Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

As they were talking, Zamora left, and Orish called for a surveillance car to pick up Lucas. Lucas asked Devlin to hang at the task force suite, watching incoming cars, then hurried down through the lobby and caught a tan Camry. The driver, whose name was Rob Blake, said, “We’ll wait completely out of sight until they move. There are Cokes in the cooler in back.”

They drove over to the street where the surveillance truck was parked, found a dark space under a tree, well back, and pulled in.

Devlin called a while later: “We got another customer. Black Jeep.”

He called again, one minute later: “He’s not a customer, the Jeep guy. I think he’s a night guard. He left his Jeep outside, by the car wash, and he went in the garage.”

And ten minutes later, “Okay, the inside man is leaving. He’s got a shoulder bag. Driving a black Audi A5. He’s in the car, he’s heading north.”

The Camry was already creeping out of its parking spot, took it easy going down to the corner. They peeked, then turned and followed the Audi. The driver was good, gauging traffic lights, hanging back behind other cars. “The thing about Camry headlights,” he said, “is they’re like everybody’s headlights. You get some of those German cars, they’re distinctive. That Audi will have a line of LEDs, really bright white, you see them in your rearview mirror, you don’t forget them.”

Orish called Blake: “Where are you?”

“Heading south on 440 toward 278. Hang on a minute, we’ll be coming up to the junction . . .”

“He’s getting off,” Lucas said.

Blake went back to the phone: “He’s heading west on 278. We’ve got another junction coming up, hang on . . . no, he’s staying on 278, we could be headed for Jersey.”

“That would be interesting,” Orish said. “I’m hanging on here: call me when you know where he’s going.”

They stayed with the Audi as it crossed the Goethals Bridge and then went north into the town of Elizabeth, through a few back streets—they almost lost him there, but Blake picked up his taillights after an anxious two minutes—and watched from a distance as he pulled into a parking space outside a small, dimly lit building. From two blocks back, they watched the Audi driver get out of the car, knock on the front door of the small building, and then disappear inside.

“Let’s cruise the building,” Lucas said.

They did that: the sign above the building’s door said goodwin’s lock and safe with a subscript that added, we’ll take care when you can’t.

They continued on, two streets, did a U-turn, parked at the corner. The Audi driver was inside for five minutes, then reappeared, carrying his shoulder bag in one hand. “Follow, or let him go?” Blake asked.

“Let him go.”

Two minutes later, one of the lights in the locksmith shop went out and a man stepped outside, turned to pull the door shut, and locked it. For a moment, the low interior light shone on his face, and Blake, watching with binoculars, said, “Well, I’ll be blowed.”

“What?”

“That’s Sansone,” Blake said. “He’s carrying a brown grocery bag. That gives me a little woody.”

“Not interested in your woody, but I’m interested in that bag . . .”

“You want to grab him?”

“Ah . . .” Sansone walked fifty feet down the street, got into a Mercedes SUV. “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “That’s probably the cash, but if it isn’t . . . damnit.”

He called Orish and told her about it. “I’d let it go,” she said. “There’ll be a lot more where that’s at. I don’t think these guys are picking up ten kilos at a time, but even if they were, there’s still a lot in that garage. I say we watch for exactly the right guy tomorrow, turn him, then hit Sansone for the marked money. If we do both things, he’ll have no way out.”

Lucas thought it over, then said, “Okay. We’re heading back.”

At the Hilton, the day shift feds had left and the night shift had taken over.

Lucas, Devlin, and Orish lingered, talking, watching the cameras. A half hour passed, and Orish finally said, “I’m going.”

To the senior agent on the night shift, she said, “If anything moves, anything, you get me out of bed. I’ll have my phone on the pillow next to my ear. Anything .”

After she had gone out the door, Devlin and Lucas waited another two minutes, then went down to their own rooms. “This is going to work,” Devlin said. “If we can get the right guy, we’ll have the whole operation pinned, from Lauderdale to New York.”

“Sleep,” Lucas said.

Lucas spent ten minutes talking on the phone with Weather, climbed into bed, and slept—but not well. He was tense, and even though he was asleep, the stress kept him close to the surface. Though he didn’t sleep well, he slept long enough. He’d expected a call in the night, or early in the morning, but his phone alarm went off at seven o’clock, and he rolled out, undisturbed by the FBI watchers. He called Devlin, who was also up, and they agreed to catch a fast breakfast before heading back up to the task force suite.

Devlin hadn’t slept well, either, and they ate the same way they’d slept: in a hurry. Up in the task force suite, Orish and her second, Dick Kerry, were drinking coffee and cruising the various computers. The day shift was back again, along with fresh boxes of pastry and a couple of gallons of coffee. Short stacks of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal sat next to the donuts. When Lucas and Devlin arrived, Orish nodded and said, “The going’s slow.”

There’d been no movement overnight. The day shift was back in the truck and the cameras were focused on the car wash.

“What happened to the Hat?” Devlin asked Orish.

“He owns an apartment house over on the east side, six apartments. He went in, and that’s the last we’ve seen of him. He could be in any of the apartments and we haven’t seen anybody arriving who might be carrying off the heroin. Makes a raid tough.”

“He’s probably cutting it,” Devlin said.

“Or he sleeps late,” Kerry said.

One of the computer operators said, “The hearse is moving.”

Orish and Kerry went to the windows and looked out. “There it goes,” Orish said, looking down at the hotel driveway. “Probably back to Florida for the second load.”

“We need to keep close track of it,” Lucas said. “I mean, what if the dope is still in the hearse, and they did the whole car wash thing to make sure they were clean?”

Orish and Kerry glanced at each other, and then Kerry said, “Unlikely.”

“Yeah, I know,” Lucas said. “But I’d sure hate to lose track of the dope . . .”

Orish said to the computer operator, “If that hearse slows down for more than a traffic light, I want to know about it. I want a car on it until it’s well out of town. Not where it could be seen, but where it could catch up in a minute or so, if the hearse starts to wander.”

“Got it,” the computer operator said.

They stood around, watching the arrowhead that represented the hearse crawling across Staten Island. It was approaching water when the computer operator who was monitoring the surveillance camera called, “We got another one.”

They went to the surveillance screen and watched a Cadillac SUV disappear into the garage. The plate went to a Cheri Malone; she showed no criminal record at all.

“I’d call that a possibility,” Orish said, looking at the photo on Malone’s driver’s license. She was a hard-faced fifty and held a New York real estate license. “What do you think, Lucas?”

“Don’t know. Like you said, a possibility. If she’s never been inside, the prospect might frighten her. On the other hand, she’s not likely to draw a lot of time . . . clean record, she might even claim to be doing a favor for a friend.”