Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

Orish nodded. “Good. We hit everything else.”

“Andres and I will go with the guys who hit his house . . .”

“Better hurry, then,” Orish said. “I’ve got a SWAT team ready to rock in a half an hour.”

“Slow them down until we get there . . .”

She looked skeptical and said, “You better hurry.”

They ran. Dillon Koch was waiting in the surveillance car and Lucas piled into the backseat while Devlin took the front passenger seat. “Gonna be close,” Koch said. “We’re probably a half hour, forty minutes away, this time of night.”

“Then go, go . . .”

Koch was an excellent driver and pushed his Chevrolet through the evening traffic like a slalom skier. Devlin said, “I love this shit.”

After a while, Lucas relaxed and said, “Yeah, it’s not bad, but it is too bad we can’t drive any faster. I could skate over there faster than this.”

“Christ, I’m doing ninety through New York traffic,” Koch said. “Okay, New Jersey traffic now. We’re lucky the state patrol isn’t all over us.”

“What’s that funny smell?” Devlin asked.

“It’s just Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth?”

“New Jersey. You wanna stop and sniff?” Koch asked.

“Keep going. Faster,” Lucas said.

They were fast for the traffic, but the traffic was tough and they wove their way through a web of freeways between Staten Island and Sansone’s place in South Orange. They were still a few miles out when Orish called and said, “Two things. First, we’re seeing lights go on and off in the house, we’re seeing shadows on the window shades. Second, SWAT is nearly ready to move. They’re still doing some recon, but it’s gonna be soon.”

“We’re five minutes out. Maybe seven minutes. Tell them to hold on . . .”

The SWAT team was staging in the parking lot at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club, five or six minutes from Sansone’s home, because the parking lot wasn’t visible from the surrounding streets. Koch had the address plugged into his nav system, and as they got closer, Devlin said, looking out the windows at the stately homes and lush lawns, “Jeez, this isn’t exactly my idea of New Jersey.”

Koch said, “Hey, not all of New Jersey is Elizabeth. There are million-dollar houses back in here. More than that, some of them.”

“How do you know that?”

“Everybody in New York knows about real estate, even when it’s in Jersey,” Koch said. And he added, “We’re there. And on time. You’re welcome.”

He pulled into a lane off the main street, which they followed down to the parking lot. Though it was dark, the freezing parking lot was half full. Several people with tennis bags in their hands were standing around gawking at the feds, and Koch said, “Indoor tennis, I guess.”

“If there isn’t, somebody’s freezing his stones off,” Devlin said. “It’s twenty degrees out there. And windy.”

With all the other vehicles in the lot, five large black SUVs dominated. A few FBI agents, bundled in olive drab uniform coats against the cold, were standing around the trucks; one was even smoking a cigarette, not often seen with FBI agents, and there was testosterone in the air, despite the presence of female agents. One of the agents walked over to their car as Lucas and Devlin got out, and asked, “Davenport? Devlin?”

“That’s us,” Lucas said.

“We’ve been waiting.”

“How long?” Devlin asked.

“Maybe . . . thirty seconds? Maybe a full minute?” The guy smiled cheerfully and said, “Good to have you with us. One of you is in the four truck, the other in the five. You got armor?”

Lucas: “No.”

“Then stay back until things are quiet,” the fed said. “Shouldn’t take more than a minute or so. We’re taking the door down. People are moving inside. We want to get right on top of them.”

Lucas got in the backseat of the four truck next to a woman who was armored and helmeted, her hands linked across her stomach, her sidearm pressing into Lucas’s hip. She nodded, looked at him, and said, “You’re the guy who shot Elias Dunn down in Georgia.”

“In a fair fight,” Lucas lied.

“In his particular case, I don’t much care about fair,” she said. “Are you going in at Sansone’s place or are you mostly a witness?”

“I always feel I can learn something useful from watching an FBI operation,” Lucas said.

The agent in the front passenger seat said, “Bullshit’s getting thick back there.”

“I do feel he lacks sincerity,” the woman said.

As she spoke, the driver said, “We’re going.”

And they went.

They must look like a train, Lucas thought, five heavy black cars running so fast and close through the suburban streets that they might have been on tracks. The neighborhood, already very nice, edged toward even better as they got to Sansone’s street, tall houses, stone and brick with a custom look about them, set back from the street.

The driver said, “We’re coming up . . .”

Lucas had been on a couple of raids with FBI SWAT teams, and they were good at it. Sansone’s house was two stories tall, built of some kind of gray rock, with a brick driveway leading to a detached garage in back. The house was lit up—light streaming from almost every window.

The house backed up to a line of trees with another rank of houses behind it—and the trees would have made it possible for Sansone to slip out undetected, if he had, because the houses in back and on the sides made it impossible for surveillance SSG agents to conceal themselves for any length of time.

Looking over the shoulders of the agents in the front seat of the truck, Lucas watched as the first three trucks rolled up the driveway and the SWAT team swarmed the front door with a ram. The door went down, interior light flashing across the front yard as the team piled into the house. Simultaneously, the agents in his own truck were out and sprinting up the driveway, covering a side door to the garage and a door that went out through a porch in the backyard.

Lucas walked across the lawn, Devlin at his elbow. Devlin said, “We oughta be doing this.”

“They’re better at it—at this kind of thing,” Lucas said.

“You really think that?” Devlin was surprised.

“I do. And we do things that they can’t do. Can’t have a SWAT team tracking some asshole across Kansas. The FBI plays zone defense, we’re man-to-man.”

“Let me think about that.”

The house was surprisingly quiet. Lucas and Devlin went through the front door to find the SWATs in the living room talking to a frightened, bespectacled Hispanic woman with a vacuum cleaner. She was saying, “. . . by the time they got home, they wanted every rug in the house to be clean. Really clean. I been vacuuming . . .”

The team leader asked, “They went out the back door?”

“Yes, but I seen no car go down the driveway, maybe I was in the wrong room . . .”

“When was that?”

She shrugged. “Maybe . . . one hour? Maybe less.”

The team leader said to Lucas and Devlin, “Sansone and his wife are running for it.”

Lucas grabbed Devlin by the elbow and pulled him to the door. “They had the housekeeper running around the house so the SSG guys would see her shadow on the drapes.”

“Now what?”

“We go man-to-man.” Lucas got on his cell phone, called Koch. “Where are you?”

“Out at the curb. I followed you over. What’s happening?”

“We need another ride,” Lucas said. He held up a hand to the SWAT team leader, saying, “We’re outta here,” and on the sidewalk outside the door, Devlin asked, “Where are we going?”

“When we followed the money delivery man, he went to a locksmith shop over in Elizabeth. Sansone was there to get the money. I’m hoping he went there for one last pickup . . . could be a hundred thousand dollars. Might be hard to give up, if you’re about to run off somewhere. South America, Southeast Asia.”