Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

The show was a cross between a state fair, the Daytona 500, and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, done on the water, with boats, some of them the size of skyscrapers laid on their sides. “They say there are four billion bucks’ worth of yachts,” Bob said, gawking. “I believe that.”

The line at the entrance was a block long, but they pushed past reluctant ticket-takers with their marshal IDs. A hundred yards inside the gates, they were stopped by cops in military-style uniforms wearing wraparound sunglasses and bulletproof vests and carrying semiautomatic black rifles. Their pistols must be printing on their guayabera shirts, Lucas thought. The lead cop said, his gun barrel slightly raised toward them, “You two . . .”

“Federal marshals . . .” Bob said, before the cop finished talking.

“You have IDs?”

“Of course. We’re working with the joint services task force on the Coast Guard murders,” Lucas said. “I’m going to get my ID out.”

He dug his ID out of his pants pocket and Bob did the same. The cops looked them over and then the lead cop asked, in a tone just short of curt: “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for the Coast Guardsman who shot one of the guys on the killers’ boat,” Lucas said. “He’s working out here. You got a problem with that?”

“I got a problem with people with guns,” the cop said.

Lucas nodded. “So do I. Especially rifles that might be fired in a crowd. You sure as shit will kill some innocent people if you fire those things.”

“That’s not the way we see it,” one of the other cops said.

“I understand that,” Lucas said. “But I’ll tell you what. You shoot some innocent citizen with that rifle and I’ll testify against you at a murder trial.”

The cop opened his mouth to reply, but Bob jumped in: “Have a nice day,” he said.

As he and Lucas walked away, Bob muttered, “Always good to have the local cops on your side.”

“Whoever sent them out here with rifles is a fuckin’ moron,” Lucas said. “If they’re really worried about a terror attack, they ought to put twenty patrol cops in plain clothes and have them walking every dock.” He waved at the megayachts. “Maybe put a couple snipers up on top of those ocean liners with spotters.”

“Maybe they’ve done that,” Bob said.

“Then why do they have guys down here in the crowd with the rifles? C’mon, Bob . . .”

“When you’re right, you’re right,” Bob said. Two nearly naked young women, wearing thongs, tops the size of bottle caps, sunglasses, and skates, rolled out of an exhibition hall ahead of them and they stopped talking for a moment. When they started again, Bob said, “Talk about flawless assets.”

“Assets,” Lucas agreed.

Another young woman walked by, wearing what appeared to be a knee-length white T-shirt imprinted with it’s not gonna lick itself.

“I got nothin’,” Bob said.

Though it was still early, the sun was pounding down like a laser and they were beginning to sweat; the whole crowd smelled of SPF 50 banana-scented sunscreen and boiled hot dogs. A man in a captain’s hat and a Fountaine Pajot catamaran T-shirt pointed them to a line of exhibition halls where, after wandering around for a while, they found Barney Hall, working in an equipment booth that sold a brand of line-cutters that attached to boat props. He and another salesman were standing next to a video screen that showed a rope being chopped to pieces by the whirling cutter, rather than entangling the prop itself. When Lucas and Bob identified themselves, Barney nodded and said, “There’s a food court out back, we could talk there.”

Hall led the way past a hundred boat-equipment displays and out the back of the building to a line of food booths where they bought Cokes and found a table where they could sit in the shade. Bob was already sweating heavily: “This place is as humid as New Orleans,” he said.

“Record heat today,” Hall said, as they sat down. “Been hot since April.” Hall was dressed like Lucas and Bob: loose shirt, shorts, athletic shoes. He said, “I’ve been interviewed a whole bunch of times . . .”

“We read them all,” Lucas said. “A lot of the questions were about what you did, rather than what the killers did when they were jumping off the boat.”

Hall leaned forward, put his elbows on the tabletop. “That part, I mean, what they did, only lasted maybe a minute. I keep seeing it over and over in my mind . . . I’m told I don’t have PTSD, but that traumatic events tend to stick with you, and I guess this was sorta traumatic. The Coast Guard made me talk to a shrink about it, and the doc said that sometimes you even make up some parts to . . . embellish . . . your real memories. I don’t think that’s happened with me. It’s all like a movie that I see sometimes before I go to sleep, and it hasn’t changed.”

“What I’d like you to do is rerun the dream for us, if you can,” Lucas said. “Close your eyes, see it. I don’t care about the parts before you closed in on the Mako. I only care about the people you saw on the boat—and maybe a little about the boat handling.”

“You guys know anything about boats?” Hall asked.

Bob said, “Bass boat,” and Lucas added, “I’ve got a twenty-one-foot aluminum Lund with a Yamaha 250 on the back, strictly for fishing, in Wisconsin. I don’t know anything about saltwater boats.”

“Okay . . . well, big boats and small boats are roughly the same, up to a point. If you can run two hundred and fifty horses, you could run the Mako with a couple hours on the water. You got a little more inertia to deal with . . . So anyway, it was tearing down the Intracoastal Waterway, which is right over there, on the other side of the boat basin.”

He pointed toward one of the superyachts, hulking over the equipment sales building. “I was chasing after him in my own boat, which is slower than the Mako. This was after . . . well, I knew the guys in the Coast Guard boat were dead. So I’m chasing him . . .”

“Go ahead,” Lucas said.

Hall leaned back and closed his eyes. “He was flyin’. Then all of a sudden, he cut right. There’s part of Port Everglades over there, a terminal. There was a white SUV already parked there. Maybe a Toyota. The Mako cuts over there . . .”

He paused in the story, his eyelids fluttering, then he continued:

“Four guys got off the bow of the boat. No, three guys, at first. One guy ran ahead to get the car and back it up, two guys were carrying these things that looked like black buckets, but the Coast Guard thinks they were PVC pipes, which is probably right. They looked like buckets to me. They threw them in the back of the SUV. The two guys made three trips, so maybe six buckets.”

He sat back and opened his eyes. “Hell, I don’t know how many buckets there were, but I think six is a good guess. With the buckets the size I was seeing, I’m told they could get ten kilograms of heroin in each, and ten kilos would be worth maybe three hundred thousand dollars, wholesale. If there were six buckets, that’s almost two million bucks.”

“Let’s go back to the chase,” Lucas said. “You see four guys. The fourth guy was spraying gasoline around?”

“Yeah. The guy I shot.” Hall closed his eyes again. “The Mako went into the pier . . . let me see, the fourth guy tied it off, real quick, like he was a boat guy. Then he got the gas . . . He had a five-gallon can, but not the kind you’d have on a boat. It was plastic, it was more the kind you’d use for a lawn tractor or something. They recovered it from the boat when they brought it off the bottom. It was melted, but they could see what it was. I told the FBI guys I think they had it there for exactly how they used it—in case they had to burn the boat. That boat was probably worth a couple hundred thousand and they burned it without thinking twice.”