Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“And you think he’s legit?”

“I do,” Regio said. “Matt’s a little nervous about him.”

Cattaneo asked, “Why?”

“Can’t really tell you why,” Lange said. “You’ve talked to him, Jack. He comes across as this stoner, lazy do-nothing slacker, but then, all of a sudden, he seems a little too . . . smart. A little too driven. He opens his mouth and all this technical stuff comes out.”

“But only about diving,” Regio said.

Lange: “That’s true. Only about diving. He seems to have trouble with his cell phone.”

Behan and Cattaneo looked at Lange for a couple beats, then Cattaneo asked, “You nervous enough to pull the plug?”

“If it was a small deal, I might pull it. But the guy’s a hell of a diver, and . . . I don’t know. This chick he’s with, she’s no kind of cop, I promise you that. She’s right out of the ghetto. So . . .”

Behan considered that, turning to look out the oceanside windows, scratched his ass once, turned back, and said, “That shit’s already been down there way too long. Could be silting over, could be gone. That’d be a hell of a hit. Other than you being nervous, he looks good?”

Lange nodded.

Behan looked at Cattaneo. “Jack?”

“I say we go with him. There’s enough shit down there to make everybody in the organization a rich man. And I’ll be on the boat. That’s what I think: I’m sure enough that I’ll be on the boat.”

“The least we can do is fuck him out of his money,” Regio said.

Behan smiled and said, “I like the way you think. But. If he brings up anything, it’s not going to be much. How many can he handle at a time? Three? Four? Even with the lift bags, I can’t see him doing more than that. Underwater? Swimming a half mile? So if he brings up anything, we pay him. Because we’ll need him for the other tubes. This is a long-term operation. Might be the first of a bunch of operations.”

“Jaquell brought up six in one load,” Lange said.

“Because she knew exactly where they were, to the foot, and she was going straight up and down. She had it easy. Doing what we’re talking about . . . using this DPV thing from a half mile away, maybe she could do it, maybe not, but she wouldn’t be bringing up six,” Cattaneo said.

“Okay. So we pay him,” Regio said.

“Which brings up another problem,” Cattaneo said. “Say he brings up three tubes, and we pay him what? More than twenty grand in cash? If they’re the kind of people we think they are, ten grand goes up their noses the first night, and then they start splashing money around town. He could get noticed.”

“This chick, Ally, seems to be the brains of their operation,” Regio said. “She has Willy under her thumb. We’ll have a conversation with her. Make the point that if his behavior pulls in any cops, his next dive will be in the Everglades.”

Behan said, “Jack: the boat’s ready?”

“It’s perfect. Our vulnerable spot would be if the Coast Guard jumped us exactly during the pickup. That won’t happen, because we’d see them coming on the radar. If we see them coming, we slow down, they board us, we drift until they’re gone and we go on to the pickup,” Cattaneo said. “If they board us and tell us to follow them into port, we leave Willy in the ocean. He sinks the cans, marks the exact GPS coordinates and then uses this DPV thing to pull him to the beach and we pick him up there.”

“He knows this is the plan?”

“Not yet. We’ll explain it to him tomorrow,” Cattaneo said. “When he’s on the boat.”

“What if they board after the pickup? Coming into the marina?” Behan asked.

“That’s trickier,” Cattaneo said, “But it won’t be like the last time. There’s a bow stateroom, one narrow bed, and we’ve filled it up with dive gear, tools, a bicycle, like we’re using it for storage. The bed’s on an eighteen-inch platform, screwed to the hull, with a hollow space underneath. When the tubes come over the side, we run them to the bow, stick them under the bed. When they’re all in there, we screw the platform back down. We’ve rehearsed it: we can get the bed screwed down and the junk tossed in the cabin in four or five minutes. If we have five more minutes, all the scuba gear will be stowed on top of it. But I don’t think any of this will be necessary. I’ve gone up to Boca Raton a half dozen times since Christmas and nobody ever looked at me. Whoever heard of a drug runner in a slow boat?”

Behan looked out at the ocean for a while, then turned, spread his arms, and said, “Let’s do it, guys. I don’t believe it’ll ever get better than this.”

Andres Devlin was such an average-looking black man that he might not be noticed at a Klan meeting. He was five-eleven with close-cropped hair, was wearing a dark blue T-shirt, black jeans, Nikes, and a Knicks ball cap. One distinctive feature, not visible from the front, was a thin scar that crossed his back at the level of the shirt collar, the product of RPG shrapnel that he’d picked up in Syria.

He sat next to Lucas in the rented Volvo and said, “I couldn’t do what Virgil’s doing. You know what happens when I get in a swimming pool? I sink. I’m told I’m too dense to float.”

“Some fat does help, I’ve heard,” Lucas said. “The only pools I get in have ice on the top.”

“Never understood hockey,” Devlin said. “You gotta be born further north than I was.”

Devlin was from Normal, Illinois, and had gone to college at Purdue. Purdue had a hockey club, rather than a full-blown team, he said, and he’d never gone to a game. “You gotta drive all over the countryside to see them play. I’d rather watch wrestling.”

“You have low taste in sports,” Lucas said. “Though I have a friend who was a big-time college wrestler at Minnesota. And of course, Bob . . .”

“Yeah. Bob.” They thought about Bob for a moment.

They’d been tracking the Mafia guys for more than a month, along with two selected FBI agents, and were running out of conversational gambits. On this day, Lucas had opened the talk with a couple of minutes of vulgar, detailed speculation about why Devlin wasn’t all over Rae, since they were both marshals and stationed at the same facility, and Devlin had asked, “Why should I be? Because we’re both black?”

“Because she’s . . . Rae,” Lucas said. “You even look at her?”

“Fuck you. Of course I looked at her and she’s definitely Rae,” Devlin said. “But, you know, I have a taste for those Mississippi blondes.”

“Blondes are good,” Lucas said. “You get their clothes off and they look really, really naked. Of course, the way young women get around with their razors these days . . .”

“You think black women don’t shave a little off the top?”

“I don’t really . . . um . . .”

Devlin snorted and said, “I’m just fucking with you, man. But Rae . . . Rae’s out of my league. I got a degree in mechanical engineering, for Christ’s sake. I fix old motorboats and Hammond organs. She’s about art and literature and all that.”

“Offer to change her oil,” Lucas said. “Even artists need regular maintenance.”

Devlin sat up. “Here we go.”

Lucas got on a handset and said, “We’ve got Lange and Regio.”

“We see them. We’ll wait for Cattaneo.”

The three were walking out of Behan’s condo. Lucas and Devlin were two blocks away, watching.

“Want to go after them?” Devlin asked.

Lucas considered it, then got back on the handset to the FBI agents in a second car, who were two blocks on the other side of the condo. “Let them go. Track them on the slates.”

“You sure, boss man?” the surveillance agent asked.

“Yes. Give them at least five minutes before you pull out. If anyone is watching their backs, that’ll be enough of an interval. We’ll pick them up later.”