The Assassin (Badge of Honor 5)

Once he knew that, he would drive his tractor to the door where luggage was taken from the baggage carts and loaded on the conveyor belt that would transport it, beneath the terminal, to the baggage carousel.

Taking it from the airplane or the baggage carts at the airplane would look suspicious. But with the baggage handlers busy throwing bags on the conveyor belt under the terminal, no one would notice if he removed a bag from the other side of the cart.

And if they did notice him, and someone actually asked him what he was doing, he would say that it was his mother's, or his sister's, and he was just saving her a trip to the baggage carousel.

Nobody questioned what a cop did. And he was only going to do this once. If he did it all the time, somebody might say something about it.

Vito told himself that there were laws and laws. Everybody broke some kind of law, except maybe the pope. And screwing the IRS was something everybody did. And that's all he was going to be doing, was keeping the IRS from making a pain in the ass of itself. It wasn't like he was smuggling drugs or jewels. He wouldn't be able to do that.

What he was doing, Vito convinced himself, was helping a friend, repaying a favor.

It wasn't anything worse than some chief inspector fixing a speeding ticket for his next-door neighbor.

The reason Gian-Carlo Rosselli, or really the people who own the Oaks and Pines, are willing to come up with ten big ones, the four I owe them on the markers, and six besides, is like them buying insurance. It's the cost of them doing business. It's not like they're bribing me or anything. They want all that money to arrive safely so they can pay that coal-mine guy-that lucky sonofabitch, he probably doesn't even need it-what he won.

It was just lucky. They knew me, and I needed the money. That fucking plumber is going to want his money, and with my luck lately, I just don't have it. So this way, everybody is happy. The plumbers, the people who own Oaks and Pines, and especially that fucker with the coal mines who hit his number four times in a row.

And my run of bad luck can't keep on for fucking ever!

Vito drove around the aircraft parking area a few minutes more, trying to figure the best way to get the suitcase, once he had taken it from the baggage cart, out to his car. That turned out to be simplicity itself.

There was a gate leading from the work area under the terminal to the outside. There was a rent-a-cop working it. No rent-a-cop was going to stop a real cop and ask him what he was doing.

I'll just drive one of these goddamned tractors out the gate, go to the parking lot, put the suitcase in the trunk of the Caddy, and drive back in and give them their tractor back.

He decided to try it. It worked like a jewel. He went out of the gate, drove to the parking lot, went in the trunk of the Caddy, got back on the tractor, and drove back through the gate. The rent-a-cop didn't look at him twice.

Why should he? I'm a police corporal. If I'm riding around on an Eastern Airlines tractor, so what? What business was that of a rent-acop?

Vito drove the tractor back to the Eastern office and told the guy he'd returned it.

"Anytime," the Eastern guy said. "Support your local sheriff, right?"

****

Starting at fifteen minutes to midnight, within minutes of each other, automobiles carrying Chief Inspectors Matt Lowenstein and Denny Coughlin, Supervisory Special Agent H. Charles Larkin of the Secret Service, and A-S AC (Criminal) Frank F. Young of the FBI arrived at the headquarters of the Special Operations Division.

The building, and especially the corridor outside Peter Wohl'swhat had been the principal's-office, and the office itself were crowded with senior police officers. All the participants in the earlier meeting in the commissioner's office, except Mayor Carlucci, were present. In addition, the commanding officers of Central, North Central, and Northwest Detective Divisions; the commanding officers of Ordnance Disposal and Stakeout; and Captain Jack Duffy, the special assistant to the commissioner for inter-agency liaison, had either been summoned or had naturally migrated to the Schoolhouse as the center of the operation.

Three inspectors, who had been neither summoned nor invited, were also in Peter Wohl's office when Chief Lowenstein marched in. They were the commanding officers of the South and North Detective Divisions and the Tactical Division. Their subordinates had made known to them the orders they had received from Chiefs Lowenstein and Coughlin, and they wanted to know what was going on.

Lowenstein ordered everyone out of Wohl's office but Coughlin, Wohl, and the three inspectors and the federal agents.

"Peter and I decided to hold this here, rather than in the Roundhouse," Lowenstein began, "for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's on my way home…"

He paused for the expected chuckle.

"Peter and I decided"? Wohl thought. Inspector Peter Wohl is not only outranked by you, but, until very recently, by everybody else in this room. Despite his reputation within the Department as a real hard-ass, Lowenstein sometimes can be very gracious and kind.

"…and for another, all these white shirts showing up at the Roundhouse at midnight might give the gentlemen of the press the idea that something's going on. Charley Larkin thinks, and I agree, that the less the press is involved until we catch this guy, the better."

"The less the press

is involved, the better, period," Inspector Wally Jenks said.

There were chuckles and grunts of approval.

"There's a real nasty copycat aspect to something like this," Charley Larkin said. "A lunatic who has been sitting around harmlessly studying his navel sees another lunatic is getting a lot of attention in the papers and on TV, and promptly decides the thing for him to do to get some attention is also blow something up. If I had my druthers, not a word of this would appear in the papers."