Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“Sure . . .”

Lucas went over and got a chair and the old man peered at him for a moment, then said, “What?”

“Your shooters killed a good friend of mine,” Lucas said.

Romano blew through his loose lips, making a farting sound. “I keep telling everyone, I don’t know what the fuck happened out there. I’m in here going to work—”

Lucas: “At midnight?”

“We’re early risers,” Romano said. He was irritated by the comment. “Why would I have two guys hiding in a motel with guns? If I was worried about somebody kicking in the doors, they’d be in here. Bring in a couple of cots, they could sleep here, protect the place . . .”

Lucas watched his face. Romano took it, staring back, his eyes cold and black. Then Lucas asked Weaver, “Will everybody excuse me if I ask a non-fact-based question?”

“Go ahead,” Weaver said.

Lucas looked down at Romano and asked, “What do you think is going on?”

Romano weighed Lucas for another moment or two, then jabbed a hitchhiker’s thumb at Weaver and said, “This guy tells me the two assholes you guys killed are hired shooters. They’re known.”

“Known to you?”

“Fuck no. This guy told me,” Romano said, tipping his head toward Weaver. “Anyway, you and the guy who got killed, we heard about you from old friends, out of the business now. You’re going around town kicking over trash cans and somebody might have gotten worried that you were getting somewhere on the Coast Guard murders. So, they chumped you. They got somebody to point you at me, because of the rumors about my previous occupations, which are completely false, by the way. You come running down here and the idea was, you’d kick the front door open and they’d wipe you out, and then all the cops would come and they’d find that black thing in my dumpster . . . You were chumped and you’re still being chumped.”

Lucas closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose, then looked at Weaver and asked, “You got time for a walk around the block?”

“I do,” Weaver said. To the agents at the table, he said, “Keep him talking.”

Lucas and Weaver went outside. A fire truck was still there, now spraying water on the blacktop at the side of the Romano building, and Lucas realized they were washing away the blood left behind by Bob and the wounded FBI agent. He turned the other direction, down the street, and said, “Listen, Dale. Romano said what I was thinking. Whoever the Coast Guard killers are, they spotted Bob and me, and followed us. They checked into the motel right behind us and waited for us to hit Romano. They thought it’d just be me and Bob. And they torched the room on the way out because they thought that would get rid of their DNA. I bet they were wearing gloves when they went down.”

“Yeah, they were. We might have still gotten some DNA, fire doesn’t always wipe it out anymore . . . but that’s irrelevant now.”

“What Romano said . . . you’ve identified them?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. We printed them, they popped right up.”

“Do they hook up with Romano somehow?”

“No. They were basically for hire, whatever you needed done,” Weaver said. “They collected on debts, protected dealers, they were suspected in a couple of gang killings.”

“Then I think Romano nailed it. We were chumped. We’ve got to get up to Miami and knock down Magnus Elliot’s door, and the sooner the better. He’s the guy who set us up.”

“I’ll get a SWAT team, but you and I have to stay here. Or I do, anyway, I’ll see what the guys from the Miami office have to say. They’ll want everyone who fired a gun to be here while they work out the sequence of events.”

“That’s fine, send the SWAT team, but I don’t think we’ll really need them. Elliot may not have known what he was doing, or maybe he did. Either way, he’s now a liability to whoever set us up. He’s probably dead. If he isn’t, he soon will be, so we gotta move. If he’s not dead, he’s squeezable.”

“Miami-Dade can have somebody there in five minutes. I’ll make a call . . .”

He walked away to make the call, and as Lucas looked after him, he thought, I should have done this earlier, I shouldn’t have frozen up . . .

Lucas walked through the mess around Romano’s building, the fire trucks, the cops, the smell of water and smoke, the constant chatter of cops talking and shouting, radios scratching out more talk. He thought about finding the motel desk clerk again, but when he went to look for her, she’d been taken somewhere else to be interviewed. He went back to the street, saw Weaver talking to one of the task force agents and went that way.

Weaver saw him coming and said, “Miami-Dade will have somebody there right now. I’ve called the overnight judge for a new warrant.”

“I’m going up there,” Lucas said. “If your guys need me . . . tell them I left without permission. Or whatever, but I’m going. I never did fire a weapon, so . . .”

He stepped away but Weaver hooked his arm and held on. “Nope. Not by yourself.” He looked around the parking lot and shouted, “Parker! Parker!”

The young agent hurried toward them and Weaver said to Lucas, “Parker was on the far side of the building, he never fired his weapon. The Miami office guys will be pissed if he leaves, but he wasn’t involved.”

Parker came up and Weaver told him, “Get the bus keys from Andy and take Lucas up to Miami, where he tells you to go. Then both of you get back here soon as you can depending . . . on what happens there. Parker—lights and siren the whole way.”

Weaver turned back to Lucas: “It’s the only vehicle we have with lights and siren. Take off.”

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

Parker was a steady driver, even in the gargantuan Suburban, but had never driven a cop car. Halfway to Miami, pushing an elderly Buick down the highway, he said, “I’ve never run a car with lights and siren going. It’s weird. Some of the cars scatter in front of you, some never see you at all. The ones that don’t see you, shouldn’t be on the road. There are some other ones that are just friggin’ ignoring me.”

Lucas said, “Yeah.” Not up for idle conversation.

“I’m sorry about Bob. You okay?”

“No, I’m not,” Lucas said. “I can’t get it out of my head. I’m fucked up here.”

After a long silence, Parker asked, “Are you sure you should be doing this? We could get a couple of guys from downtown . . .”

“I’m sure,” Lucas said. “I need to find out what happened. Did Elliot see us coming? Were we set up right from the start? Were we set up at all . . . No, we were set up. No question. I need to know how Elliot was involved. If he was . . .”

As they got off the expressway and headed east, Lucas took a call from Washington, from Russell Forte: “Lucas, I got a plane ticket down there, I’ll see you this afternoon. Are you still at that TRYP place?”

“Yeah, we never checked out. Why are you coming?”

“To see about Bob, for one thing. And to see about you. I need to talk to you about what you’re doing and what you’re planning to do. I’ve got a guy picking me up at Fort Lauderdale, I should be at your hotel by three o’clock.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. Right now I’m headed north with one of the task force agents to see if we can find the guy who put us on Romano.”

“I can hear the siren . . .”

Lucas told Forte about the emerging theory that they’d all been chumped, that Bob and Lucas were set up to be killed on Romano’s doorstep.

“And we don’t know who’d do that?”

“If we knew that, we’d know who the drug runners are and who killed the Coast Guardsmen,” Lucas said. “Who benefits from Romano going down? Whoever set us up were tracking Bob and I, and they didn’t expect the FBI teams to be there. If it had gone as they expected, Bob and I would be dead and Romano would be toast.”