Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

“Right, right, right,” I say.

When all I want to say is shit, shit, shit .

Chapter 64

“BEEN WORKING this for a month,” Sosh says from the front seat. Rodriguez is driving. Mat’s no fool. People who’ve been in a car driven by Lanny Soscia usually volunteer to take the wheel for their own safety. Sosh considers stop signs, traffic lanes, and red lights purely optional, and he has the attention span of a toddler. There are crash-test dummies that have been involved in fewer collisions.

This is Pred turf, the southwest side, Little Village. Los Depredadores Latinos, the Latin Predators, got their name from a press conference Mayor Daley—Richie, not his old man—once held in Pilsen, talking about street gangs preying on our youth. They apparently decided to take it as a compliment.

We drive along 26th Street, where we won’t stand out among the heavy traffic, passing colorful murals on brick walls, panaderías and Mexican grocery stores, pushcart vendors selling fruity ice cream or corn dipped in butter.

“I could eat,” Sosh says. That’s a headline right there—Sosh is hungry.

Carla, seated behind Sosh and next to me, elbows me and gestures out the window. “That laundry,” she says, pointing to a store with a large green awning bearing the word lavandería . “My grandfather used to own that.”

“No shit?” I say. Other than having met her son, Samuel, and knowing that she’s not married, I don’t know a lot about Carla. Does having a grandfather in Little Village mean she’s Mexican? My money says she’s biracial, but Sosh thinks she’s PR, a hundred percent. Neither of us has the stones to ask her. “You grow up here?”

“I moved around. Spent some time by Marshall Square after my parents got divorced.”

Rodriguez says something to her in Spanish, so quickly I couldn’t make it out, and she returns the volley even more quickly, fluently. They laugh.

So that probably confirms the Latina part. Most cops know some Spanish—I do—but she speaks it like she’s been speaking it her whole life.

“Hey, no habloing languages I don’t understand,” says Sosh.

“That rules out English,” I say. I turn to Carla. “Bilingual?” Hoping it might give me some further insight, that she might elaborate.

“Tri, actually,” she says. “French, too.”

French? That muddies things. “I can go as far as un, deux, trois, ” I say.

“Okay, here we go.” Rodriguez hangs a right, and we’re in a residential neighborhood now, a large park to our left, brick tenements to our right. Rodriguez takes a left around the other side of the park. “It’s on the next corner,” he says. “The yellow brick.”

He’s not gonna pass it. Too noticeable. But Mat pauses the ride for a bit at the stop sign so we can scope it out. Nondescript, just a brick three-flat, an alley behind it. On the front stoop, there’s a teenager in long shorts and a T-shirt, wearing an orange bandanna, looking at his phone.

“That’s lookout number one,” says Sosh. “Unarmed.”

“Where’s number two?” I ask. We drive away.

“Rooftop,” says Carla. I look at her. We haven’t worked this case. We’re just assisting on the execution of the search warrant.

“Don’t look so surprised, Harney. I cut my teeth in Narcotics.”

That much I did know about Carla—several years in Narcotics, some undercover.

“She’s right,” says Rodriguez. “Rooftop. He’s not up there now, because the shipment isn’t here. It will be tonight. We don’t have aerial, but we think he has a twelve-gauge or a Tec-9 up there. We’ve seen both.”

“He probably has both,” says Sosh.

“What about rear entry?” Carla asks.

“None,” Sosh says. “Well, not really. There’s one back door you can only open from the inside. Steel-reinforced, looks like. Our intel says it’s got an alarm on it. But anyway, the Preds parallel park a truck right up against it. That truck only moves when the shipments come. They take the H in through the back door, park the truck back against it, and set the alarm.”

“We can’t cut the alarm, either,” Rodriguez adds. “Not without it tripping a detector. We might as well call them up and tell them we’re coming.”

“Roof entry?” I ask.

“Nope. Only way to the roof is the rear fire escape.”

“Only way in this place,” says Sosh, “is the front door.”

“That sounds like fun,” I say. “You have diversion?”

“We got two diversions,” says Sosh. “We’ve been running a UC past the place every evening for three weeks. She’s from the Fifteenth. She walks some little dog right after eight thirty and stops and flirts. You gotta see this filly in her halter top and tight little shorts.”

Carla rolls her eyes. She gets it, but still.

“And the other diversion?” I ask, to change the subject.

“Tonight,” says Rodriguez, “they’ll be shooting off fireworks in the park at eight thirty. Some spring-fling party or something.”

Which explains why we’re doing this tonight.

So Carla and I will take out the rooftop lookout while the undercover subdues the kid on the porch. Once the lookouts are out of the picture, the patrols can roll in with the wagon, and Sosh and Rodriguez will lead twenty cops up to the third floor to meet our friendly neighborhood heroin traffickers.

Mat’s right about fireworks. We don’t get this just right, there’s going to be plenty of them.

Chapter 65

THE PATROL officers are in full go mode—helmets and vests, handguns and rifles. Sosh gives them a pep talk outside the wagon, then shuts them inside.

“It’s humid as shit out here,” Carla mumbles, adjusting her vest, checking her piece.

“You good to go on this?” I say to her under my breath, away from the others, only for her ears. My mother had chemo before she died, and it sucked the life out of her. But she was almost twice Carla’s age. Carla looks basically okay, if heavy eyes and a drawn expression count as okay. It’s how she looks all the time.

She makes a face. “We’re not going to do this every day, are we? Just assume I’m fine unless I tell you I’m not. Don’t make me sorry I told you.”

“Right, got it. I won’t bring it up again.”

She holsters her weapon, and we jump in our car.

Eight twenty-five. The sun has fallen, and it’s near blackness where Carla and I stand in the alley down from the house’s rear parking lot. I see the UC pass by, walking the dog she’s been walking every night. Even from a distance, I see what Sosh means. Long legs, denim shorts so small they look like underwear, a halter top. That lookout on the front porch is gonna have plenty to occupy his attention.

So is the guy on the roof, if we have any luck here.

“UC’s in place,” Sosh buzzes in my ear. “The rooftop is checking her out.”

“We’re going,” I say.

“Green means we’re good. Orange means we’re fucked.”

Orange being the Predators’ color.

Carla and I move down the alley, staying close to the wall, out of view of the rooftop for as long as possible. Carla has jumped in front of me. We didn’t really talk about an order. Maybe she feels like she has something to prove.

We stop at the clearing into the parking area behind the building. Peek out. Sure enough, a blue truck is parked sideways across the rear door. Up at the roof level, there’s nobody looking down. We just have to get to the fire escape unseen.

I hear the man’s voice, up on the roof, calling down, not catching every word but hearing chiquita, which tells me he’s shouting to our undercover, flirting with her.