Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

That done, he said, “Now. Bob and I have been running around town stepping on toes.”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Elliot said.

“Well, we have been. We’ve been specifically looking for guys like you, out on parole, or guys we can get for three-strikes offenses. For example, if we were to pull your house apart here, and find a joint . . . well, a joint is a federal offense, even if they don’t believe it here in Miami-Dade.”

“I know that, which is why you wouldn’t find a joint in here,” Elliot said.

“Okay. But you know, the damnedest things turn up with a thorough search, stuff that you might not even think is illegal, but it is,” Lucas said. “I mean, that .45, in the hands of a convicted felon out on parole . . . But we don’t want to go there. Instead, we want to bribe you. Don’t ever tell anyone I said that.”

“What do you got to bribe me with?”

“We’ll get to that. We want the name of the guys who shot three members of the Coast Guard this summer up in Fort Lauderdale.”

Elliot looked from Lucas to Bob, his unnaturally pale brow wrinkled, and he asked, “Why would I know that?”

“We heard you dope importer guys down here cut a deal with some Jersey goombahs not to fuck with them when they dropped a load of heroin off the beach,” Lucas said. “A deal got cut, the dope was dropped, and that led to the shooting. That’s why.”

“I’m not . . . uh . . . Man, why would I even talk with you?”

Bob said, “Because you’re on parole. We weren’t even in the house for five seconds before we found that .45. Your parole officer would send you back to prison for that. Find a joint or a bag of heroin, same thing. Drunk driving, drug paraphernalia, domestic abuse . . . almost anything and you go back inside. No trial, no problem, you’re gone.”

“I needed the gun for self-protection but there ain’t any drugs. Does it look like there’s a woman in here that I’d be abusin’?” It didn’t; there was one La-Z-Boy chair pointed at an oversized television in the living room. “If I was gonna . . .”

Lucas interrupted: “What we’re offering is a deal that would terminate your parole. You’d be done with it. If you got caught with a little dope, you couldn’t automatically be sent back to prison. The government would have to go through the whole bail bond, trial, and conviction route to put you back inside. How much would that be worth to you?”

Elliot stared at Lucas with watery blue eyes too small for his face, his heavy head bobbing a bit, and then he muttered, “Something.”

Bob: “Something?”

Elliot walked out of the kitchen and in a circle around the living room; as he was doing that, a gray tiger-striped cat came out of the back of the house and meowed at him. He picked up the cat and draped it across his shoulders, where it settled in and looked at Lucas with yellow eyes.

Elliot said, “Look. I might be able to help out here. I’m not sure; I’d have to make some calls. But I think so. I won’t give you shit until I talk to somebody who could help on the parole.”

“You got a cell phone number?” Lucas asked.

Of course he did, several of them, he was a drug dealer; but he didn’t say that. He said, “I guess.”

“Give me the number and I’ll set you up with one of the top assistants at the U.S. Attorney’s Office here in Miami. She makes the offer and you either believe her or you don’t.”

Elliot stared at Lucas for a moment, and then said, “Really?”

“Yeah. Really.”

Elliot pulled at his heavy bottom lip, peeled the cat off, took it to the front door, let it out, came back, and said, “I’ll talk to her. When?”

“This afternoon, probably. Tomorrow morning if one of you can’t make it. You might want to take your attorney along.”

Elliot snorted. “He’s a good criminal attorney, but if I took him along on this deal, he’ll sell me out in a New York minute. I’d probably get shot on the courthouse steps. Nope. I’ll talk to her by myself. I’ll want some paper with some signatures on it. And I can make it this afternoon.”

Lucas called Elsie M. Sweat at the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office, got her out of a meeting, and asked about an appointment for Elliot. She’d see him, she said, at 4:40. “I’ll pull his file, see what’s what. He didn’t kill anyone?”

“No, straight drug bust,” Lucas said. “You know what the deal is, he thinks he can help.”

“All right. That’s 4:40,” Sweat said. “If he’s not outside my door at 4:40, I’ll be gone at 4:41.”

“Heavy date?”

“I just need some goddamn sleep,” she said. “4:40.”

She rang off, and Lucas turned to Elliot, who said, “I heard. I’ll be there at four o’clock, outside her door. If I’m not there, I’m dead.”

Elliot walked with them out to the gate, to take the chain off. Lucas gave him his card with his cell phone number, said, “Call me,” backed the truck away from the fence, held up a hand to Elliot, and he and Bob started out through the winding streets.

Bob: “Now what?”

“If Elliot has a deal by five o’clock, he might have something for us tonight,” Lucas said. “Why don’t we go back to the hotel, check in with Weaver, see what’s happening with the hairdressers? Take a nap, get something to eat, check with Elliot later on.”

“Okay with me,” Bob said. And: “I’m worried about all the cooperation we’ve been getting. Everybody stepped right up, said, ‘Glad to help out.’ That’s not right.”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Lucas said. “The hairdressers, they might give us something, but then we’ll have to connect a lot of dots to get from guys seen on a boat days before the shooting, to proving they were the same guys who did it. Or even that it’s the same boat. Everybody else, we blackmailed them and still haven’t gotten a name or anything solid.”

“You’re not even a little spooked? By the cooperation?”

“Maybe a little,” Lucas conceded.

Bob yawned and said, “I could use a nap. Miami is a crappy place to drive around. I like it better out in the countryside and there isn’t any here.”

Elliot watched the marshals leave from behind his window blinds. When he was sure they were gone, he went into the kitchen, rummaged around in the back of a silverware drawer, and took out four burner phones. One of them had never been used to make a call—but it had an encrypted vault on it, with a list of private phone numbers.

He opened the vault, found the number he was looking for, and used another of his phones to make the call.

“Yeah?”

“Yes, sir, this is a big blond guy you met last year over on the beach,” Elliot said. “I made a delivery for you folks from some Latino friends of mine and picked up some money. You asked me about the blue ribbons in my hair.”

“I remember. You said they were there because rednecks would give you a hard time about them, which was an excuse for you to beat the shit out of them.”

“That’s me. You gave me your phone number and said to call if I ever had some news you could use,” Elliot said. “Well, I do. Maybe. Or maybe you know somebody who can use it. A couple of U.S. Marshals were here. They wanted a name from me. Somebody in the Mafia.”

“You didn’t give them one?”

“No, but they offered me a hell of a deal. I’m taking the deal. Now I need to come up with a name. You got one?”

“Let me call you back,” Jack Cattaneo said. “I gotta talk to a guy.”

Cattaneo talked to Behan one minute later. “You’re not gonna believe this. We’re not gonna have to jump though our asses to set up those guys. They set themselves up.”

“That’s nice,” Behan said. “Come over and tell me about it.”