Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“This Elliot guy—don’t get hurt, man. I’m fairly screwed up myself,” Forte said. “Bob was one of my favorite people of all time.”

“Have you talked to Rae?”

“Somebody’s doing that now. I expect she’ll be calling you,” Forte said.

“Ah, Jesus.”

They were halfway across Miami when Rae called. Lucas looked at his phone, didn’t want to answer it, but he did: “Rae.”

“Lucas. I needed to tell you, I talked to Russell. This wasn’t your fault and I don’t blame you in any way, shape, or form.”

“Ah, jeez, Rae . . .”

Lucas let her go, his eyes closed, as she began to cry. When she could speak again, she said, “Russell said you were there with a whole bunch of feds, so this wasn’t some crazy Davenport cowboy thing.” She said something else, but Lucas couldn’t make it out as her voice squeaked higher as she began to cry again. “I should have been there, if I’d been there he wouldn’t be dead . . .”

Lucas said, “Rae, your being here wouldn’t have changed anything except you might be dead yourself. The shooters came out from behind us and started spraying bullets. We were set up. We didn’t have a clue. If one of the feds hadn’t see them come through the motel door with guns and hadn’t yelled at them and opened up . . . I’d be dead, too. I never even saw the fuckers until they were down.”

“Was Bob . . .”

“Ah . . . Goddamnit, this is hard, Rae. We never saw it coming. Bob was here and then he was gone, no pain, no fear, no warning. He was hit twice . . . Listen, I’m not going to talk about this anymore. I’m trying to run down the guy who set us up.”

“Get them! Get them, Lucas!” she said. And then, “Oh, my God, I got a call coming in from Shirl. The service must’ve notified her. Hang on, I’m going to her call for a minute . . .”

She went away and a moment later, was back: “Lucas, I need to talk to you some more, but right now Shirl needs me . . .”

“Call me later in the day,” Lucas said. “I’ll have more about the guy we’re looking for.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know—maybe kill his ass,” Lucas said.

“Lucas . . . Lucas, just take him,” Rae said. “Take him and squeeze him. Now I gotta go, I gotta go.”

She was gone.

Parker, who’d heard Lucas’s side of the conversation, said, “Let’s not kill his ass, okay? Let’s have a nice professional arrest and slam his ass in jail.”

“We’ll do what we gotta,” Lucas said. Then, after another moment, “Yeah, we’re not going to kill him. We won’t have to. He’s already dead.”

“Excuse me?”

Lucas shook his head.

The city was as quiet as it ever got, three o’clock in the morning, the night people sliding along, big coupes with gray primer on their fenders and doors, long-haired guys looking sideways out the windows as they jumped the traffic lights . . .

When they got to Elliot’s house, two Miami-Dade cop cars and a van were parked at the fence, and five cops were standing in the yard, all of them vested and helmeted. They were part of a SWAT squad, the leader told Lucas. “What are we doing here? We understand he’s involved in a shooting . . .”

Lucas gave him a quick recap of the shootout. The cops had heard various versions of the shootout and as he and Parker filled in the details, the cops all shaking their heads, the leader asked, “If this Bob was your partner, what are you doing here? I mean . . .”

“I know what you mean,” Lucas said. “I’ve got the background on Elliot and we didn’t have time to fool around. Have you knocked?”

“Yeah, we knocked, no sign of life. We’re told there might be a warrant, but we don’t know about that.”

“I think we’re good. You guys got a ram? This place is a fort, you’re gonna need one.”

“Yeah, but I’d like to know for sure that we got a warrant.”

Lucas told the cop who Weaver was, then called him, leaving his phone on the speaker function, and Weaver said, “Yes. We have a warrant. Under the circumstances, you can go in right now. Knock the door down.”

“You got it,” the cop said.

Both the front and back doors had steel cores. The doorframes were made of steel bolted to the concrete block walls. After a few attacks on the two doors, the cops knocked out a window, and the least senior cop crawled into the house and unlocked a door from the inside.

On a fast walk-through, they found nothing except a couple of large cockroaches sitting on the kitchen table and then scuttling out of sight. The house was silent: the television was off, so was the air conditioner and all the lights, until the cops turned them on. There were two clean dishes in the sink.

“There was an alarm, but it was turned off,” the SWAT leader said.

“Because the guys who took him out of here didn’t know how to set it,” Parker said.

The bedroom closets were full of clothes, as was a bedroom bureau. The bathroom showed a razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, and shaving cream on a counter next to a sink, and a drawer, partly opened, revealed a half-empty Dopp kit inside. The bureau had a jewelry tray that contained a couple of rings, a diamond earring, two gold bracelets, and a gold Rolex. Two suitcases and a duffel bag were piled atop one another, in a hallway closet, under a line of jackets.

After walking through, Lucas stopped at the table next to the front door and pulled open the drawer. The .45 was there, reassembled and loaded. Parker looked at it, and at Lucas, and asked, “What do you think?”

“What I thought in the car. He’s gone. If he’d walked away on his own, he would have taken some of his stuff. I don’t know how much that Rolex is worth, but I’d guess between ten and twenty thousand, maybe more.”

“So you think he’s . . .”

“Dead.”

The SWAT squad leader came into the living room from the back. He’d taken off his helmet to reveal a shaved head, and from the shine off his scalp, one that was mostly bald before he got it shaved, Lucas thought.

“We might have found a fake wall,” he said. Lucas trailed him back to a small bedroom, now full of exercise equipment—a stationary bike in front of a wall-mounted TV, a weight rack with weights. One of the SWAT cops pointed at a bookcase. “I work construction on weekends. That bookcase ain’t right. From the side, it’s fourteen inches deep, but he’s got nothing in it but CDs and Blu-Rays and they barely fit.”

“How does it move?”

“Can’t see anything. Maybe it just pulls straight out, but I can’t get it to move. There might be a stopper or something.”

“What would happen if you hit it with your ram?” Lucas asked.

“It’s just veneer over chipboard,” the construction cop said. “It’d fall apart.”

“Then hit it.”

One of the cops went back outside to get the ram and the construction cop began unloading the shelves of the CDs and Blu-Rays. He was on his knees unloading the bottom shelf and he said, “Up . . . here it is.”

The team leaders asked, “What?”

The construction cop lay on the floor, looking up at the bottom of the next-to-the-bottom shelf. “Some kind of pin . . . We need a screwdriver. A big one.”

“Saw a screwdriver in the utility room, there’s some tools,” another cop said.

Lucas walked around a corner to the utility room, saw a nylon tool bag, found a half dozen screwdrivers, shouted back, “Phillips or flat-blade?”

The construction cop yelled back, “Phillips.”

Lucas carried the screwdriver back as a cop was arriving with the ram. Lucas handed the screwdriver to the cop on the floor, who did something under the shelf, grunting, and then said, “It’s coming out.”