Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(90)

That seemed plausible.

“But this flies in the face of the profile,” I said. “The bureau’s profilers all said he was not vengeance motivated. The story is already out. Why risk coming back to do something to us? It’s behavior he hasn’t shown before.”

“I don’t know, Jack,” Rachel said. “Maybe it’s something else. You’ve made a lot of generalized statements about him on the podcast. Maybe you got him mad.”

Her phone’s screen lit up with a return text from Metz.


What’s your 20? I’ll send Agent Amin out in a Lyft. See if he follows and we’ll lead him into a horseshoe.



Rachel sent back a text with the address and asked for an ETA on the Lyft car. Metz replied that it would be forty minutes.

“Okay, so we have to order another round and then act like neither one of us can drive,” Rachel said. “We fake a request for a Lyft and then get in the car with Amin.”

“What’s a horseshoe?” I asked.

“They’ll set up a car trap. We drive in, he follows us, they close the horseshoe behind him, and he’s got nowhere to go.”

“Have you ever done a horseshoe trap before?”

“Me? No. But I’m sure they have.”

“Let’s hope it works.”





42

Forty minutes later we were in the back of the FBI’s Lyft minivan with Agent Amin behind the wheel. He pulled away from Mistral and headed west on Ventura Boulevard.

“What’s the plan?” Rachel asked.

“We have the horseshoe set up,” Amin said. “We just have to see if you have a follower.”

“Did Metz get a bird up?”

“Yes, but he had to wait until it was free from another op. It’s on the way.”

“And how many cars do we have?”

“Four including the Lyft.”

“That’s not enough. He may spot the surveillance and bug out.”

“It’s what we could do on short notice.”

“Where’s the horseshoe?”

“Tyrone Avenue on the north side of the 101. It dead-ends at the river and it’s only five minutes away.”

I saw Rachel nod in the darkness of the car. It did little to balance the anxiety she was exuding.

At Van Nuys Boulevard, we turned north. I could see the 101 overpass just a few blocks ahead.

Rachel pulled her phone and made a call. I only heard her side of it.

“Matt, are you running this op?”

I knew then that she had called Metz.

“Did he leave the restaurant?”

She listened and her next question seemed to confirm that the man at the bar had followed us when we left.

“Where’s the airship?”

She shook her head while listening. She wasn’t happy with his answer.

“Yes, I hope so.”

She disconnected the call but the tone of her last words indicated she thought Metz was handling it wrong.

We crossed under the freeway and then took an immediate turn east on Riverside Drive. Four blocks later, Amin put on his right turn signal as we approached Tyrone.

Amin was monitoring radio traffic on an earpiece. He got an instruction and passed it on to us.

“All right, he’s behind us,” he said. “We are going down to the dead end and stopping. You two stay in the van. No matter what, you stay in the van. That understood?”

“Got it,” I said.

“Understood,” Rachel said.

We made the turn. The street was lined on both sides with parked cars and only dimly lit. There were single-family homes on both sides of the street. A block ahead I could see the twenty-foot wall of the raised freeway. The tops of cars and trucks were crossing up there left to right, heading west and out of the city.

“This is residential and it’s too dark,” Rachel said. “Who picked this street?”

“It was the best we could do on short notice,” Amin said. “It’ll work.”

I turned to look out the back window and saw headlights sweep across the roadway as a car slowly made the turn and followed us onto Tyrone.

“There he is,” I said.

Rachel glanced back and then forward, obviously better versed in this maneuver than I was.

“Where’s the cutoff?” she asked.

“Coming up,” Amin said.

I scanned through all the windows, wondering what the cutoff meant. Just as we passed an opening on our right I saw the lights of a car backed into a driveway flash on. The car then lurched into the street behind us and stopped dead in front of the tail car, creating a barrier between us and the tail. I watched it all through the back window. Simultaneously, another car pulled from a driveway behind the tail car, boxing it in.

I saw agents tumble out of the two passenger-side doors of the first car and take cover behind the front of it. I assumed the same happened with the car on the other side of the box.

Amin kept driving, putting more distance between us and the takedown operation.

“Stop here!” Rachel yelled. “Stop!”

Ignoring Rachel, Amin started to bring the van to a slow stop as we reached the terminus of the street at a fence that enclosed the concrete aqueduct known as the Los Angeles River. Rachel was reaching for the release on the side door before he brought it to a halt.