James Patterson - #1 Suspect

Del Rio said patiently, “We know what Scotty scoped out. If we go through the wall, we don’t know what we’re going to find. Could be heavy crap stored against it. We could hit pipes.”

Now Del Rio was swearing because Boyd Street, where they’d parked before, was locked in. Not an empty space on either side of the block.

Cruz said, “Ricky, I’m telling you. I don’t like this.”

Del Rio said, “There.”

And he parked in a “No Parking Anytime” driveway that maybe wouldn’t attract the attention of a random drive-by cop at this time of night. Maybe.

Before the car had come to a stop, Scotty was out the back door. He crossed the street in his black duds, his ski mask in hand. When he crossed Artemus, he ducked into the shadow of the pottery’s outside staircase and, as he’d done before, rattled a window until he set off the alarm.

The alarm screamed out over a couple of square blocks, and Cruz knew that it also alerted the techs at Bosco Security Systems’ control center through the phone line.

The same people who had manned the phones twenty-four hours ago were very likely on duty now. They’d received three false alarms from this address, and team Del Rio was counting on Bosco to tell the building’s owner and the cops that the alarm indicated a system failure, not a break-in.

The Private investigators waited for a police response that didn’t come.

Fifteen minutes later, under the pale light of a new moon, Cruz, Scotty, and Del Rio crossed Anderson and proceeded into the narrow gap between the Red Cat Pottery and the auto parts building next door.

Employing a rock-climbing maneuver called “bridging,” they inched up the brick crevasse between the buildings.

Two cars hissed past on slick pavement as the Private guys slowly ascended to the Red Cat Pottery’s roof.

Scotty got a leg across the low wall at the edge of the roof, pulled himself up and over, gave Cruz a hand up, and did the same for Del Rio, who rolled onto the tar paper, saying, “Everybody down.”

The three men hunched behind the wall, got their wind and their bearings.

Del Rio counted off a couple of minutes in his mind, then stood up, located the skein of electric lines running from the pole on Anderson to the roof, and severed them with his wire cutters, causing a blackout inside the warehouse.

The alarm was cut off, as were the motion detectors, the telephone backup, everything-but, shockingly, the alarm sounded again almost immediately.

Startled, Del Rio ducked from pure reflex, then said to the others, “They have a battery backup. To the alarm. It’s gotta be wireless.”

Cruz said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Then the alarm halted midshriek.

Del Rio said, “That’s Bosco shutting it down, thinking that’s enough of this noise tonight. Emilio, we’re okay. We stay put. Make good and sure no one is coming.”

A long ten minutes went by, then Del Rio got up, paced off twenty feet in from the Anderson side of the building, eyeballed approximately the same distance from Artemus, took his eighteen-volt battery-operated Sawzall out of his bag, and flipped it on.

It made a little bit of a racket, but not the kind of thing that would wake up any watchdogs in the neighborhood or even cause anyone driving by to notice.

Scotty and Cruz stood by as Del Rio sawed through the tar paper, the old layers of asphalt roofing, and the plywood below that, cutting through sheetrock that had little resistance to the blade.

Roofing fell through the opening and clattered down. They listened to the ensuing silence, and then Scotty opened his bag of tricks.

He put on his miner’s lamp and took out a thirty-five-foot length of marine-grade one-inch poly line. He tied one end to a brick chimney, put some knots into the rest of it, and approached the hole.

Del Rio said, “Take it slow, ” and Scotty grinned, jazzed up with nervous energy.

He pulled the knotted rope taut, then lowered himself down from the roof to the kiln room, where the clay pots were fired. Del Rio followed and Cruz was last to come down the line.

As soon as his feet touched the floor, Cruz went to the office and found the wireless alarm backup system next to the circuit box. He took out the batteries and set up the cell phone signal jammer in case the wireless signal went active again.

Del Rio, meanwhile, left the kiln room and went to the back-right-hand corner of the warehouse proper, where Scotty had seen the van. But Del Rio didn’t see a van. He saw racks and racks of flowerpots.

He didn’t want to believe this.

Private investigators had watched the damned warehouse, three shifts a day every day, for the past week. Had the van been dismantled, taken out in parts, or driven intact into a big rig?

Del Rio was ready to call Jack, when Scotty walked past him, catlike on rubber soles, and showed him where the van was hidden behind the racks, pretty much barricaded in.

Scotty said, “What do you think, Rick?”

Relieved that Jack wasn’t going to have to tell Noccia that the van had disappeared, Del Rio said, “We’re good.”

The van was a late-model Ford transport, white with vegetables painted on it, two doors and a slider on each side, cargo doors at the back, tinted glass all the way around.

It was parked fifty feet away from and facing the roll-up doors at the far end of the warehouse. Whoever had parked the thing had meant to hide it. The driver’s side and rear were against the corner walls of the warehouse. The other two sides were hemmed in by metal racks of flowerpots two deep and seven feet high.

Del Rio squeezed around to the driver’s-side door and tried the handle, but the door was locked. So were all of the others.

Fucking A.

He had a short crowbar in his bag. He took it out, staved in the passenger-side window, reached in, and pulled up the handle. He brushed the glass off the seat with his gloved hand, threw his bag into the passenger-side foot well, and slid behind the wheel.

After flipping on the dome light, Del Rio looked at the ignition. He wanted to see a key dangling there. That would have been nice, but no, the only thing on the ignition was blood spatter. It was on the wheel too, sprayed all inside the windshield, and there were some bits of bone and brain matter too.

Noccia’s wheelman’s remains.

Del Rio looked for the keys under the mats and up under the visors. No luck. He called out to Scotty to check the tops of the tires, just in case, and when Scotty said, “Nope. Nothing,” Del Rio opened all the doors with the lock release.

He got out of the van and squeezed past the racks of flowerpots, hitting one of them with his shoulder. The rack shimmied as if it weren’t sure if it was going to fall, giving him a shot of adrenaline he didn’t need.

He imagined Cruz calling Jack: “Jack. Ricky had a heart attack, man. What should I do?”

Cruz called out, “You okay, Rick?”

“Fine. Fine. Emilio, let’s see how quick you can start this engine.”

Cruz squeezed along the racks, got into the van, and used the screwdriver attachment on his knife to remove the guard plate from the ignition tumbler. While he stripped the wires, Del Rio groped his way to the rear of the van and checked the cargo.

He counted the stacks of cartons, did the math, came up with four hundred cartons, all but one of them still sealed. Each carton was marked with the number of bottles per carton, so many pills per bottle, so many milligrams per pill. He took out one of the bottles, shook it, put it back.

This was a ton of Oxy. If there wasn’t thirty million in this van, it wasn’t his fault.

Scotty called to him, “Houston. We’ve got ignition.”