Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“Not a real good-looking guy,” Devlin said. “He looks . . . seedy.”

“He’s a drug dealer,” Kerry said. “He’s not a dumb guy—he scores relatively high on the tests they did in prison. He reads well, he took online accounting courses when he was inside.”

Three more prime distributors came into the car wash, spaced almost exactly an hour apart. “It’s like they don’t want the dealers to see each other,” Orish said. “Suppose it’s some kind of security thing?”

Lucas didn’t know. None of the dealers looked better than Pruitt.

Rae called at 3:20 and said, quickly and quietly, “Our ride is here. Are we still on?”

“Yeah. We have a target, but we won’t be going after him for another two hours. Watch your phone . . .”

“Take it easy, Lucas. These guys will kill you.”

“You do the same, Rae. Easy does it.”

The lead surveillance car, watching Pruitt, called at 5:15, just as it was getting dark, to say that Pruitt was moving.

“You going?” Orish asked.

“We’re going,” Lucas said, pulling on his overcoat. “We’ll call when we’ve got him. Keep a van close, but out of sight.”

Lucas and Devlin stopped at their rooms long enough to retrieve lightweight bulletproof vests, then went down to find Dillon Koch waiting for them. They briefed him on the pickup—“We’ll spot his car and wait for him there, then move him to a van for transport”—and they headed south. The cars covering Pruitt said he’d gone to a Vietnamese restaurant called Loan’s on the southeast side of the island. Loan’s was in a strip mall and they found Pruitt’s black Mustang at the edge of a nearly full parking lot.

“What do you think?” Devlin asked.

“Lot of windows looking out at the car,” Lucas said.

“If he unloads the shit here . . . and we grab him later . . . we got nothin’,” Devlin said.

“He won’t unload a kilo here. This is only his first stop of the night. He’ll have more to spread around.”

They moved a half block away to watch the restaurant, and Pruitt showed five minutes later.

“He didn’t eat,” Lucas said. “He’s unloading the junk.”

Pruitt opened the trunk of the Mustang, did something inside, and carrying a paper sack, climbed into the driver’s seat, sat there for a full three minutes, then pulled out of the lot, heading farther south. They crept along behind, turning down side streets and then making immediate U-turns to get back behind the Mustang.

Pruitt’s next stop was in a neighborhood called Eltingville, according to Koch’s iPad, at a tiny yellow house with a tiny attic sticking up like a cheese wedge. There were three cars parked on the street near the front of the house and Pruitt parked down two houses, got out, carrying the brown paper shopping sack.

“This is it,” Lucas said to Koch. “As soon as he gets inside, put us right on the other side of his car, then watch and get ready to call the van.”

Koch dropped them and accelerated away while Lucas and Devlin walked up a driveway and waited behind a thin hedge at the corner of the house that was hiding them. A few minutes later, Pruitt, still carrying the paper sack, sauntered down the sidewalk toward the car. He used a key fob to unlock the car, and as he turned to step off the curb to go around the back of his car to the driver’s side, Lucas and Devlin bounded out of the dark and were on him.

Pruitt turned, brought up a hand; Lucas batted it aside and said, “U.S. Marshals. You’re under arrest. Open the car and get in the back.”

“Fuck you . . .”

Lucas hit him in the solar plexus, the blow blunted by Pruitt’s leather jacket, but the smaller man bent over and Lucas slapped him hard on the side of the head.

Pruitt dropped the sack he was carrying and the keys. Lucas looked around for interference, saw none, then led the stunned man to the passenger-side door, did a quick search, found no weapon. As Devlin held the front seatback forward, Lucas pushed Pruitt facedown in the tight backseat.

When he was in, Devlin crawled into the front seat, backward, looking over the seat facing Pruitt, and Lucas picked up the sack and the keys and walked around and got in the driver’s seat. Devlin said to Pruitt, “I’ve got a sap in my hand. If you fight me, I’ll break your skull. Do you understand me?”

Pruitt muttered, “Lawyer.”

Devlin: “We’ll get you one. Don’t fight us, or I’ll crack you like a fuckin’ lightbulb.”

Lucas started the car and eased it down the street. Devlin had Pruitt by the hair with one hand, and with the other, groped through Pruitt’s jacket and came up with a cell phone.

Lucas’s phone rang and Koch said, “Straight ahead three blocks. I’ll give you a left turn signal when I see you coming. Follow me, it’s about two more blocks.”

Pruitt began kicking and Devlin said, “Hey, hey!” And then whack . Pruitt stopped fighting.

“Only hurt him enough,” Lucas said, for Pruitt’s benefit. “We don’t want him paralyzed or anything. If you can help it.”

Devlin: “I hate fuckin’ dope dealers. I’m gonna hit him some more . . .”

Pruitt stayed quiet.

Lucas spotted Koch’s turn signal, flashed the headlights, and Koch led them around a corner and down two blocks, into an alley space between a pizza parlor and a dark commercial building of some kind. A van was waiting and when Lucas pulled up beside it, a side door slid back and two large FBI agents climbed out. Devlin got out of the Mustang, pulled the front seat forward, and he and the two agents yanked Pruitt out of the back of the Mustang and half-carried, half-dragged him to the van, where they cuffed him to a steel ring welded to the floor.

One of the agents said, “Call Orish. We’ll see you—or not—over in Manhattan.”

“Check him for weapons or another cell phone,” Lucas said. “We didn’t have a lot of time back there.”

“Do that.”

A minute later, the van was gone.

Devlin got back in the Mustang and Lucas pulled deeper into the alley, found the interior lights, looked in the paper bag and found a thick stack of currency, mostly twenties and fifties. “I need to take a look in the trunk before we go,” he said. “Pray for heroin.”

“I want to look, too,” Devlin said. He stepped down toward the street. “What happened to Koch?”

“Kept going,” Lucas said. “Surveillance guys don’t like to be seen.”

They popped the trunk, found a leather satchel, and opened it. Inside were a dozen plastic bags of heroin, ranging from a few ounces to perhaps a pound. They transferred the satchel to the backseat and Lucas called Orish.

“We got him. We got money and we got the heroin. A lot of heroin.”

“I talked to our pickup guys in the van and the surveillance cars. They think you got away clean.”

“Okay. Now it’s up to you guys: break him, and we’ll sweep up the whole organization tomorrow.”

Lucas talked to Virgil. “How’d the dive go?”

“Routine. Five cans. We’ve really got it down, now. I’m going deeper, though. I’ll be okay tomorrow, maybe one more day, but after that, I’ll be getting uncomfortable. We’ll see.”

“We’d all be happier if you didn’t die,” Lucas said.

“Me, too,” Virgil said.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SIX

Pruitt didn’t break.

The agents in the pickup van reported that he said nothing but the word lawyer .

He was held overnight in the isolation section of the Manhattan federal lockup. Since he’d asked for a lawyer, the feds couldn’t press him with questions, but they could talk around him.

“This poor chump thinks some of his Mafia buddies are going to bail his ass out. Not gonna happen. Sansone takes care of one person: Sansone. This genius is going to prison forever to protect him. Forever, and man, that’s a long time. With as much dope as he had on him . . . you think they’ll send him out to ADX Florence? These are the guys who shot those Coast Guardsmen and murdered the marshal . . .”