Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“That’s right,” Rae said. “He shoulda been quicker. But he was a dumbass, he wanted to enjoy himself, looking at me, seeing the fear.” She was talking street because she wasn’t yet sure she should announce herself as a marshal. If they thought she was street, they might still think they could talk their way out of their problem.

The muzzle of her Sig never moved from Cattaneo’s forehead. “Now, here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna move off to this side . . .” She tipped her head. “. . . and Matt’s gonna move up the other side where he can pull Willy out of the water.”

She added, “While he’s doing that, this gun is pointed at your head, Jack. From this distance, I could choose which eye to shoot you in. You’re the boss and you better tell your boy not to be fuckin’ around, because if he fucks around, I’ll deal with you first thing, and worry about him one second later. Then you both be dead. But you first, Jack.”

“We can talk this out,” Cattaneo said.

“Maybe we can, maybe we can’t,” Rae said. “Whatever happens, we gonna want more than the pea bag full of cash. We gonna want a couple of those cans that Willy’s bringing up.”

“Deal. Don’t point the gun at me anymore.”

“What, you think I’m stupid? I’m pointing at your left eyeball until I’m on that fuckin’ dock.”

Virgil saw them coming. Twenty minutes earlier, the wedding cake powercat had gone by, a few hundred yards toward shore, making twenty knots. Now Cattaneo’s boat was coming up, bow lights coming right at him. He flashed his light at them, got a return flash. Cattaneo cut the power and the boat glided up, barely moving when it got to him. As it came up, he saw Rae standing to one side, Lange to the other, with no sign of Regio.

Virgil swam to the boarding ladder, looked up, and said to Lange, “Gonna be heavy. Got eleven cans in the two bags.”

On the first two nights, the recoveries had sparked minor celebrations. This time, Lange said nothing except “Hand me the lines.”

Virgil: “Everything okay?”

Rae shouted: “Fuck no. These motherfuckers were gonna shoot us. Marc, he’s dead. I’m pointing a gun at Jack. If Matt gives you any trouble at all, you yell and I shoot Jack in the fuckin’ eyeball. Then I shoot Matt.”

“Fuck me,” Virgil said. He passed up the lines for the lift bags and Lange struggled to get them on board, and Cattaneo came hurrying to help, Rae shouting warnings at him. When the second bag went over the side, Virgil unbuckled the backplate harness and the tanks went on board, followed by his fins. He got his feet on the ladder, and Rae shouted, “Matt, you go way up on the end of the bow, away from Willy. Get up there.”

Lange moved to the bow and Virgil climbed the ladder. Rae was calling him “Willy.” That meant that she’d kept her fake identity, and for whatever reason, he should as well.

When Virgil was on board, Rae said to Cattaneo, “Willy gonna come over by you. Willy, get down in the cockpit, reach under that asshole’s body and you find a gun. Jack, you make one fucking move toward him and I kill your sorry ass. I got my eye on you too, Matt.”

Virgil carefully stepped into the cockpit and halfway down the ladder to the salon. The floor of the cockpit was awash with purple blood. He tugged Regio’s legs around, picked up a bloody black Beretta 92. “Got it,” he said. He leaned over the side of the boat, rinsed the blood off in the ocean, then shook the water off.

“Get up on deck,” Rae said to Virgil. “Matt, you get down in the cockpit with Jack. I know you probably got a gun, but don’t even think about it. Willy’s not a good shot, but we can’t miss and we’re really worried about all this and you twitch wrong and we kill your sorry asses.”

Lange said, “I don’t have a gun.”

Cattaneo said nothing for a moment, then, “We probably ought to get rid of Marc’s body.”

“Fuck that,” Rae said. “We get back to the dock, me’n Willy gonna put a couple-three cans under our arms and all the cash you got and run for it. What you do then, with the rest of the shit and Marc, that’s your problem. We be gone.”

Cattaneo nodded once.

“I can’t fuckin’ believe this,” Lange said. Then, to Rae, “I tried to talk them out of it.”

“Don’t give a wide shit,” Rae said. “You still an asshole. You didn’t want to shoot me, but you weren’t gonna stop them.”

The ride back was tense: Cattaneo kept trying to come up with alternatives to returning to the marina—he suggested a hard left turn and a trip to the Bahamas, dropping Regio over the side before they got there—but Virgil was silent and Rae wouldn’t take anything but a ride back to their car.

On the way, Virgil watchfully stripped off the wet suit, the Beretta close at hand, and changed into his street clothes, and checked the cut on his calf. It was deep, and bleeding, but Cattaneo had a good first-aid kit and he smeared the cut with disinfectant and covered it with a gauze bandage, wrapped it with a couple yards of medical tape.

At the marina, with Rae’s gun still pointing at Cattaneo’s eye, Cattaneo made the sharp turn into the slip, and as they pulled in, a half dozen men dressed in dark clothing materialized from the moored boats around them.

Cattaneo saw them, looked to Rae. “What the fuck is this?”

Rae: “Oh, shit. Did I forget to mention that me’n Willy are U.S. Marshals? You’re under arrest for God only knows how many drug violations, and now, with Marc dead, I believe you’re up for felony murder.”

Cattaneo goggled at them, finally managed, “What?”

Lange, depressed, in a defeated voice: “I warned you. Way back when. I warned you something wasn’t right.”

Cattaneo lifted a hand at Virgil: “This moron is a marshal?”

Rae said, “We don’t brag about it, but he sorta is, yeah.”

Virgil said to Lange: “You want to help tie up, or you gonna stand there with your dick in your hand?” And he yelled to the agents on the dock, “This guy might have a handgun on his belt.”

Four feds, three FBI and one marshal, took Cattaneo and Lange off the boat. Neither one was carrying a gun.

Virgil put an arm around Rae’s waist and squeezed her tight: “You were . . . you’re so fuckin’ amazing.”

“I was scared,” she said, squeezing back. “I was so . . .”

“Fuckin’ amazing,” Virgil repeated.

Two more agents started pulling cans of heroin out of the lift bags. The team leader, a tall thin man with a military look to his face, wearing a flat Marine Corps utility hat, said, “We’ve got a problem. Somebody tipped off Behan. We kicked the door on his condo—we saw him go in and it was him—but he wasn’t there. We’d never been inside and we found out he had two floors with an interior staircase between them. He went down one floor and probably out the fire stairs or something even trickier. We’ve got no idea when he did it, or where he went. He was there an hour ago and then gone.”

“What about his phone?” Rae asked.

“His phone is sitting on the kitchen counter on the upper floor. We were watching it, of course, and it never moved.”

“Damnit. He’s probably the number-two guy in the whole operation, after Sansone.”

“We know that . . .”

Virgil looked at the file of feds leading Cattaneo and Lange down the dock toward waiting SUVs. “Hey, tell your guys to hold off on Lange. We want to talk to him.”

“You think he might know something?” the team leader asked.

“Maybe. I don’t know if he’ll talk,” Virgil said. “Rae and I should give it a try, though.”

The team leader called on a handset down the dock and the two feds with Lange stopped walking. Virgil and Rae hurried down the dock, trailed by the team leader. A sailboat was moored in one of the slips, its rail a couple of feet above the dock, and Virgil pushed Lange toward it and said, “Sit.”