Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

Lucas jogged up behind him and farther down the sidewalk, in the light from a line of house windows, saw a woman running away from Kerry, the lights blinking off her tan coat like a strobe. Kerry was closing in and Lucas saw her turn and lift a hand. Kerry went a bit sideways and the woman fired a gun at him, missing, and then turned, took a few more steps, turned back toward Kerry, and Kerry went down as she fired again, bapbapbapbap, straight down the sidewalk.

Lucas heard Sansone scream, “Ahhh!” He went down on the sidewalk and the woman was running away again and Kerry stood, lifted his gun, and fired once and she went down.

Devlin came down the side of the house, pushing the heavyset man in front of him, looked at Sansone floundering on the sidewalk, and then down at Kerry, standing over the woman’s body, and Lucas with a gun in his hand, and asked, “What happened, what happened? Were you hit?”

Lucas: “Sansone’s wife tried to shoot Kerry and she missed and hit Sansone.”

“What?” And, “You got blood all over your face.”

From down the sidewalk, Kerry yelled, “Ambulance. Ambulance.”

Lucas was on his phone to Orish: “We’re at the locksmith shop. We need a meat wagon, maybe two. In a hurry.”

“Mother of God! Who’s hurt?”

“Sansone and his wife. His wife shot Sansone and Kerry shot her.”

“Wait a minute. Say that again?”

“Call a fuckin’ ambulance, we got people bleeding here!”

CHAPTER

THIRTY-ONE

The Elizabeth cops and two ambulances arrived in a cloud of snowflakes and the cops taped off everything in sight and the EMTs put pressure bandages on Sansone and his wife and took them away in no great hurry. A two-person crime scene crew arrived and began marking empty nine-millimeter shells on the sidewalk.

Orish pushed through a crowd of rubberneckers, followed by two other feds from the task force and two SWAT team members from the South Orange raid. Orish demanded to know what had happened and how bad the wounds were: Sansone was hit in the right leg, breaking the femur halfway between the hip and knee. Kerry had hit Sansone’s wife in the butt, in and out through her pelvic bone. Neither wound was life-threatening, which pleased Orish.

The SWAT members took charge of the money man and the $118,000 in the money man’s package. One oddity: there were three checks among the currency. Devlin: “There are junkies who can buy with checks?”

Orish: “This is New York, not some remote backwater.”

“Actually, it’s New Jersey,” Devlin said.

An FBI medic put some antiseptic on Lucas’s head cut and told him not to scratch it.

Kerry was walking up and down the block, breathing hard, hyped on adrenaline after being shot at and narrowly missed. As it happened, he was wearing an Apple Watch that alerted him to unusual heart behavior. An EMT with one of the ambulances took one minute to slap a heart monitor on him and sent the EKG to the local hospital, where a doc said he didn’t see any problem other than overexcitement, and who should he send a bill to?

Lucas was wandering around the crime scene trying not to scratch his scalp and to avoid the rubberneckers when Virgil called.

“We have a problem,” Virgil said. “We got Cattaneo and Lange, Regio’s dead, and Weaver’s team is rounding up the small fry, but it turns out that Behan probably knew we were coming . . .”

He gave Lucas a quick summary of the night so far.

“Sansone called him. He had a silent alarm . . .” Lucas explained, and told him about the arrests and the shootings in New Jersey.

“Well, we don’t have Behan, not yet,” Virgil said. “Turns out he’s a pilot and has a plane down in Miami. We’re on the way . . .”

“I can hear the siren,” Lucas said. “You get Behan and we’ll have a clean sweep. We’ll have set back New York heroin dealing by at least an hour and only cost the American taxpayers a couple of million.”

“But hey, we had a good time doing it and that’s what really counts,” Virgil said. “And we’re gonna put the Coast Guard killers away.”

“Yes, we are. Call me when you’ve got Behan,” Lucas said. “Please tell me you’re not carrying a pistol.”

“Can’t do that,” Virgil said. “I’ve even got seventeen bullets. I know because I counted them. Rae couldn’t come, because she had to talk to the bureaucrats about shooting Regio.”

“Okay, then,” Lucas said. “Take care, Virgie.”

Miami.

Rush hour was well past but traffic was still snarly as it always was in South Florida, unregimented and fast once they were on I-95 headed south. The FBI driver, whose name was George Hamm, said, “I’d like to be there when they take him, but we’re gonna be late.”

“How long does it take to get an airplane up in the air from an airport?” Virgil asked. “I’ve never been on a private flight out of a major airport.”

“Me, neither,” Hamm said. “I can’t believe you could run in the door and drive the plane out the other side in one minute. There are millions of commercial flights in and out all the time, I expect you’d have to wait at least a little while. Maybe quite a while.”

“I hope,” Virgil said. “Behan would have been the guy who set up the shootings down in Florida City.”

“I’ve been told,” Hamm said. He missed an aging Saab, with Minnesota plates, barely.

Virgil took a call from a fed at Miami International Airport. “You sure you got good information? We’ve gone through the fixed-base operators here and they never heard of Behan and they don’t recognize a photo.”

“The guy who gave it to us is looking at a murder charge and wants some consideration, so I think he’s probably telling us what he thinks is the truth,” Virgil said. “No guarantees.”

The agent said, “There’s a bunch of general aviation airports around here. We’re told to try the other ones; we’re gonna split up here . . . Where are you at?”

“Broward County on I-95, coming up to the Miami-Dade line . . .”

“All right, there’s an Opa-locka general aviation airport, you’re right on top of it. Go west on 135th Street . . . I hope we’re not screwin’ the pooch . . .”

“You and me both, brother,” Virgil said.

Virgil rang off and Hamm pointed at the navigation screen and said, “We’re two miles from 135th, that must be the airport over here, this blank spot . . . It looks big.”

Virgil got back on the phone and called Weaver in the Fort Lauderdale task force suite and told him what was happening. “You need to call somebody who can hook us up with whatever cops they’ve got at this place . . . It’s the Opa-locka airport . . . I don’t know the real name . . . Hook us up with some cops and get us to a place where small planes go outta . . .”

“Don’t they have to sign up with somebody to fly? The FAA or somebody, file a flight plan? There should be a computer . . .”

“Well, shit, I don’t know, Dale, I’m calling you because I don’t know. You need to call one of your feds, get them on this.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

Hamm: “We’re coming up to 135th. How do you want to do this?”

“I need my iPad so I can look at a map,” Virgil said. “Unfortunately, it’s in Mankato, Minnesota.”

“That’s probably too far to drive,” Hamm said. “You can make the nav map bigger by turning the dial . . . and we’re getting off.”

Virgil screwed around with the dials below the nav map until he managed to enlarge it and move it over the airport. “Okay, when we get there . . . It’s further away than that FBI guy made it sound, we’re not right on top of it, we’re a couple of miles, I think, maybe three or four . . .”