarding his compound. From what I’d heard, Joe’s place had always been well guarded, but this was a ridiculous amount of security. We knew he had about a dozen guns, nine of which had surrounded the cemetery where I’d met him less than a week ago.

The drone showed he had another eight men stationed between the chain link and concrete fences. These eight had guard dogs on leashes, which told me they were on loan from a private security company. Joe was paying the big bucks and taking no chances.

It would have been nice to have someone on the inside, so I had Sal o
ff
er Joe some of his shooters. But Joe wasn’t in a trusting mood and felt it wouldn’t be prudent to invite a rival crime family inside his inner walls.

Especially one that had recently survived a bombing.

After the Beck Building went up in smoke, DeMeo voiced concerns about Sal’s loyalty. Sal gave an Oscar-winning performance of indignation, replete with threats. In the end, Joe DeMeo had no good reason to doubt his story, and one reason to believe it.

Sal had told DeMeo that I must have followed Garrett Unger all the way from New York to Cincinnati, because by the time Sal’s driver got him and Big Bad to the Beck Building, the place was in flames and the whole block had been roped o
ff
.

Joe DeMeo cursed extensively before saying, “You telling me you weren’t even there? You never made it to the meeting?”

“That’s what I’m sayin’,” Sal said. “You don’t believe me, you can check the tapes. I been there before, and Chris had cameras all over his private suite area. You call security and check the tapes. I ain’t on them.”

“That’s a pretty convenient test,” Joe DeMeo said, “considering the security cameras were destroyed by the explosion.”

“No shit!” said Sal. “What a rotten break.”

DeMeo’s reason for believing Sal’s story: just before the meeting, Sal had called Joe and said he wanted to bring Big Bad to the meeting, since the Ungers had a bodyguard.

“I just want—whatcha call—détente.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Joe had said.

“You need to clear it with the Ungers first?”

“Fuck the Ungers. Just get to the meeting.”

“I’m on my way,” Sal had said.

A few minutes passed, and Sal had called Joe to tell him he was sitting in his car a block away from the Beck Building but the area was roped o
ff
because the Beck was on fire.

“I just called Chris Unger,” Sal had said, “and he ain’t answering.”

Joe had tried with the same result.

It was a plausible chain of events. The way Joe figured it, Sal wouldn’t be making demands about bringing his bodyguard if he didn’t intend to show up at the meeting. But that didn’t mean he trusted Sal.

A few hours later, they had had another conversation.

DeMeo said, “According to witnesses, Chris Unger jumped—or was thrown—out of his window.”

“You think he jumped like them people in the World Trade Center?” Sal asked.

“My stooge in the CPD says their witness puts Unger on the sidewalk more than a minute before the bomb goes o
ff
.”

Their conversation had gone on like that awhile, according to Sal, but the bottom line was, Joe DeMeo was starting to panic. So he put together a small army and stationed them in and outside the walls of his estate. It would be a formidable challenge, but I was gearing up for it.

My phone rang.

“I’ve got the architect,” Quinn said. “I’m in his house right now.”

“Good. Bring him to the campground.”

Quinn paused.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“What about the wife?”

“I thought she was out for the afternoon.”

“Bad timing. She forgot something and came back to retrieve it.”

“Retrieve,” I said.

“Yup.”

“Bring her, too.”

Quinn paused.

“Jesus,” I said. “What else?”

“He doesn’t have the plans.”

“Why not?”

“It was part of the deal. Joe made him turn over all the blueprints.”