Detective

any kind. I had moved my car about ten times, argued with a dozen policemen, and even gotten a forty-dollar ticket from an overzealous meter maid. And still nothing.
    What made things worse was, once again, I had gotten no sleep. After dropping Rosa off, I had driven out to East Hampton to pick up the kilo of coke. That wasn’t as easy as it sounds. I have a map that lists the distance places are from New York City, and East Hampton was listed at 106 miles. That’s as the crow flies, and I’m not a crow.
    The saving grace was at that time of night there was no traffic and I could make good time, and after I took the East Side Drive to the Midtown Tunnel and got on the L.I.E., I was averaging about sixty, and the miles were flying by.
    The tracking unit kicked in somewhere around Islip, and I was mighty glad to hear it. It would have been a real kick in the ass to have driven all the way out there to discover that Red was nowhere to be found and was probably on his way back to Florida at the time. The “beep, beep, beep” from the unit spurred me on, and I pushed down harder on the accelerator.
    Not long after that I started getting punchy. I had flashes of paranoia that I shouldn’t be going so fast, I was going to get busted for drug running. Then I realized how stupid that was. I started cracking myself up, paraphrasing the speech Dub Taylor says to Paul Newman and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”: “Morons. I got morons on my team. No one’s gonna bust me on my way out to East Hampton. I got no dope on my way out to East Hampton.”
    You had to be there. I got to giggling uncontrollably and stomping down on the accelerator, and if a cop had happened to stop me, drugs or no drugs, they were going to put me away.
    I hit East Hampton about four in the morning. It’s a beach town, as the smell of sea air reminded me, and I bet it would have looked great in the daylight, but it was too dark to see, and I was too tired to care. All I cared about was finding Red’s house. Fortunately, I had the tracking unit.
    So far I’d only used the unit to track a moving object. This was my first time using it to find a stationary one. It was kind of fun. I’d drive along following the vector, and if I missed a turn or made a wrong turn, the vector would change and I’d have to turn around and backtrack until I got the vector pointing ahead of me again. I kept doing this, and it wasn’t long before I found myself driving down Red’s street with the vector pointing “right this way.”
    A couple of blocks down the street the vector veered slightly to the right and pointed straight at a car parked in a shrub-lined driveway about two houses ahead of me. I immediately pulled into the curb and cut my lights.
    I took a flashlight out of my glove compartment just in case and got out of the car. I stuck the flashlight in my hip pocket, and crept along the sidewalk up to the edge of the shrubs to check out the house and car.
    The car was in the shadows, which was good, but there was a light on in one of the downstairs windows of the house, and I didn’t like that at all. By rights Red should have been sound asleep, and if he wasn’t, what else could it mean except somehow he knew something was up? What if he was watching? What if he was waiting for me? What if he had a dog?
    I was a nervous wreck, but I did it. I crept out into the driveway, bent down behind the car, reached under and grabbed—nothing! There was nothing there! I groped my hand around. Jesus Christ, wasn’t this where I put it? I lay down on the ground, stuck my head under the car, groped around with both hands. Nothing! I even risked switching on the flashlight. That clinched it. There was nothing there.
    My head was racing. What had happened? Could it have fallen off? No, it couldn’t have fallen off. The coke could, but not the transmitter, because I’d been following the transmitter here. So the transmitter had to be here, but it wasn’t. Impossible. The vector was pointing right at it. It was pointing right at the car and—Jesus Christ! The house! It was pointing at the car and the house, so if it wasn’t on the car it was in the house, and that meant that Red had found it, and found the coke. Red knew that something was up and that’s why there was a light on in the house, because he, and maybe some of his buddies, were there right now waiting for me, and this was a trap, and they must have seen the flashlight,