Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“I’ll buy that,” Devlin said. “We better hurry, though. He’s been out for a while.”

Lucas didn’t know exactly where the locksmith shop was, and called Orish to find out. She found the address from the SSG driver’s daily log and asked, “Do we hit the car wash?”

“Is anything happening there?”

“Yes, we had that Zamora come in a while ago. Just left.”

“Hold off, then. Call me if the car wash delivery guy leaves. He might, and soon.”

Orish called a few minutes later, said that Kerry, her second, wanted to be at the locksmith shop. “That could be awkward,” Lucas said. “Devlin and I do this a lot. If this isn’t Kerry’s kind of thing . . .”

“He’ll be fine, he used to be SWAT, and besides, he’s already on his way,” Orish said. “Where do you want to meet?”

The driver had a map up on the navigation screen, and gave Orish an intersection a couple of blocks from the locksmith’s. Off the freeway, they threaded their way through an older section of the city, tall narrow yellow- and blue-painted clapboard houses built directly on the front sidewalks, no lawns at all, the houses separated by narrow driveways. Cars were parked all along the street, and in the dark, and cold, they saw only one man and one woman, the man getting in a parked car, and then pulling away, the woman standing outside a closed store, hunched against the wind, smoking.

“Let’s troll the shop,” Lucas said. They did that, saw one dim light, but no movement in the windows.

Lucas got on the phone to Orish: “Call your SWAT team. See if there are cars in Sansone’s garage.”

“Back in a minute,” she said.

A minute later she called back and said, “It’s a three-car garage with two cars in it, and the third space is filled up with stuff—lawn mower and so on. So . . . they’re on foot.”

“I can promise you that they’re not on foot,” Lucas said. “Where’s Kerry?”

“He should be at the rendezvous,” she said, anxiety leaking into her voice. “I talked to him three or four minutes ago and he was close.”

“We’ll be there in a minute or so.”

They were, and saw a deep red RAV4 sitting on the street with its windows fogged. “There they are,” said Koch. “How do you want to do this?”

“We’ll walk down, I think,” Lucas said. “We’ll call you when . . .”

His phone buzzed and he looked at the screen. Orish. “Yeah?”

“The money man is leaving the car wash. We’re tracking him.”

“ Do not let him spot you,” Lucas said. “Stay way back, all we need to know is that he’s coming this way.”

“We got it, we got it,” Orish said.

“We just pulled up behind Kerry, we’ll tell him,” Lucas said.

Lucas told Koch to stay in the car, while he and Devlin walked to the RAV4 and jammed themselves into the backseat. “Tell me what you want,” Kerry said.

Lucas relayed Orish’s call about the money man, and said, “We need to wait until he gets here. We’ll catch them with the money. I think we should walk the last block or so, quieter that way.”

“I know,” Kerry said. “We drove one time past the shop, to get an idea of the layout.”

“Good.”

Orish called and Lucas touched the speaker button on the phone. “The money’s coming your way,” she said. “Same route as last time.”

They waited. A man walking a leashed dog went past, blowing puffs of steam into the cold air. He stooped a bit to look at the Toyota, then hurried off. Not a neighborhood where you got curious about four men sitting in a compact car at night.

“Hope he doesn’t call the cops,” Kerry said.

“He might,” Devlin said. To Lucas: “We all know what we’re doing, let’s move back to the other car. It’s getting stuffy with four of us in here.”

Time drags when you’re not having fun; they took a call from the leading SSG car tracking the money man. “We’re five minutes away, maybe less.”

Lucas said to Koch, “Let’s go, stop a block out and around the corner from the shop.”

Devlin was on his phone to Kerry: “We’re moving.”

They were less than a minute from the locksmith’s shop. When they pulled to the curb, Kerry pulled in behind. Most of the houses around them showed lights, but there was nobody on the freezing street. Lucas and Devlin walked back to Kerry’s car and got in.

The SSG tracking car called: “One minute.”

“Last time, the driver was only inside a few minutes,” Lucas said.

Devlin: “What if he’s picking up Sansone to take him to the airport?”

“Good thought. If they do that, we jam him with the SSG cars,” Lucas said. To Kerry: “They’re all on radios to Orish. Tell her that the SSG might have to jam them. If we have to do that, we want to do it here where they can’t try to outrun us. Block them on these narrow streets.”

Kerry pushed a button on his phone, and, talking fast, told Orish what they might have to do with the SSG cars and she said she’d call them. “Let me know what’s happening, Christ, I wish I was there, I should be there . . .”

“You’re fine,” Kerry said, and she went away.

The tracking car called and said, “He’s turning the corner . . .”

At the end of the next block, headlights turned the corner and crawled toward them.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Lucas said.

The lights eased to a curb, several car lengths away from the front door of the locksmith’s shop. After a moment, the driver got out with a package in his hand, and walked down to the shop. He was a heavyset man wearing a black knee-length overcoat.

“The money,” Devlin said.

The money man walked to the front door of the shop, did something—rang a doorbell?—waited for a moment, then the door opened and he stepped inside.

“We’re on,” Lucas said. To the SSG driver, he said, “Call Orish, tell her to stage the other SSG people in case they try to break out.”

The houses on the locksmith’s street each had a tree in the boulevard out front, and Lucas, Devlin, and Kerry crossed the street and hurried toward the shop, not quite running, staying in the gutter, which kept the line of trees between them and shop windows.

When they got close, Lucas said, “Run.”

They ran, Lucas leading, to the front door, guns in hand. Without hesitating, Lucas kicked it, hard as he could, and the door shuddered in its frame, but didn’t entirely give way. Lucas stepped back, kicked it again, and it gave way. He kicked it again and he heard somebody shouting inside and he turned to Kerry and shouted, “Watch the back,” then he and Devlin were inside in the dim light.

They could see a man standing in a patch of light through the door of an interior room, but then, closer, the money man rose up from behind a counter, where he’d crouched when Lucas first kicked the door, and he hurled something at Lucas’s head. Lucas was only six feet away, and he flinched but had no time to duck, and the object—he found out later it was a demonstration lock-set—hit him on the forehead and he staggered, sent to his knees.

Devlin shouted, “Hands, hands in the air or I’ll kill you!” and then he shouted at Lucas, “You okay?”

Lucas stood up and took a tentative step and said, “Hold this guy,” and he ran toward the lighted door, went through, and saw Sansone at a back door, looking at him, and Lucas lifted his pistol but Sansone was gone.

Lucas went after him, saw him running down the side of the shop toward the sidewalk. He shouted, “On the ground, on the ground!” and he heard somebody else shouting and, thirty or forty feet behind Sansone, he fired his pistol into a tree. He shouted again, “Stop, on the ground!” Sansone got to the sidewalk, looked both ways, then at Lucas, and put his hands in the air.