Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

Lucas called Weaver and they agreed that he and Parker could enter the apartment on grounds that Snow might be inside, injured and unable to respond to their knock, but they wouldn’t be allowed to search the apartment until they had a warrant. Duffy didn’t have a key, but knew where the manager lived. The manager had a key, opened the door. The apartment was as empty, and as undisturbed, as Magnus Elliot’s house.

“It’s gonna be a couple more hours to get the warrant, it looks like,” Parker said. “What do you want to do?”

Lucas looked at his watch. 5:45. “I want you to stay here with Meredith. Make sure she’s not . . . interfered with. I need the car keys.”

Parker handed over the keys. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. Someplace quiet,” Lucas said. “I’ll be back for the search. Call me.”

Lucas went down to the truck, got in, wandered around, eventually crossed what looked like a major street, Sunrise Boulevard, and took it east. Thinking about Bob. A few hours earlier, feet up, laughing at Miss Congeniality ; now Bob was gone, on a slab at the medical examiner’s office, to be cut open and . . .

He kept driving, eventually arrived at Fort Lauderdale Beach. He hardly realized what it was, when he got there; it took a moment. He turned north, parked, walked out on the sand, took his shoes off, and sat down.

The sun came up over the Atlantic; and Bob was still gone. As Lucas was sitting there, he saw two muggers walking down the beach at him. He slipped his Walther out of its holster, and let it rest against his thigh.

He looked at the muggers and said, “Hey, guys.”

Lucas spent another week in Miami. Russell Forte stayed for three days, representing the Marshals Service. Lucas talked to Romano and Bianchi before they bailed out, and the old man sensed that Lucas believed them about the setup, which didn’t help them on the gun or money laundering charges that the feds had come up with. The old man refused to say much while he was sitting in an interview room, but he told Lucas, “I’ll be out of here tomorrow. You meet me on the way out. On the steps.”

Lucas and two FBI agents interviewed Meredith Duffy, Alicia Snow’s friend from the boat. She was frightened to death. She would, she said, go home to Georgia until it was all done with. She was willing to look at mug shots, and she did, but failed to identify any of the men on the boat, for sure, but ticked one face with her index finger.

“This guy, maybe. Not for sure. I couldn’t really . . . but I think he might have been the boat driver.”

Weaver, who was leaning over her shoulder looking at the computer screen, said, “John Cattaneo. Once known as ‘Black Jack.’ Huh. He’s from New Jersey. Did time for ag assault, that was a while back, nothing since . . .”

On the steps of the federal courthouse, after he and his son-in-law had made bail, Don Romano told his attorney and son-in-law to walk off a way, and when they were alone, said to Lucas, “Ask your Mafia experts about the Newark group. Doug Sansone. He’s the motherfucker who did this to all of us. The FBI thinks me’n some friends had a little thing going over in Perth Amboy and up on Staten Island. I’m not saying yes or no, one way or the other, but . . . that fuckin’ Sansone wants all of that. They do dope, the Newark guys. A lot of it. Not weed, the hard stuff. They’re the ones you want, not me.”

“Doug Sansone,” Lucas repeated. “How do we know you’re not putting us on somebody you don’t like, just to get us off your back?”

“Don’t like? I hate that motherfucker,” Romano said. “Listen, if those shooters only wanted to kill you, they could have knocked on your motel room door and said, ‘room service.’ You open the door, they’re standing there with a gun aimed at your chest and they pull the trigger. You got no chance. They didn’t do that. They waited until you were headed for my place. They wanted to take both of us down, to get rid of you and to hook me up for murder. They wanted somebody for the FBI to blame. I mean . . .”

“What?”

“The fuckin’ can that the dope supposedly came in. I threw it in my dumpster? Do I look like a moron? No—it was somebody who wanted to get rid of me almost as bad as they wanted to get rid of you. There’s only one guy who fits the bill: Dougie Sansone.”

“I’ll think about that,” Lucas said.

Romano tapped him on the chest, “He’s an evil one. Evil. He’d kill you for a dime and the people he works with are just as bad. Evil motherfuckers.”

“You ever hear of a John Cattaneo?”

“Jack? Sure. If you’re looking at him, you’re looking in the right place. He’s one of Sansone’s men now. Maybe . . . two steps down, but it’s a big operation, so he’s a heavy. There’s another guy they work with . . . mmm . . . Jimmy. He kills people. That’s what he does. Or he fixes it.”

“That’s it? That’s everything?”

“What the fuck you want? You want me to go arrest them myself? What I told you, that’s a big thing. I ain’t wrong about this, either. That fuckin’ Sansone. For him, killing those Coast Guard guys would be like stepping on bugs. He wouldn’t even think about it afterward. Probably went out for a Starbucks latte.”

He started away, then turned and said, “I’d tell you I’m sorry about your friend being killed, but I didn’t know him, so I guess I’m not. My attorney told me about you. You personally. I don’t want to be on your bad side. You want to get even? Kill that mother-fuckin’ Sansone.”

Tennan, the Mafia expert, told Lucas that most of what Romano said was probably right, that the Newark organization was moving south on Staten Island, pushing Romano’s loan organization out of the best bars where they did their loan sharking business. And, he said, the Newark group was rumored to have gotten into the drug distribution after the new boss, Douglas Sansone, pulled together the fragments of older organized crime groups that had gone out of business.

“What are you going to do about it?” Weaver asked Lucas.

“Dunno. Give me some time.” Lucas thought about it for a day, then got back to Weaver and said, “I’m going home.”

“You’re jumping ship?”

“I’ll be in touch. I need to think about this Sansone guy, this John Cattaneo. I need to talk more with Tennan. I need to go to a funeral in Louisiana. I need to read a lot of your organized crime files. You and I . . . we need to put a surveillance team on this Cattaneo, figure out who’s who in the Sansone group,” Lucas said. “I’ll be back. I’ll be talking to you. A lot. Count on it.”

JANUARY

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

Brill’s Deli was a good one, smelling of fatty meat, crusty bread, mustard, and pickles in vinegar. Sixteen feet of wall space was dedicated to coolers filled with Coke and Pepsi and beer and root beer and ginger beer and near-beer and lemonade, limeade, and sports drinks. The Mexican tile floor was cracked and worn, the tabletops scarred from three decades of use. The place even had a sandwich man named Lou.

Jack Cattaneo wandered in at one o’clock on a bright afternoon in mid-January and immediately spotted the cool dude and dudette sitting at a table across from his regular booth, which was empty. Dude and dudette were his private terms for middle-aged people who were trying too hard to stay young, and these two were trying hard. You saw a lot of that on the Beach, right up to ninety-year-old women still getting work done on their turkey necks.

These two had been in a couple of days before, new customers, he thought, though they’d been sitting on the other side of the room the first time he’d seen them. He’d noticed them because they’d seemed to be arguing, the dudette all over the dude’s act. And they were hard to miss, a biracial couple in an old people’s deli on Miami Beach.