Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

Lucas: “If we can find somebody who knows how to get to the dope, we’ll have somebody who can take us to the killers.”

Weaver said, “Yes. Of course. The Coast Guard is doing surveillance of the area. We have cameras mounted in beachside condos that scan the area for suspicious activity—boats that may be putting down divers in the target area.”

“Are there legitimate divers going out there?” Lucas asked.

Taylor said, “We contacted all the local dive boats and told the owners that anyone diving in the search area will get inspected right down to the screws in the hull. They’ll stay away.”

Another agent—Lucas could see his plastic name card and it said, bruce, david c.—said, “Unless we want them out there. The divers.”

Yet another agent groaned and said, “Do we have to talk about that again?”

Weaver pointed his pencil at Bruce and said, “The marshals haven’t heard this yet—so talk.”

Bruce, a thin, boyish man with careful brown hair and narrow-rimmed, rectangular glasses, cleared his throat and said, “I suggested that we sponsor a kind of . . . Easter egg hunt. That instead of forbidding the dive boats from going there, we offer a substantial reward for one of the pipes. A lot of divers like the idea of treasure hunts. If we offered say, a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for one of those pipes, and outlined the area that we thought they might be in . . . I bet we’d have a dozen boats out there every day, with expert divers. At no cost to us.”

“Plus a few amateurs who’d probably die,” somebody else said.

Bruce shrugged. “It may be distasteful to some, but . . . not our problem. We could have the Coast Guard check each boat and make sure everybody was properly certified. I don’t think deaths would actually be likely.”

He looked directly at Lucas: “The other benefit, of course, is that it might stir up talk between the killers and we might hear about it. Sort of what you’re here to do.”

Weaver jumped in, speaking to Lucas and Bob: “It’s in the paper you read, but we believe each . . . dope container, each can . . . probably carries a location beeper of some kind. You dive down close with your own sonar unit, put out a specific low-power code, maybe a complicated code because it’d be all mechanical, so why not? Then, when the can’s unit picks up the code, it beeps back. You use your sonar unit to track right into the capsule. All we need is one of those cans and we’ll have the code and then we could find the rest.”

Bob asked, “What’s wrong with that idea? The Easter egg hunt? That’s the best thing I’ve heard so far . . . not counting the dead amateur diver thing.”

“It’s a weird way to operate,” the objecting agent said. “We’d have to run it through Washington, the whole fifty-grand thing . . .”

Bruce, annoyed, cut him off and said to Weaver, “Dale, we’re probably spending twenty thousand dollars a week here, counting salaries and everything else. We’re spending that to get, as you said, jack shit. Ask Washington for the money.”

“It’d be a waste of time,” said the agent who hadn’t wanted to talk about it.

After a little more snarling and chipping, Weaver sighed and said, “I already asked for the money. I could hear back today or tomorrow.”

There were a couple of groans and Bruce leaned back in his chair, looking pleased. “Good move,” he said.

The meeting went on for the full hour, the agents assigned to contact and recontact various underworld characters working between the Keys and Palm Beach, but from the desultory response, Lucas didn’t expect much to come from it.

To Lucas, Weaver looked like a man in the twilight of his career, assigned to run the task force because he had the experience to do it, but without great expectations from anyone higher up. The case was most likely to be resolved by accident, Lucas thought—a cop somewhere arrests a guy who really needs to walk away, and who has a piece of information, and who voluntarily rolls on the killers. Or, he thought, it’d be solved by him and Bob.

When the meeting broke up, Weaver said, “Is there anything I can do for you guys?”

“We’d like to talk to some of the local narcs, here and down in Miami, if that can be fixed,” Lucas said. “Guys who could put us onto some of the longer-time dealers.”

“Sure. How about this afternoon? Three o’clock?”

“Where at?”

“The best place would be at the Miami-Dade North police station,” Weaver said. “They’ve got a bunch of conference rooms down there. I’m sure we could get one. We could pull in people from both Miami-Dade and Broward. And city of Miami and Lauderdale.”

“That’d be great,” Lucas said. “Sure you can fix it?”

“Fairly sure,” Weaver said. “They’ve all been cooperative. I mean, they get federal grants.”

“Ah.”

“Want some DEA agents?”

Lucas and Bob took the elevator down to the ground floor with Kelly Taylor, the Coast Guard cop, who asked, “Did you get anything out of that?” She was one of those women who could lift one eyebrow at a time, and she did that.

Lucas said, “Not much new.” He had some sympathy for Weaver, running the task force to nowhere; he’d been on a few of those.

“They’ve given up,” Taylor said. “A couple of more weeks and Dale will write a report suggesting that we continue to monitor the possible dive site and arrests of drug-related persons, but that the task force be closed down.”

“Do you think they should do that?” Bob asked.

“I think we should try David Bruce’s idea of the reward. If nobody finds a dope can, we’re no worse off than we are now. At least we’ve got an iron in the fire.” Then she shrugged: “Right now, we have nothing. Unless you two are law enforcement geniuses, that won’t improve. I’m ready to go home.”

Bob smiled at her: “But we are law enforcement geniuses. At least I am. Lucas is more like my assistant, he carries my gun and so on, does my PR. We’ll break it in a week or two.”

“I’m holding my breath,” Taylor said. “Waiting to see you two at work. I know Dale is impressed, and I mean, I could learn so much.”

Lucas said to Bob, “A cynic. She doesn’t believe you.”

Bob shook his head. “It makes me sad to think about that.”

“I have to confess,” Taylor said to Bob, reaching out to touch his arm. “I loved that part where you dropped your Glock on the conference table. That was the most electrifying thing that happened in that room in two months. Well, aside from your shorts.”

CHAPTER

FOUR

The Nissan’s air conditioning produced a breeze that was cold and damp, almost wet, so they drove across Fort Lauderdale with the windows down and their elbows out, Queen doing “We Are the Champions” on the satellite radio.

“This fuckin’ place is like a monument to the concrete block,” Bob said, watching Marina Mile stream by.

“And mobile homes,” Lucas said. “Ever been here before?”

“I went on a cruise, once, with an old girlfriend, but I never saw the city. Never been to Miami.”

“It’s concrete blocks from top to bottom, Palm Beach to Key West,” Lucas said. “Same on the West Coast.”

“Plus the mobile homes,” Bob said.

“Yeah. They’re like the architectonic spice to illuminate the stucco,” Lucas said.

“I wish I’d said that.”

They followed Bob’s telephone navigation app across Fort Lauderdale and over the Intracoastal Waterway to A1A where they immediately got jammed up in traffic; they grabbed a lucky parking space a half mile from the show, and walked along A1A to the show’s entrance.