When you’re working surveillance you sit for hours. Don’t even think of going to the bathroom because the minute you duck over to the Shell station is the minute your subject slips out of the house. When you’re on surveillance you drive a generic vehicle, you dress in slate gray clothes, the same color as the interior of your vehicle, so that if you’re lucky, someone walking down the sidewalk doesn’t notice the cute brunette staring at his neighbor with a pair of field glasses.
Surveillance is hard on your back and hard on your kidneys. Worst of all, it gives you a lot of time to think. Hours and hours of watching a house with its blinds drawn, thinking.
There was a whole range of subjects that Lennox Cooper did her best not to think about.
It was 7:10 in the morning the first week in December. The sun hadn’t come up yet and when it did no one in Portland would be able to see it through the rain. Lennox had parked her car across the street and two houses west of the residence of one Allan Lammers—age: fifty-two; occupation: welder; injury: back strain, lumbar region disc bulge, L5-S1. Lammers had been out seven weeks on an injury that typically took eight days bed rest, tops.
This was a neighborhood of modest one-story homes built during World War II for the shipyard workers. Lammers lived in the middle of the block in a little brick box of a house with dark red trimmed windows and door. The landscaping was tidy and predictable: boxwood, azaleas and a border of rose bushes lining the driveway. One short year ago, Lennox was tracking murder suspects. Now she was critiquing some dude’s shrubbery.
She spooned a mouthful of raspberry yogurt with one hand and steadied her binoculars with the other. On the passenger seat a game of Vegas solitaire lined out. She was thirty bucks down.
The garage door at the Lammers’ estate levered upwards, and there was Allan Lammers behind the wheel of a freshly waxed Chevy pickup. Lennox had figured him for an early riser, after all, he’d worked first shift at Zeller Tool and Die for eleven years. Lammers torqued sideways, his head turned over his shoulder as he reversed down the narrow driveway. Such lumbar pain he couldn’t work didn’t mean he should drive over his wife’s roses.
Lennox flung her yogurt spoon on top of the solitaire hand and grabbed the zoom lens, got a shot.
Waiting until Lammers reached the corner of 59th and Holgate, she kept her headlights off and followed. He zigzagged through Portland’s southeast neighborhoods and headed north. Working class homes in Lammers’ neighborhood were replaced by funky Queen Anne cottages where the eternal hippies from days of old still lived, worked and raised up a new generation of hippies from Hawthorne Street to Belmont. Then funky turned into Asian groceries and dry cleaners coming up northeast Sandy. She tucked a strand of hair under her watch cap and hung back as far as she could without losing him. This was the fun part, the part that called for reflexes and judgment. What surprised Lennox was how people never realized they were being followed. But hey, there are thousands of beater trucks like hers in Portland.
The rain let up by the time Lammers finally pulled to the curb of a pale green ranch house on Fargo Court in north Portland. A sweet-looking vintage Chevy sat parked alongside a middle-aged tow truck in the driveway. Lennox drove past the house and parked up the street alongside a row of arborvitae. She twisted around in her seat and watched Lammers get out of his car.
There are men in their fifties, men who take a stab at fitness, watch their fat and carbohydrate intake, men who try. They may not look young but they still look viable. Lammers wasn’t one of them. Lammers was one of those crack-in-the-ass guys ten months pregnant with a beer baby.
He stood in the driveway talking to his buddy, a skinny man with a gray ponytail. Ponytail popped the hood of the Chevy and the two gray-hairs peered inside. She got the shot with her Nikkor zoom telephoto 70-200mm super honking lens. She got another three butt shots of Lammers bent way over the car wrenching on something while Ponytail revved the engine. Here was the payoff for two days’ work.
