Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“What’s that?” Virgil asked, nodding at a two-inch-thick brown file envelope sitting by Davenport’s right hand.

“Maybe a case,” Lucas said. “I’m thinking about it.” He stuck a hand in a jacket pocket, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to Virgil. “Get me a cheeseburger, fries, and a Diet Coke.”

“What, I’m a waitress now?”

“I’m saving the table,” Lucas said. “Or would you rather eat standing up?”

Virgil came back a few minutes later with a tray, scraped out a chair, put the food down, and said in a quiet voice, “There’s a woman sitting behind me . . . Don’t look right away, be casual about it. She’s wearing an old blue dress with flowers and has a white handbag sitting on the table.”

He sat down and Lucas looked casually past his shoulder and checked the woman. He turned back to Virgil and picked up his cheeseburger and asked, “Who is she?”

“She’s the wife of the guy I testified against. He’s going to prison for ten years or so.”

“What’d he do?”

“Robbed credit unions. One every three or four months, down in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa. I caught him a couple of months ago, in Blue Earth. He was the family’s sole support.”

“She does look mean. I’d be worried, if I were you,” Lucas said. “Did you get mustard?”

“Only ketchup. I don’t think she’s armed, but . . .” Virgil picked up a piece of silverware and waggled it at Lucas. “. . . I’d rather not have a fork stuck in my eye.”

“Not to worry. If she rushes you, I’ll put three Hydra-Shoks through her belly button.”

“Thank you, I’d appreciate it,” Virgil said. Davenport got up, went to the cafeteria line, and came back with three packets of mustard. Through a forkful of hot macaroni and cheese, Virgil said, “Frankie says hello.”

“How are the twins?”

“Loud. Very loud. Relentless,” Virgil said. The twins, one of each, were two months old. “Frankie would need about six tits to keep them happy—don’t ever tell her I said that. My mother’s down there with them. I get two hours of sleep a night.”

“I thought you were keeping your mother away?”

“That would be like keeping gravity away,” Virgil said. “Not gonna happen. She still staring at me?”

“Still staring,” Lucas said, watching Virgil’s stalker from the corner of his eye.

“I can feel her eyes burning a hole in the back of my neck,” Virgil said.

Lucas asked, “What happened with your novel?”

Virgil had been writing wildlife magazine articles for years, but since the previous winter had been working on a thriller novel. Lucas was one of the few people who knew about it. Virgil said, “Didn’t fly. Not good enough.”

“You gonna give up?”

“No. I’ve got this agent in New York. She told me that I could make a living at it, but I didn’t know what I was doing yet. She gave me some ideas, and I’m starting over.”

“You can do it,” Lucas said. “I’ll be bragging to people that I know you.”

Virgil was as tall as Lucas, but with blond hair worn too long for an agent of the Minnesota Department of Criminal Apprehension. He was wearing his court clothes, a gray suit, white shirt, and blue necktie, an ensemble unsettled by his cowboy boots, though the snakeskin was well polished. He poked his fork at the brown file envelope next to Lucas’s hand. “What’s the case?”

“Three Coast Guardsmen got shot to death a few months ago, down in Fort Lauderdale,” Lucas said. “Broad daylight. Nothing’s happened on that. Nothing.”

“I remember reading about it.”

“The FBI has been investigating, but haven’t been getting anywhere,” Lucas said. “The thought was floated by a U.S. senator from Florida that maybe the Marshals Service could take a look.”

“Was the senator one of your political godfathers?”

“No, but people talk,” Lucas said. “He called me directly.”

“So when he suggested the Marshals Service might take a look, he meant you. Personally,” Virgil said.

“Yes. That didn’t go over real well—it implied that the FBI wasn’t getting anywhere,” Lucas said.

“Which they weren’t.”

“True, but the implication was resented. The FBI has a lot more clout in the Justice Department than the Marshals Service and they’ve been peeing on our shoes. Actually, my shoes,” Lucas said. “The longer the case stretches out, with no progress, the more pressure . . . Uh, the woman with the handbag got up, she’s . . .” Virgil pulled his head down. “. . . going to the cafeteria line.”

“Check what she orders. I’ve seen a woman get burned bad by a slice of hot pizza. Red hot, stuck to her face, couldn’t get it off,” Virgil said, resisting the urge to look at the woman. “Anyway, you’re tangled up in a bureaucratic feud. What are you going to do?”

“I’ve been reading the files,” Lucas said. “They keep coming, but they never have much in them. Lots of paperwork. The feeling is, we’re dealing with drug smugglers and the drug is most likely heroin, and it may be coming in from Colombia, but nobody knows for sure.”

“That’s it? That’s all they got?”

“The Coast Guard says that a freighter probably dumped a bunch of heroin in watertight containers on a reef off Lauderdale. It was being recovered by a diver from a fishing boat, and when the Coast Guard tried to stop the boat, three Coast Guardsmen got shot and killed and the boat was burned to get rid of biologic evidence. A Coast Guardsman killed one of the smugglers, but the rest got away. The Coast Guard has been watching the general area of the dump, but they haven’t seen any more recovery efforts. Maybe it’s all gone. Then again, the Broward County sheriff has picked up rumors that it’s still sitting out there.”

“Has anybody been looking for the stuff? Navy divers?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah, that’s mentioned in the files, but the search area is large, the water is really deep for divers, and the visibility isn’t all that good,” Lucas said. “They had one of those remote-control submarines looking for a while, but didn’t find anything.”

“Then how are the smugglers finding it?”

“They’ve probably got precise GPS coordinates that’ll put them right on top of the containers,” Lucas said. “The Coast Guard thinks the containers may have some kind of proximity device—push a button on a transceiver and it sends out a locator beep. That’s what they tell me, anyway.”

“Huh. What do you think you could do? You’re not a diver, you don’t know shit about submarines or GPS. If the feds . . .”

Lucas said, “Your friend bought two slices of pizza.”

Virgil: “When I went by there, the pizza was so hot the cheese was bubbling . . . What’s she doing now?”

“Staring at you. Carrying the pizza to her table . . . Okay, she’s sitting down. She’s eating the pizza. Still staring.”

“It’s creeping me out,” Virgil said.

“It’s creeping me out and I’m not even you,” Lucas said.

Virgil wrenched the conversation back to the heroin dump. “What could you do down in Lauderdale? Other than get out of Minnesota in November?”

“What could I do? That’s what I’ve been thinking about,” Lucas said. “The FBI doesn’t do confrontation. We need some confrontation to shake things up. Push people around. Deal some get-out-of-jail cards in return for information. Street-cop stuff. Find out who gets upset.”

“You’re gonna do it?”

“I dunno. Those meatheads at the FBI . . .” Lucas stroked his chin with a thumb and forefinger, staring past Virgil, not at the woman, but at the blank wall to one side. Virgil let him stare, uninterrupted. Then, abruptly, Lucas looked back at Virgil and said, “Yeah. I’m gonna do it.”