Drone: An Eli Quinn Mystery Read online

  The night grew black, dotted by stars above and porch lights down here. The bottle of wine was more than half gone. I dozed off in the chair thinking about the case I didn’t have.

  Chapter 5

  I parked the Jeep in front of Lulu’s Grind. It was already eighty-seven degrees an hour after sunrise. My head throbbed lightly, my brain full of cotton. I desperately needed some of Lulu’s coffee.

  Beach sat at his usual table on the patio out front, squeezing a red rubber ball in his left hand. He was in his tan posse outfit, shorts and short-sleeve button up shirt, a black belt weighed down with all manner of posse things you could use to shoot, stun, club or otherwise apprehend someone with.

  Beach had called early, woke me up. “Breakfast, Lulu’s, soon as you can,” was all he’d said, and hung up.

  “Morning, Beach.”

  “Sit,” my friend said.

  I looked around. Solo was in the Jeep, already sitting. I gestured his way.

  “Talking to you,” Beach said. “Sit down. I don’t have much time.”

  Beach was always straightforward, but he was never rude. This morning his tone was, shall we say, urgent. I sat.

  Lulu came out and walked up to the table. Beach leaned his chair back against the wall, watched the occasional car navigate the circle and continue up or down Pleasant Way.

  “Quinn, what you drinkin’ this morning?”

  “Gin and tonic?” My voice was raspy and deep. I cleared my throat.

  “I get you coffee.”

  “Thanks Lulu. And good morning.”

  “Oh, you in cheery mood. Good, good. Not like friend here.” She pointed at Beach. “He a grump today.”

  Lulu smiled wide. She was from Tanzania, had been here many years. She was above average height for a woman, thin. Hair cropped short. I didn’t know many women as sexy as Lulu. I didn’t have a clue how old she was. Nobody knew. Her skin was smooth, wrinkle-free, but something about her—wisdom emanating from her eyes and smile—suggested she was older than she looked. I’d never seen her in a bad mood.

  “People get cranky when they get to be his age,” I said, pointing my thumb at Beach. “Don’t let him rub off on you.”

  “No, no.” Lulu laughed. “No grumpy old man get me down. Coffee, come right up.”

  Normally Beach would watch Lulu walk away. It was quite a sight. He didn’t this time.

  “Talk to me,” I said.

  “This whole thing stinks like a pig in heat.” He tossed the ball over to his right hand, recommenced squeezing it.

  “I caught a whiff yesterday,” I said.

  “Biggest crime in Arizona since Gabby Giffords was shot down in Tucson, and Sheriff Otto’s treating this like a damn traffic violation.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  Beach gave an audible humph. “Something’s not right,” he said. “I mean, I don’t expect him to ask me to investigate this…”

  “You being just posse.”

  “…but none of Otto’s people interviewed me or any of the other posse.”

  “You figure if Otto wants the complete picture, somebody would interview you.”

  “Would interview every one of us. Everybody saw things from a different angle. Maybe they wouldn’t learn anything they didn’t get from the deputies, but that’s a no-brainer, interview any lawman that sees something like that.”

  “Why you telling me?”

  “You’re a private detective, aren’t you?”

  “Says so on my license.”

  “So detect.”

  I squinted. Lulu arrived with the coffee. I thanked her profusely. It was almost too hot. I sipped carefully and watched my friend. Beach had already cleared my head some. The coffee cleared it a bit more. I had given up trying to figure out what was in the coffee. Lulu called it a Tanzanian tribal secret. People from other towns drove past their own Starbucks and came to Pleasant for a cup of Lulu’s coffee. There was only one kind. It was simply called Lulu’s coffee. She didn’t make espresso, cappuccino, or any other foo-foo variations.

  Lulu asked what we wanted for breakfast. Beach ordered a Denver omelet, which wasn’t on the menu, but Lulu always made it for him. I ordered two scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, and a cream-cheese-and-raspberry pastry called Just Pleasant. Hangovers required all this. And Lulu’s pastries were incredible.

  “I can’t just start working on the case,” I said after Lulu left. “I don’t have a client.”

  “I’m your client,” Beach said.

  “You want to hire me to investigate Sheriff Horace Otto. Your boss.”

  “Can’t officially hire you, no. And I didn’t say investigate Otto. I just don’t see anyone else trying very hard to get to the bottom of this. Otto says he’s bringing full attention to the investigation. Ha. Maybe there’s a bunch of investigating going on that I’m not privy to, but my posse sense tells me there’s something screwy happening, or not happening. I’m not saying Otto is behind it.”

  “Your posse sense?”

  “Like Spidey sense. We lawmen all have it. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Jack Beachum made me smile more than just about anyone. Not more than Sam. Not more than Jess had back when things were good. But he was a solid third. And he was a good man, a good lawman, and he always shot straight, no matter the consequences. Great friend. My best friend. Though we never verbalized that. Didn’t have to.

  “What’s got you up on your high horse?”

  “This is my town,” Beach said. “Someone tries to kill a state senator in Pleasant and gets away with it, town won’t feel safe.”

  “Lasko seemed awfully calm yesterday,” I said.

  Beach shrugged.

  “You think he’s involved? Think he tried to kill a senator?”

  “Not a fan of Lasko,” he said. “He’s an ass. That don’t make him an assassin. Bottom line, I’m just saying somebody needs to find out what the hell is going on, who tried to kill Jackie Brand. I figure you’re desperate for work, so I might as well toss you a bone.”

  “Not sure I can work for free.” I already knew I would, despite telling Sam I couldn’t work pro bono. It was always this way—on Wall Street, at the newspaper, and apparently now as a private eye. I’d see a problem, or an opportunity, or just a challenge. I’d circle around it, determine if it was interesting and if it was a nut I could crack. Then I’d decide quickly, go or no-go, and not look back. I was just toying with my friend now.

  Beach pulled his wallet from his hip pocket, took out a dollar, handed it to me. “There, you’re employed,” he said. “Just don’t tell anyone who you’re working for.”

  “Otto would fire you in a heartbeat, he knew you asked me to do this.”

  “I’m a damn volunteer for the posse. I make sure cars don’t plow through school crosswalks. I see something, I call for backup. I’m on the support crew. He can’t fire me. He can only stop letting me volunteer.”

  ***

  Lulu brought breakfast. I dug in. Beach told me what else he’d gleaned, which was mostly what I had figured myself or learned from Sam.

  “Did the footage from the TV crews show anything interesting?” I asked.

  “Nothing we didn’t see with our eyes. Less, actually. They were all trained on the senator and barely even caught the blur before the explosion.”

  Beach stopped talking. Squeezed the rubber ball more vigorously. He was looking over my shoulder, down Pleasant Way.

  “Don’t turn around,” he said.

  I didn’t.

  “Shiny black BMW just pulled into the Horny Bull.”

  “A little early for a steak,” I said.

  “The Bull doesn’t open until eleven.”

  “Not many BMWs in the Horny Bull parking lot most days,” I said.

  “Pickup trucks and Harleys.”

  “Who’s driving?”

  “Can’t see. Tinted windows.”

  “What’re they doing?”

  “Car’s just sitting there
.”

  “They watching us?”

  “Be my bet.” Beach squeezed the rubber ball so hard I thought it would pop. He continued to stare over my shoulder. “What else you wanna know?”

  “What about the helicopter footage?”

  “It showed the direction the thing came from.” Beach pointed up and to the southwest, sighting his finger over Ringo the cactus and the roof of Café Amir just beyond the traffic circle. Scraps of plywood were still strewn around the base of Ringo. “But they were zeroed in, too, so they caught just the last bit before it came over the roof there. Just a little more than what you and I saw.”

  “It came straight in, no turns captured in that footage?”

  “Actually made a turn toward the north just after the helicopters picked it up,” he said. “Was headed due east, then northeast.”

  “Precisely those compass points, or roughly?”

  Beach chewed. “Precisely.”.

  “Any idea whether it was being piloted, or if it was on autopilot?”

  He set his fork down. Swallowed. Looked at me. “The guts of the drone were destroyed, so there’s no way to tell, I hear. Don’t know how you’d tell.”

  “If it was auto,” I said, “there’d be more brains onboard.”

  “Brains?”

  “A computer chip more powerful than the basic setup you need to fly one of these things yourself. Enough brains so it can get from Point A to Point B on its own.”

  “I know the military has drones like that,” Beach said. “And deputies are using them for recon down at the border. Even Sheriff Otto has one. Privacy advocates not happy about it. So a civilian can get hold of a drone that’ll do all that?”

  “Welcome to the modern world, old man. You can build one or buy one these days. At a university in Europe, they released an autopilot system on a chip a few years ago, about the size of a quarter. It’s got a processor similar to what you’d find in a smartphone, plus GPS, an altimeter, gyroscope, accelerometer. Runs on software called Paparazzi, developed more than a decade ago specifically for autopiloting UAVs, or what we now usually call drones. The software was pretty glitchy early on, but it’s a lot better now. Both the hardware and the software are open source.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means anyone can use it, develop it further, improve it.”

  Beach interrupted me. “He’s moving.”

  His eyes followed the BMW around the traffic circle.

  “Act natural and keep talking.”

  I leaned back in my chair, put my hands behind my head, laced my fingers together.

  “How’s this?”

  “Almost looks natural,” he said.

  “You gonna shoot him?”

  “Not just yet.”

  “Get a license number?”

  “Nope. Too far.” The rubber ball nearly exploded as it bounced off the patio and back to Beach’s hand. Then the squeezing again.

  “Want me to look?”

  “My eyesight is fine,” Beach said. “Cataracts, remember? They gave me new eyeballs. I’m twenty-twenty again. See better than you, by my bet. There. He’s gone.”

  “OK good. No more acting.”

  “As an actor,” Beach said, “you’re a pretty good detective. Where were we?”

  “Paparazzi software and chips,” I said. “At least one company is making and selling the chip now. But any company could. Practically speaking, an individual would have to buy one of the chips. Other companies sell all the same stuff in kits or pre-assembled. The end result is bigger and heavier, not all on one chip, but this isn’t new technology at all.”

  “So the inventors are giving away everything you need to build and fly a drone on autopilot, do exactly what happened yesterday to Jackie Brand, and companies are selling these things fully assembled and ready to kill.”

  “That’s probably not their intention,” I said. “But basically, yes. Although you have to add your own bomb.”

  “Holy mother.” Beach tossed the rubber ball back and forth between hands. “Seems like a lot of potential for bad things to happen.”

  “That’s what they said about the internet back in the nineties,” I said.

  “And for the most part they were right.”

  I shrugged in partial agreement. “Technology can be used for good or bad. Drone proponents figure someday guys like you, and firefighters, will all have drones in your pockets.”

  “Just another tool,” he said.

  “Like flashlights and radios.”

  “Or guns,” Beach said. “Speaking of which . . .”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “Quinn, you got lucky the first time. Either of those guys—the big Slav or Bobby G or that idiot Johnson—could’ve popped you.”

  “None did. And I wasn’t lucky. I was careful. And skilled.”

  “Goddamn karate. Won’t stop a bullet.”

  “Taekwondo.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Your judo shit got you out of a couple jams last time. A gun would’ve worked just fine and been safer.”

  “Or I might’ve killed someone,” I said.

  “Someone might’ve deserved it.”

  “But I didn’t need a gun. I don’t need a gun. I don’t want a gun. Just enough force . . .”

  “And maybe a little more.”

  “Maybe a little more.”

  “Gotta admit,” Beach said, “I kind of enjoyed what you did to Earl Johnson. Anyway, what do these chip setups cost?”

  “The autopilot hardware and software, generally a few hundred dollars.”

  “And the drones?”

  “Good entry-level drone costs just a few hundred. I would guess the one we saw yesterday was a lot more than that, but this isn’t as expensive as buying a car.”

  “These things even legal?”

  “You’re the posse member.”

  “Haven’t run across any situations.” Beach took the last bite of his omelet, slid his plate away. “Until yesterday.”

  “All drones, commercial or private, are supposed to be registered with the FAA. Other rules covering how and where they can be used are emerging, so it’s a little confusing, but suffice it to say, it’s illegal to blow people up with one.”

  Lulu brought more coffee and the bill. I reached for it but Beach snatched it away. It was a game we always played, and we never argued over who would pay. Over time it evened out. He gave Lulu his credit card and watched her walk away. He wasn’t strong enough to resist that twice in one day. I kept my eyes on Beach.

  “So what if this thing wasn’t on autopilot?”

  “You could still have targeted the senator,” I said. “But it’d be harder to do it so precisely, if you weren't within sight of the target. You could tell the thing to fly perfectly east, turn to the northeast, and it would do so. A good remote pilot could do that, I suppose. Maybe even dive it down and slam it into the podium. You’d use the drone’s onboard live video to guide you, if you knew where you were going and were familiar with the area. Would’ve taken a good amount of know-how and skill either way. But I’m guessing autopilot.”

  “Why?”

  “That also saves a guy having to stand nearby to run the controls, and look obvious,” I said. “One of us—me, you, a whole damn posse—might have noticed someone piloting that thing.”

  “Unless he was hiding.”

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t rule that out. But if I wanted to pull off what we saw yesterday, I’d go with autopilot. Wouldn’t be anywhere near the scene. Plus it allows for advance planning—if you know where the target will be, you just program in the GPS coordinates and a route.”

  “How would you know where the target is gonna be?”

  “Indeed,” I said.

  “Yeah, noodle that.”

  My bacon, eggs and hash browns done, I took a bite of the pastry. I held up a finger to let Beach know there would be no talking during this first delicious bite. I had some ideas on the targeting. Didn’t share them yet. It w
as sometimes good to noodle with someone, it was sometimes good to noodle alone. Right now I wanted to have some more facts, maybe even a lead, to noodle with. I set the pastry down, swallowed, drank some coffee.

  “You said security was tight,” I said. “How tight?”

  “We had the entrance to town blocked off hours before the speech. Nobody came in without showing ID or being a local.”

  “You blocked the town entrance?”

  “Easy to do here.”

  “One way in, one way out,” I said.

  “Be stupid not to take advantage of that.”

  “What about after?”

  “Nobody got out the rest of the day without showing ID. We asked a lot of questions.”

  “You harassed them.”

  “We questioned them vigorously.”

  “See if they get nervous.”

  “Yessirree.”

  “And?”

  “Unless one of the good citizens of Pleasant has gone rogue and pulled off an Academy Award performance, I don’t think the bomber slipped past us.”

  “Autopilot,” I said.

  “Be my guess, too.”

  “Any chance I can get a copy of that helicopter footage?”

  “That’d be against regulations.” Beach leaned back, scrunched eyebrows and pursed lips looking all serious. “Might get me fired.”

  “Any chance I can get a copy of that helicopter footage?”

  Beach reached into a backpack under his chair, pulled out an unmarked DVD in a thin plastic sleeve and slid it across the table. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” he said. “Ever seen it?”

  “Only four or five times.”

  “Great ending. You should watch it again.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I owe you one.”

  “I’ve lost count.”

  Chapter 6

  I jogged out of Pleasant and turned south on Pima Road, stayed on the left shoulder to keep an eye on oncoming cars and bikers. The sky was wide open, unbroken blue. Heat rose in waves off the pavement.

  The plan was for six miles in forty-two minutes, give or take fifteen seconds. I checked my time at the large mesquite tree, my one-mile mark: 7:30. Perfect warm-up mile. I’d run the other five in 6:50 to 6:55 each. I quickened my pace.