Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

And the diver . . . they badly needed a diver of the right type, and the dude had that look. Their previous diver had apparently been freaked out by the shooting on the Mako. They took their eyes off Jaquell for one minute and she disappeared into the Bahamas. Cattaneo and a couple of other guys went to look for her, but it was hopeless. So no luck there, not for the home team. Of course, he thought, she lucked out.

He went for the cheesecake and another bottle of Peroni. Five minutes later, he’d tipped the bottle up for a final mouthful, when a man walked in, looked slowly around the place, caught Cattaneo’s eyes, held them, then moved on to Lou, the sandwich maker.

The man was wearing a cotton sport coat, seriously wrinkled in the back, golf slacks over a small potbelly, and brown shoes a few shades too yellow. His face was pitted with some kind of disease scars that Cattaneo didn’t want to know about. He and Lou talked for a moment, and then they both looked at Cattaneo.

Cattaneo thought: Cop.

The cop walked over toward him and Cattaneo told himself to relax; no reason a cop should be talking to him.

The cop said, “Barry Cohen, Miami Beach police. You were talking to a blond guy and a tall black woman?”

“Yeah, they left ten minutes ago. I didn’t know them, they were just sitting at that table”—he nodded at the table—“and we had a couple of words. What’d they do?”

“You see which way they went?”

“Yeah, they went out on the sidewalk and turned that way.” He pointed south. “That’s the last I saw of them. What’d they do?”

The cop ignored the question again and asked, “What did they have to say for themselves?”

“They said they were looking for work. I think they might have come on a bus. They might have been walking, something one of them said . . . mmm, the blond guy said his feet hurt.”

“You didn’t know them?” Cohen asked.

“No. I did see them here a couple of days ago, though. What’d they do?”

“They’re thieves, we think. Working around here. We’re trying to catch up with them. You didn’t give them access to a car or . . .”

“Man, I talked to them for five minutes, max. I come here every day for lunch—I live three blocks from here,” Cattaneo said. “If they’re thieves, I want them caught. This neighborhood is going to shit. Never saw them before two days ago . . . Lou probably knows them better than I do. I didn’t give them access to anyone.”

The cop nodded and said, “Okay. If you see them again, call 911. My name again is Barry Cohen, Miami Beach. Tell the 911 operator to call me.”

“I’ll do that,” Cattaneo said. “I hate fuckin’ thieves.”

The cop said, “Headed south?”

“Yeah. Ten minutes ago.”

The cop left, headed south, and Cattaneo got up and stepped over to Lou. “You know what those guys did? The blond and the black chick?”

“Yeah. Somebody must’ve told Cohen that they were in here. Cohen says they were over at the Rue Rouge yesterday. The black girl got talking to the valet and pulled him away from his board and they think the guy lifted some car keys. Somebody did, anyway. They took the car, a Porsche Cayenne, one of those remote-entry things, and the car had the owner’s registration. They drove over to the owner’s house, used the keys to get in and ripped off a few thousand bucks worth of electronics and some other shit. Silverware, a statue, some suits and shoes, some tools from the garage. Chain saw. They would have got more but there was a security system on a one-minute delay so they only got about two minutes’ worth of stuff. When the security company called the guy at the Rue Rouge, halfway through his lunch, he went running out to get his car and it was gone. They found it under I-95 with the wheels gone.”

“So they got some used electronics and some wheels?”

“I guess. Expensive wheels, though.”

Cattaneo briefly thought about climbing on Lou about pointing him out to the cop, for talking to the dude and dudette. After a moment’s consideration, he didn’t, because (a) Lou thought he was an upright citizen so why wouldn’t he point him out, and (b) he liked the corned beef sandwiches and didn’t want Lou hockin’ a loogy in there.

“Hate thieves,” Cattaneo said to Lou. “They make it so hard for the rest of us.”

By the time Cattaneo left the deli, the blond and the chick were looking out the rear window of their ten-year-old Subaru Outback. They saw the cop leave, and then, a couple of minutes later, Cattaneo. The blond took a burner phone from his pocket and punched in a number.

“Davenport . . .”

“Yeah, this is Virgil. I’m with Rae. We talked to Cattaneo. We got a bite. Cohen was just in there, laying out our bona fides.”

“Excellent. Now we wait. The apartment’s good?”

“We’re gonna fire up some weed tonight, to give it that necessary je ne sais quoi ,” Virgil said.

“Hey: no inhaling . . . and what’s with the Latin and fuckin’ French?”

“I’m a high-quality cop,” Virgil said.

When he got off the phone, Rae said, “It’s bona-FEE-days, dumbass. FEE-days does not rhyme with ‘fries.’”

“Maybe not in Rome, but it does in Miami Beach,” Virgil said. “Let’s get on home.”

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

After the shooting in Florida City, and a series of conversations with Romano and Bianchi, Weaver had set up a surveillance net in South Florida, focusing on known associates of Douglas Sansone.

One of them, James (Jimmy) Parisi, had been identified as a killer, suspected of five murders in New York and New Jersey, carried out with semiautomatic .22 rifles; but he was good, and had never been indicted for any of them. The feds thought he might have been on the boat when the Coast Guardsmen were murdered, not because they had hard information, but simply because of his proclivities.

Six more men were identified as working for Sansone in South Florida, and rumor had it that they had a connection with Mexican heroin importers, but that the Mexicans had begun shifting their support to Hispanic dealers in New Jersey, overlapping Sansone’s territory. Sansone, the rumors went, had looked for an alternate source of heroin, and had found one. Heroin was again flowing into Staten Island needles.

In mid-November, a week after Bob’s funeral in Louisiana—where Rae had told Lucas in no uncertain terms that she was on this case now, so Lucas could just shut up about it, and so Lucas did and started thinking—Lucas had traveled to Washington to meet with Weaver, who’d come up from Florida, and two contacts high in the FBI, Deputy Director Louis Mallard and an influential senior agent named Jane Chase.

Weaver was impressed: as they walked together down the hallway to the first of the meetings, he’d said in a hushed tone, “Jesus Christ, I didn’t know you were friends with these people. Mallard is like the Archangel Gabriel, right up there next to God.”

“He’s no kind of angel, I can promise you that,” Lucas said.

They met in Mallard’s office, a cluttered double cubicle with piles of books and paper on every flat surface. As they talked, Chase wandered around the office, peering at the piles, occasionally muttering, “No way,” or “Gimme a break,” until Mallard told her to shut up and sit down.

“What do we know about this Sansone guy? Know for sure?” Mallard asked Weaver.

Weaver said, “For sure? He owns a chain of donut shops.”

“Donut shops?”

“Mama Ferrari’s Donuts. Ten shops. The OC unit did some checks on his income taxes, and they tell me he’s the most successful donut seller in New Jersey,” Weaver said. “People come in the door at the donut shops and pay with small bills. Mama Ferrari discourages credit cards—if you pay in cash, you get an extra donut, supposed to offset credit card fees. That means they have large amounts of small greasy bills . . .”