Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

Weaver called Lucas at 11:30 and said, “We’re gonna grab the truck the first time it stops. Tennan identified both the driver and the passenger. The driver is on probation in Jersey and didn’t bother to get permission to travel, so we can take both him and his passenger and search the truck. The passenger is a leg-breaker from Staten Island. Depending on what we take out of the truck, we’ll see if it’s enough to get a warrant for the warehouse. We’ve got an overnight judge ready to sign it, depending.”

“Am I still staying up?”

“Yeah. We need to watch. I’ll call if we get any changes, but if you could still go on at one o’clock, that’d be great.”

“Go to bed now, you need the sleep,” Lucas said. “I’m up anyway.”

“Thanks, man,” Weaver said. “Oh. I called the rest of the task force down from Broward, we’re staking out Romano’s house and his son-in-law’s place, just in case.”

At midnight, Weaver called back, sounding stunned. “I no more got to sleep than I got woke back up. The van stopped at a Pizza Hut at a service plaza on the Florida Turnpike and we grabbed the guys and the van. The black box was hidden in a slot under the floor of the van. We opened the box and it’s full of handguns, a hundred and twenty of them.”

“Whoa. No problems?”

“We’re not sure. One guy was driving and I guess the other one was sleeping in the back. When we boxed them in, the driver was yelling something to the guy in the back and he wouldn’t unlock the van until our guys threatened to break the windows and drag him out. That took two or three minutes—and we couldn’t see what the guy in back was doing. He could have made a call.”

“Damnit. Now what?”

“We’re getting a warrant now and we’ll hit the warehouse tomorrow morning as soon as it gets light,” Weaver said.

“Stay on schedule for now?”

“Yeah, I really need to get some sleep. I’m so goddamned tired, I’m stumbling around. I need to be sane when we hit the place.”

Weaver didn’t get any sleep. He called back a minute later and said, “Romano’s moving. So’s Bianchi, the son-in-law. Something happened. Both houses went dark around 11:30, and then ten minutes ago, the lights came on in what we think was Romano’s bedroom and then in Bianchi’s. We think Romano called him. Now both of them are in their cars, headed our way. They’ll be twenty minutes or so, if they’re coming to us.”

“The guy in the van made a call,” Lucas said.

“That’s what we think. We’ve got the warrant and if they walk into that store, we’ll hit them one minute later. Stay out of sight until then.”

“Okay. We’ll see you in the lobby. Ten minutes.”

Lucas rousted Bob and washed his face and put on jeans, a canvas shirt, and cross-training shoes, then took another few seconds to brush his teeth. Bob was dressed and he’d thrown his gear bag on the bed. He pulled out a bulletproof vest and tossed it to Lucas, and put on his own, then pulled out his M4.

Lucas asked, “Think we’ll need that?”

“Better to have it and not need it . . .”

“Right.” Lucas checked his Walther, reseated it in his cross-draw holster on his left hip. He checked his watch: time to move.

“Rock ’n’ roll,” he said.

“You sleepy?” Bob asked.

“Tired, but not sleepy,” Lucas said. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. Let’s watch out for these FBI turkeys, the ones tracking Romano and Bianchi. They’ll have guns and they’ll be running toward us. And it’s dark outside.”

Lucas took a last look out the window: “Not too dark. Lots of lights around.”

Bob said, “Get the handset. Let’s go.”

Weaver was waiting in the lobby, cocked his head at Bob’s M4 but didn’t say anything. A young woman who was standing behind the check-in desk said to Weaver, “I’m going to hide in the office now.”

Weaver nodded and put his handset to his ear and asked, “Where now?” He listened, then turned to Lucas and Bob and said, “Three minutes. You guys wait here. I’ll run over and squat down behind that palm where I can see Romano coming in.”

He pointed kitty-corner across the street at a clump of palms from where he’d be looking at the front of Romano’s store. “Our guys will track Romano until he turns the corner. Bianchi right now is about a minute behind him. When Bianchi turns the corner, our guys will pull into the lot behind the store. There’s a door back there and we’ll put a car bumper right up against it so it can’t be opened. There are no windows back there. When I see Romano and Bianchi are inside, I’ll call you and you come running. As soon as the team leaders out in back see you moving, they’ll go around both sides of the store, around to the front and we’ll all get to the front door at the same time. One of the guys has a sledge if we need it . . .”

Weaver was cranked, talking a hundred miles an hour, the words tumbling out like pebbles. Bob said, “That’s fine, man, but you’ve got to cool down a little. Take it easy. You don’t want to have a heart attack.”

Weaver looked at him. Nodded and said, “I forgot you guys do this all the time . . . I’ll try to slow it down.”

But he glanced at his watch and then said, “I gotta go, I gotta go,” and he pushed through the door and scurried across the street to the clump of palms and disappeared.

Bob, peering out through the glass doors, said, “This is gonna be hairy. Too many guys with guns and no time to think about it.”

Lucas said, “Yeah. At least we’re going out first, so everybody knows where we are.”

They waited, and Lucas said, “Getting tight.”

As they waited, a Latino man with a pencil-thin mustache, wearing a yellow Hawaiian shirt walked around the corner, saw Bob’s rifle, did a double take, said, “Oh, man,” and Lucas said, “Sir, if you could go back to your room for a minute?”

The man read police and u.s. marshal on their vests and said, “You got it,” and disappeared.

Bob grinned and said, “Didn’t take him long to make up his mind.”

From the office, the counter woman called, “Is it over yet?”

Lucas called back, “Not quite, but we’re close,” and to Bob, “Fifteen seconds? Something like that.”

Twenty seconds later, Bob said, “Here they come.”

A black SUV pulled into the parking lot across the street and an elderly man got out and went to the front of the store. Less than a minute later, another SUV, identical to the first, pulled into the parking lot and a younger man got out and went to the door. Ten seconds later, four more cars crawled around the corner and bumped over the curb into the lot at the back of the store. One man jumped out of one of the cars and motioned another car forward until the bumper nearly touched the back of the building, a door that Lucas and Bob couldn’t see.

Lucas’s handset burped: Weaver said, “Go.”

Lucas and Bob went out the door, walking fast, Lucas in the lead, to Bob’s left, headed straight across the street.

Weaver shouted “Go” into his handset and saw Lucas and Bob burst through the motel door into the street. He turned to look for his FBI teams rounding the corner of the building, then looked back at Lucas and Bob. They’d crossed the street and were into the parking lot when two more men ran out of the motel behind them and both raised guns that Weaver recognized as old MAC-10 submachine guns.

Astonished by their sudden appearance, he saw them lift the guns toward Lucas and Bob and he screamed something he didn’t recognize himself, maybe an Indian war cry, and lifted his own Sig at the two men and began firing at them and saw them falter and Lucas and Bob went down and Weaver kept pulling the trigger on the Sig until it went dry and the two men were still up but staggering as a storm of gunfire erupted from behind the store and the two men twisted, turned, and went down. Somebody was shouting, “Stop, stop . . .” and Weaver realized it was him.