James Patterson - #1 Suspect

Del Rio closed the cargo doors, came out from behind the van, and got in the passenger side. Scotty wedged himself between the seats.

Cruz put the transmission into drive and turned on the headlights. At that moment, there was the loud, brassy roar of a motor coming from outside the building. The lights in the warehouse flickered and then they came on. It was like daylight inside the Red Cat Pottery.

Fucking A, for sure.

Cruz yanked the wires apart, cutting the engine. He snapped off the headlights too. He sat there, gripping the steering wheel, staring through the tinted windshield, thinking, Sure, there was a generator. Red Cat had a generator in case the power went out while they were making the flowerpots.

Cruz turned to Del Rio, same instant as Del Rio grabbed his arm and ordered, “Get down.”

Cruz did what Del Rio said, thinking, Now what? There was roofing on the floor of the kiln room, rainwater was maybe dripping down. If that was discovered…They were walled in, couldn’t even attempt a break for it.

Whatever getting caught red-handed meant, this was it. Literally. He had a dead mobster’s blood on his palms. He knew what to say when they got dragged out of the van and shoved facedown on the concrete floor.

You got us. We give up.

Scotty said quietly, “Hear that?”

Cruz heard men talking over the roar of the generator. Their voices were getting louder as they came through the office door and into the warehouse proper.

Cruz hoped that they weren’t going to check the ovens, that they wouldn’t look at the van. But the voices were getting closer.

“You see it? Because I sure don’t,” said one of the men. “Where’s the goddamned van?”

“It’s here. Stop worrying, Victor. It’s hidden in the back here. Right there. Behind the frickin’ racks.”

It was about the van after all. Whoever was leasing the space, storing the van, he was looking to make sure his millions were still safe. These weren’t cops. They were hoods.

Cruz got his piece out of his waistband. Del Rio was doing the same.

The first voice was saying, “Okay, okay. Just be glad, Sammy. I want to move this thing in the morning.”

“You say so.”

“I say so. Sammy, you and Mark…”

The men’s voices faded as they turned and headed back toward the office.

Cruz thought about that one guy saying Sammy. It clicked. Sammy, with the goatee and the piercings-a guy he’d known for years as an almost-dead druggy-was moving up. This was the same Sammy who had taken twenty bucks in exchange for sending a text message and said it was common knowledge that the drug van was inside a warehouse.

Common knowledge?

It was inside knowledge. He had fucking known.

Sammy’s brains were like scrambled eggs. He would say and do anything for a fix.

And the guy Sammy called Victor?

Cruz thought he knew that guy too.

Cruz peered over the dash, saw the backs of the guys’ heads going into the office. The office door closed, then the lights in the warehouse went out. His heart was still hammering, his palms and underarms wet.

Scotty was muttering, “Man, oh, man.”

Cruz said to Del Rio, “One of those guys is Sammy. Remember him, Rick?”

“Turquoise cowboy boots? Metal in his nose?”

“Yeah. Sell himself out for twenty bucks. And the one looking for his van? I think that’s Victor Spano. He’s with the Chicago Mob, am I right?”

Del Rio said, “Yeah. Spano. That could have been him. We gotta wait now. Just sit tight.”

Time dragged, Cruz counting off too many minutes in the dark, smelling his own sweat, thinking of the time he’d been in a knife fight and the other guy had a gun. The time he’d been in bed with a woman and her husband came into the room.

He was thinking about his last professional fight, with Michael Alvarez, the punch that had ended his career, when Del Rio said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”

Del Rio flipped on the dome light.

Cruz twisted the wires, got a spark. The engine turned over. He gunned it.

Cruz turned on the headlights, sending two high beams into the pottery, and put the van in gear. He let off the brake, and the van rolled, nudging the racks until they tipped over in slow motion, pots crashing to the floor.

Cruz backed up, twisted the wheel, and maneuvered in quarter turns until the tires were clear of the racks.

There were two sets of roll-up doors at the Artemus side of the pottery. One set opened onto a ramp that went down to the street. The other doors opened onto a loading dock where there was no ramp. There was an eight-foot drop.

Cruz said to Del Rio, “It’s on the left, right?”

Del Rio said, “What?”

“The doors to the street are on the left, right?”

Del Rio said, “Make sense, Emilio.”

Cruz was almost sure the doors that went to the street were on the left. He stepped hard on the gas and ran the van into the thin metal of the roll-up doors, the doorframes flying right off the walls.

Scotty was saying, “Man, oh, man” over and over again like a mantra. Cruz went through the doors, praying he was right.

I was still at my desk when my cell phone buzzed. It was Del Rio.

“How’d it go?” I asked him.

“Mission accomplished,” he said. “Which means our troubles are just starting.”

“Where’s the van now?”

“We’re in it. On the road.”

“Did you put the tracker inside?”

“It’s under the seat. Way under.”

I said, “Good,” told Rick to stay on the line, and called Noccia from my desk phone. I had a ringing phone in one ear, traffic sounds and Del Rio and Cruz talking together in the other.

Noccia picked up.

I said to the Mob boss, “We’ve got your delivery. It’s intact.”

We agreed on a place just north of Fry’s Electronics Paradise in Burbank.

I said, “Del Rio has some names for you, Carmine. The guys who jacked your van.”

“That’s more than I expected,” Noccia said to me. Then he hung up.

I wanted Del Rio and his crew out of that vehicle. It couldn’t happen fast enough for me. I hung in with Rick for a half hour of pure screaming adrenaline overload as Noccia got a couple of his goons out of bed and we waited for his guys and mine to meet up on the shoulder of a highway.

Rick said to me, “My date is here,” and a few minutes later he said, “They’re gone. Headed north on Five.”

I told Rick to call Aldo for a ride, and had just hung up when the phone rang again, a 702 area code. Vegas.

“Carmine. Is everything under control?”

“Very under control. I’m going to sleep like a kitten tonight. I wired your fee into your account. Six million even.”

“Thanks.”

Noccia said, “No problem. Good job,” and hung up.

My throat was dry. My hands were shaking. I drank down a Red Bull in one long swig and I dialed out. I got Chief Mickey Fescoe on the third ring.

I told Fescoe that a van with a fortune in illegal pharmaceuticals was headed north on 5, that it belonged to Carmine Noccia. I pictured Fescoe, my sometimes friend, shaking off sleep, jumping out of bed, dying for me to fill in the blanks.

“What did you say?”

I repeated myself and then gave him the details. Fescoe punctuated every fifth word with “Holy shit” and “You’re kidding ” as I connected the dots for him. I drew a straight line between the three members of the Noccia crew who had been found shot dead on a highway in Utah to the Ford transport van holding a street value of thirty million in OxyContin.

I said, “There’s a GPS transmitter in the van. The receiver is in Fry’s Electronics parking lot. Yeah. Inside a trash can under the flying-saucer marquee if you want to send a car for it.”