Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“Dope?”

“Sort of a giveaway, huh? He’d sit here on the church steps, where he could see Foot-Long. He kept the dope right here off the side of the steps, where we’re standing, in these weeds.” He kicked a weed, which ignored the attack. “Foot-Long would call him with the specs on what he wanted delivered. Heroin or meth or weed, and how much. Then, the way I heard it, Dope started clipping the meth and reselling it on his own.”

“That’s the kind of entrepreneurial enterprise that made this country great,” Bob said.

Herrera blinked, considered the comment, shrugged. “Anyway, the word is that Foot-Long fired Dope and since there’s nobody else out here at the church, he’s probably sitting on some dope himself.”

“Any particular way we should handle this?” Lucas asked.

“The bathroom’s at the back. If he smells cop, he’s gonna get back there in a hurry and the door has a lock. He’ll shove it in the toilet and flush. I think the one of you who looks least like a cop . . .” He surveyed the two of them, then said, “Okay, you both look like cops. So, if I were you, one of you ought to go through the whole sandwich-ordering routine and by the time you get to the cash register, he might be a little less interested. Then get a table and sit down for a minute or two, take a couple bites, let him relax, and then rush him.”

Bob: “How about if I unbutton my shirt and let him see some skin, going in. A construction-worker vibe.”

“Could help,” Herrera said.

“Then let’s do that,” Bob said. “I’ve done it before.” He pulled the gun from his belt and handed it to Lucas. “Hold this for me. Better if I go without.”

Herrera: “Really?”

“Bob was an NCAA wrestling champ,” Lucas said.

“Third place,” Bob said. “If it comes to a fight, I’d rather not have a gun flying around. Lucas, I’d want you in there one second after I hit him.”

“Yup. Let’s set it up.”

Lucas got a marshal’s vest out of the Pathfinder and walked around the block to get sideways to the front door of the Subway, which was in an anonymous yellow-painted concrete block commercial building, with what looked like apartments on the second floor. Bob walked down the block out of sight from Foot-Long’s booth and Herrera stayed where he was, behind the church steps, standing in the weeds, where he could watch the action.

When Lucas was in position, he called Bob, who shambled into view from the Subway windows, bare-bellied with his open shirt. He paused across the street from the Subway and gave his belly a scratch, may have picked something out of his navel, smelled it, flicked it away, whatever it was, and crossed the street.

Inside the door, he carefully didn’t look at Foot-Long, but focused on the sandwich board, eventually ordering an Italian BMT, no mayonnaise. He continued shambling and scratching, got a cup for a Diet Coke, paid the cute Hispanic woman behind the cash register, shambled down the aisle to an empty booth with his back to Foot-Long, sat down, took a few bites of the sandwich, then pulled out his phone, called Lucas, and said, “Five seconds. Four, three . . .”

He went on one, pushing out of the booth, leaving the phone behind, charging down the aisle like a linebacker going after a quarterback and Foot-Long had only begun to scramble when Bob slammed into him, pinning him in the booth.

Bob snarled, “Pull that fuckin’ screwdriver on me and you’ll be pulling it out of your rectum.”

There were six customers trying to get out of other booths, but Lucas pushed through, a badge in his hand, shouting, “U.S. Marshals, U.S. Marshals!”

Foot-Long, still pinned against the back of the booth, said, “Aw, shit.”

Bob said, “Lucas, grab my phone, will you? I don’t want it to disappear.”

Foot-Long was wearing cargo shorts, from which Lucas pulled four ounces of what looked like heroin and another four ounces of what looked like meth, all neatly packed in tiny Ziploc bags, along with a short but very sharp flat-blade screwdriver. Bob bent him over the Subway table and cuffed him and they walked him across the street to the church steps.

Herrera had disappeared. “I heard you fired Dope,” Lucas said.

“Lawyer.”

“You’re on probation for domestic assault,” Bob said. “Lawyer ain’t gonna save you from getting your probation pulled.”

“Lawyer,” Foot-Long repeated.

“It’s possible we could work out something right here,” Lucas said. “We’re basically looking for information.”

“Fuck you. Lawyer.”

“Trying to figure out who might have killed those Coast Guard guys last summer. They were heroin dealers like you, shot three guys in cold blood. If you . . .”

“Lawyer.”

That’s all he said. Bob finally called in the Miami cops, and when a squad car arrived, explained that they’d gone after Tobin Cain looking for information on the Coast Guard murders, and found him holding the dope. “We’ll testify if you need us, but it’d help us out if you guys could take the arrest,” Lucas told the cops. “He’s on probation on a domestic assault charge, pled down from rape, so . . .”

“We’ll take him, though he’ll probably be back out tomorrow,” the Miami sergeant said. He took Foot-Long by the arm. “Let’s go, Footie.”

“Lawyer.”

As they watched the cops haul Foot-Long away, Bob said, “We’re hearing that ‘lawyer’ stuff all the time now. Hell, every time. The assholes are getting better trained. Keep their mouths shut, except for that one word: ‘lawyer.’”

“Which is why I prefer to shoot them,” Lucas said. “It unclutters the process.”

“Don’t let anybody hear you say that,” Bob said, looking around. “Seriously, you could get your process all cluttered up, if anyone heard you say that.”

That was the day’s only wrestling match.

With more help from Herrera and a Miami narc named Dan Colson, Lucas and Bob hit four dealers that afternoon and evening, three men and a woman. The dealers were willing to chat; they had no idea who dumped the dope. They were convincing.

They were all holding dope. The woman, who had hair the color of a winter haystack, also had a Smith & Wesson snub-nose .38 revolver in her purse and had a felony in her history. They all took cards from Lucas.

“Here’s the deal,” Lucas told them. “We want you to tell your friends, your suppliers, that we’re out here and we’re coming for them. We got get-out-of-jail cards for good information on the Coast Guard shootings. But it better be good.”

Bob took the dope and scattered it in the streets, like cinnamon sugar. The woman said she needed the gun for self-protection because she worked in a bad area, so they let her keep it after unloading the weapon. Bob put the cartridges in his pocket as they walked away, and later threw them one at a time out the window of the Pathfinder.

Then, later that night: the man with the worst sheet and the best drug connections was a louche redheaded dude named Axel Morris, a former high school teacher who dealt weed, coke, heroin, and methamphetamine out of a booth in a nude-dancer club called Bandit’s.

A Miami narc, Walker Weeks, had suggested Morris as a target during the meeting, and that evening he met Lucas and Bob in a McDonald’s parking lot on 163rd Street in northern Miami-Dade County.

Weeks looked like a wide receiver, a lanky black guy wearing a black T-shirt under a black sport coat, with black jeans and black sport shoes and a diamond in one earlobe. He had a wide smile and big white teeth. “You feds have been a little backward about going after the assholes who killed the Coasties. What changed?”

“We did,” Lucas said.

“I thought marshals mostly shuffled prisoners around,” Weeks said.