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“I’m kind of overwhelmed. That fuckin’ McLaren we saw, afterthat lime green Lambo this morning... I mean, it’s like something broke.”
Cartwright: “Broke? You mean, inyou?”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”
Letty and Cartwright looked at each other, and Letty said, “He’s weird.”
The navigation apptook them to an area north of the port, streets lined with parked semi-trailers, fenced-in warehouses with acres of parking lots, power lines strung from a forest of wooden poles.
The Mammuthus building, if it was the Mammuthus building, was a low white cracker box with few windows, and those were covered with something that might have been raw cardboard. The parking lot had a single pickup in it, nosed into the front of the building. Two loading docks punctured the back, but no trucks were loading or unloading. The front side featured a glass door and two uncovered windows, looking out at the parking lot.
Cartwright said, “Cameras.”
“Lots of cameras,” Letty said. “Four on each side...”
“Makes me wonder what needs the protection,” Cartwright said. “Or who.”
“If you’re like, CIA... don’t you get jump training, parachute training?” Baxter asked.
“Well, some CIA people do, as I understand it, not saying I’m one,” Cartwright said. “And I’ve jumped out of airplanes, but not on the job, just recreationally.”
“Could you jump onto the roof?” Baxter asked.
“Maybe, but then what would I do?” Cartwright asked. “I’d have to get off the roof and there are still cameras looking at me. I might as well walk up.”
“Right. Sorry about the brain fart.”
“Look over there. At the container yard,” Letty said, pointing.
Down the block from the front of the warehouse, a sprawling lot was stacked with shipping containers, rust-red, yellow, a few blue, most with Chinese names on them. “Nothing keeping us out of there,” Letty said. “We could sneak in with granola bars and some water bottles and watch Mammuthus. See who comes and goes.”
“That could work, if you’ve got the patience for it,” Cartwright said.
“What else have we got? I don’t see that G-Wagen anywhere... And I’d like to get a photo of the plates on that pickup.”
“Let’s get that and then get those snacks,” Cartwright said. “Rod could pick us up after dark... Maybe we’ll see a way in.”
Baxter rolled thempast the front of the building and Letty got a photo of the plates on the Dodge Ram. She sent them to Nowak, who identified the owner as Dale Weston of the City of Industry. Weston had three arrest records for theft, and one for public drunkenness and fighting with cops, so was unlikely to be either a criminal genius or a Russian spy.
They got snacks and water at a Sunshine Market, which Letty put in her yellow REI bag, along with jackets for both of them should it get cool, and Baxter dropped them off on a side of the container yard not visible from Mammuthus. They walked between stacks of containers until they got to a spot facing the target, found an old wooden cable reel to sit on, rolled it inside an open container, and settled in to watch.
They’d been there for an hour, talking about personalities in their jobs, about growing up with guns, fathers, the stinky-socksmell that seemed to be coming from a patch of small pink flowers, divorce, and etcetera, when a man came out of the Mammuthus building and walked to the pickup, dug around in the backseat for a moment, and came away with a sack that might have had his dinner in it.
He was shaggy: hair on his shoulders, jeans, cowboy boots, a muscle shirt. Earring. He looked up and down the street, unselfconsciously dug in his pants to scratch his balls.
“He’s got a gun on his hip,” Letty said.
“Saw that,” Cartwright said. “Hope he washes his hands before he eats his lunch.”
They watched asthe man went back inside the building and noticed that he’d left it unlocked as he walked to the truck, so either there were more people inside or he wasn’t especially security-conscious.
Baxter called: “You guys want pizza?”
“We’re okay.”
“I figured out how to get in the building.”
“How?” Letty asked.
