Chief Shaw waved her over.
“Almost didn’t recognize you under so many meters of scarf.” He
ushered her toward Tiny, which had been disguised as a bread truck. Bite me had been written above a cartoonish rendering of bread loaves, with a green, childish monster swallowing each one whole.
“Bite me?” Lila asked. “This is why men shouldn’t go into marketing.”
“It was Captain McGraw’s turn to paint the truck his month. It was either this or paint Tiny up with a couple of women in bikinis drinking beer. We voted for the less stupid of the two ideas.”
“Good choice.”
He paused at the door. “You okay after yesterday?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I read the report, chief. That would have shaken anybody up.”
“It helps when you don’t remember much.”
“All the same. Given the circumstance, I’m going to have to ask you to stay in the truck away from the suspect, away from the other officers. I can’t give the High Council any reason to toss her case.” He scratched his forehead under his sentry cap. “You understand, don’t you?”
Lila nodded. It was already starting to happen. Shaw wasn’t quite sure of her anymore, wasn’t sure that Tiny shouldn’t race after her next, wasn’t sure about her and the bombing and the AAS, wasn’t sure that he shouldn’t fill her with truth serum and get answers.
“Of course I understand, chief.”
Shaw nodded and opened the back door of the truck. The two chiefs slipped inside. A rack of computers hummed along one side of the truck, and two blackcoats sat before them, chairs bolted into the floor, ears covered by headphones.
“Hello, cousin,” both men, the eldest sons of Randolph highborn, said at once. They turned to their screens before Lila could respond.
“Let’s head out,” Shaw called to the driver. He and Lila strapped themselves into the chairs behind her cousins, and Tiny lurched away from the curb. For such a large truck, the shocks absorbed a good portion of the bumps in the road.
“I have three teams out in the field near the airports,” Chief Shaw explained as they passed through downtown. “One’s only a kilometer from NBI, and two more are near Martins and Stevens. We don’t want Wilson’s spies to tip her off, so we’re just waiting for now. When we go in, we’ll claim an anonymous tip has alerted us to black market drug smuggling through the airports.”
Lila’s palm vibrated, and she scrolled through Max’s message. As I thought, it was just a drop-off location. Wilson didn’t even get out of the car. I managed a tracker, but it’s not seated well. It might come off.
She called out the tracker’s ID, and a little blip appeared on the cousins’ map of the city. They pumped the verbal directions through to the front of the truck, and Lila heard the muffled, disembodied voice of Jewel Randolph calmly relaying the next street.
“I can’t believe you kept the voice,” she told the chief.
“Your cousins like it. Reminds them of home.”
Lila held her tongue. The Randolph compound had never been their home. They belonged to Bullstow.
It only took her cousins five minutes to figure out that Chairwoman Wilson had not chosen New Bristol International or Stevens for her flight. Instead she had chosen Martins, a small private airstrip outside the city. While their reserve team brought up the rear, a kilometer behind the chairwoman’s car, Tiny passed Wilson’s limo and sped to the airport. The group radioed back and forth to the team already in position, planning the last-minute details of their trap.
“We already have a team in plainclothes at Martins. It’s our own good luck she picked that one. The strip is small and manageable, and Captain O’Bryan is leading the team. It’s his aunt’s airstrip. She’s leaving him and his boys to their playacting, all too happy to assist. She’s told none of her people what’s going on.”
“Of course she’ll help. The bust will be good for his career. What helps him helps the family.”
“Doesn’t anyone do anything just because it’s the right thing to do?” Shaw asked, rubbing his salt-and-pepper mustache.
“Chief, I didn’t know you were such an optimist.”
The driver pulled into the airport and hid behind a fuel truck. The two chiefs peered over the shoulders of Lila’s cousins. As the men brought up the lapel cameras and microphones on the plainclothes blackcoats who roamed the airstrip, Chairwoman Wilson’s limo slid through the gates and pulled inside the hangar.
Captain O’Bryan approached the back window of the limo seconds later. The rest of the blackcoats surrounded the car on every side while Martins staff closed all but one hangar door, blocking the exits. Shaw’s reserve team pulled in front of the last door and parked outside it, waiting.
The chief winked.