Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“There was no evidence, though, that the Currys were directing the attack?”

Lucas suspected sarcasm, but Wright showed innocent brown eyes and no sign of a smile. “Well, no, but it’s obviously a dangerous bird, a sulphurous cockatoo, as I understand it.”

She finished with, “You saw no sign of the heroin?”

“Not yet, but we haven’t looked for it.”

Lucas glanced at his watch as Wright led the way back to the front room: three o’clock, and they hadn’t started yet with Curry. Too late to call Virgil and tell him to bail.

“Too late,” he said, aloud.

Wright turned: “What?”

He shook his head, but Devlin looked at him and said, “Fuck me.”

In the living room, the four inhabitants of the house were seated in a line, like a jury. Devlin introduced them, pointing at them one at a time. “Paul Curry on the end, and then Sophia Curry, Paul’s wife, and Sophia’s mother and father, David Bruno and Carol Bruno.”

Wright, standing in front of them with a clutch of paper, peeled off a piece of it and handed it to Paul Curry. “You are under arrest. This is a search warrant for your house. We are searching for heroin and money, currency. These two women . . .” she turned and nodded at the two search specialists, “. . . are going to tear this house apart looking for the heroin and the currency. I mean that literally. They have tools with them, wrecking bars and so on. They’ll take apart furniture, pull up baseboards, clean out closets, and so on. If you wish to concede the presence of the heroin and the currency, that won’t be necessary.”

Paul Curry held up a finger and said, “I . . .”

“Let me finish,” Wright interrupted. “You’ve been under surveillance for several days. We have high-resolution movies of you picking up the heroin at the Clean N Go car wash and making contact with your dealers on the street. You are a criminal, Mr. Curry, and your past history makes you liable for a life sentence in prison, if we find as much as an ounce of heroin in this house. And you will get life in prison, without the possibility of parole, I can promise that.”

She continued: “But we’re prepared to offer you a deal. In return for your testimony against Douglas Sansone and for surrendering the heroin and the currency, we will place you and your family in the U.S. Marshals Service’s witness protection program. No one who ever entered in the program, who has followed the rules of the program, has ever been traced and killed by his former colleagues. You will be safe.”

“Not in New York. You wouldn’t let us live in New York,” Sophia Curry blurted.

“I don’t know the details of the Marshals Service’s protection program, but I will tell you, there are some nice places outside of New York,” Wright said. “I actually come from one of them—Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston is far, far better than any prison in the federal prison system.”

Paul Curry asked, “How soon do we have to decide?”

“Right away, today, this afternoon,” Wright said. “There are several parts of this investigation already in motion. The South Florida gang is being rounded up as we speak. We have already arrested Kent Pruitt and he is currently being protected in our Manhattan lockup. Despite Mr. Pruitt’s arrest, we’d also like your cooperation. With more than one of the top dealers testifying against Sansone, we will cinch his conviction.”

Lucas smiled; she lied well.

“I want to talk this over with a lawyer,” Curry said. “See what he says about the deal.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Wright said. “You’ll notice that I’m not asking you any questions, because you already asked the marshals for a lawyer and so I’m not permitted to question you. And I won’t. I’m telling you things and making an offer. If you decline my offer, the four of you will be taken to the federal lockup, held for seventy-two hours, beginning with your arrest, and then allowed to speak to a lawyer. The deal, however, will have been withdrawn—and I don’t care how good your lawyer is, Mr. Curry, you will be going to life in prison. Because we have got you.”

“Jesus Christ,” the old man blurted.

“You can talk about it, and you can ask me questions,” Wright said. “Don’t take too long. This is a complicated process and we don’t have a lot of time.”

The Currys and Brunos sat and looked at each other, and then David Bruno said to his son-in-law, “Paul, take the deal. You been talking about retiring to Florida. Tell them you’ll take the deal if they’ll send you somewhere warm.”

“What about the kids?” Sophia Curry asked. “What if they go after the kids?”

David Bruno waved her off: “That’s against the rules, honey. Nobody goes after nobody’s kids. That’d be a nightmare all the way around. That’d set off fights that would never end. And they won’t come after me’n Carol, because that’s another nightmare.”

“Sansone’s not like the old guys, Dad,” Paul Curry said. “He doesn’t respect anything.”

“Sansone goes to prison, with most of his outfit, you’ll be an old, old man by the time he gets out, if he ever does,” Bruno said. “I’ll be dead. He won’t have an outfit anymore, he’ll be an old has-been. He’s what, forty-something?” He tilted his head up to Wright. “If all this comes true, you get Sansone on dope . . .”

“Not just dope,” Wright said. “We’re going after him for numerous murders in Florida. If he doesn’t get the death penalty, he’ll be gone forever.”

“There, that’s it,” Bruno said to Paul Curry. He looked around. “You sell this place—you don’t let these assholes wreck it—and you buy a place wherever they hide you, somewhere warm . . . take it easy.”

“We’d be poor,” Sophia said.

“There’s some money floating around the family,” Bruno said. “You won’t be poor.”

All of them, including Wright, Devlin, and Lucas, looked at the old man. Paul Curry’s forehead wrinkled and he said, “What? You’ve got money?”

Bruno used the end of his cane to wave at Wright and the others: “These are cops. We’ll talk about it some other time.”

Curry stared at him, then buried his face in his hands, stayed that way, then rubbed his face, looked up and said, “Deal.”

Lucas: “Where’s the dope?”

“What’s left of it is on the shelf in the kitchen closet. The money’s there, too.”

One of the search specialists said, “We got it.” They’d pulled on blue vinyl gloves and now they headed into the kitchen, trailed by Wright.

A half hour passed as the searchers uncovered and documented the heroin and the cash. Wright, still in her dress and heels, went out to the SUV and returned with a box containing a small copy machine, on which one of the searchers and Devlin began copying the currency. The currency was wrapped with rubber bands, most hundred-dollar bills with some fifties and twenties, in five-thousand-dollar stacks. Wright asked Curry, “How much do you get for a kilo? You personally?”

“I get forty, more or less. Doug sells it to me for thirty. So I get to keep ten. By the time it gets to the small guys, they’re getting a hundred and fifty a gram, so that’s . . . what? A hundred and fifty K for a kilo on the street? But it’s gone through three more people by then.”

“Nice little profit all around,” Devlin said.

“Nobody’s getting rich except maybe Doug. We got a lot of expenses and we don’t get loads like these every day. I’m lucky to clear two hundred K in a year of work. In New York, that’s nothing,” Curry said. He looked at Devlin and the search specialist at work with the copy machine. “Why are they xeroxing all that cash? Why are they doing it here?”