The cheap room Bouthier carded into up on three was about as spacious as the bed of a pickup.
But they weren’t there on their honeymoon now, were they? Bouthier thought as he kick-slammed the beat-up door behind him.
It actually couldn’t have been better because its window provided a clear line of sight to the Juneau arrivals gate.
Llewellyn was bent over the spotting scope by the window, and Bouthier shook his head at his partner’s room-filling back. Even taking a knee, his boy Llewellyn was one massive goon.
“Target acquired?” he said.
“Clear as day. He’s out on the sidewalk getting a taxi.”
“Nevin and Grabowski are on him already?” Bouthier said, referring to their other team members.
“Like maggots on a rotting corpse,” Llewellyn said. “They just pulled up at the curb behind his taxi.”
“And the target’s kid is there, too?”
“The kid, too,” Llewellyn said, standing up to his full gargantuan six-foot-six-inch height. “See for yourself.”
It was true, Bouthier thought, as he put one of his dark doll’s eyes to the scope.
There he was in the flesh, the intrepid Michael Gannon, long-in-the-tooth navy SEAL, and his happy progeny.
Gannon was midsize, maybe five foot ten. Good width in the shoulders. Lean faced. He was fit-looking enough. Not like Bouthier himself, of course. But who was?
Bouthier’s eyes narrowed as he thumbed at the zoom.
“Mr. Gannon, you need to lay off the mashed pertaters,” he said with a pretty good Irish brogue. “Because faith and begorra that Irish gut of yours is starting to lean a little more toward keg than six-pack, isn’t it?”
“Looks like everything’s right on schedule after all,” Llewellyn said, chuckling behind him.
Bouthier nodded. They already knew all about Gannon’s hunting trip itinerary. The printout of it from Control was sitting in a glossy folder on the hotel desk beside him. Along with several marked-off topographical maps of the Glacier Bay territory.
He buttoned the zoom back a smidge as the SEAL’s kid handed him one of the rifle cases. Then Bouthier suddenly found himself frowning.
Was all this truly adding up? he wondered. From the startling reports they had gotten, especially the world-class-level confirmed kill count, he was really expecting someone more formidable looking.
The target in his scope certainly didn’t give off the demeanor of a killing machine. Fair-haired and bright-eyed with an easy grin, he could have been a youth sports coach, an upbeat daytime game show host, a helpful friendly small-town mailman.
But then again, appearances really didn’t always tell the story, did they? Bouthier thought. Take Mike Tyson for instance. He was only five foot ten. Thick and stocky. Built like a gun safe, like he was bolted into the floor. Then one blurring, bobbing-and-weaving second after the bell rang, he was somehow standing in the middle of his much larger opponent’s kitchen, ripping down all the cabinets and tearing the door off the fridge.
Or take plastic explosives for another example, Bouthier thought as he watched the stocky SEAL pile the rest of the bags and cases into the taxi’s trunk.
One second it was a harmless blob of kindergarten Play-Doh, wasn’t it? Then an eyeblink later, they were scraping your sweetbreads off the ceiling with a putty knife.
Nodding at this self-served food for thought, Bouthier was about to turn the camera off when he spotted something and quickly zoomed back in close on Gannon’s neck.
“There you go. Now that’s more like it,” he said with a grin as he scanned the healed-over hickie-like welt just above Gannon’s clavicle.
He’d seen such marks before. In his own mirror. It was the burn mark that sometimes got left when the hot tumbling brass shell casings of a rapidly fired automatic weapon got caught in your shirt collar.
Bouthier’s stony face creased into a full smile as he watched Gannon settle back into his taxi.
This actually might be fun after all, Bouthier thought as the cab pulled away.
He’d never been on a SEAL hunt before.