He went on one, pushing out of the booth, leaving the phone behind, charging down the aisle like a linebacker going after a quarterback and Foot-Long had only begun to scramble when Bob slammed into him, pinning him in the booth.
Bob snarled, “Pull that fuckin’ screwdriver on me and you’ll be pulling it out of your rectum.”
There were six customers trying to get out of other booths, but Lucas pushed through, a badge in his hand, shouting, “U.S. Marshals, U.S. Marshals!”
Foot-Long, still pinned against the back of the booth, said, “Aw, shit.”
Bob said, “Lucas, grab my phone, will you? I don’t want it to disappear.”
* * *
Foot-Long was wearing cargo shorts, from which Lucas pulled four ounces of what looked like heroin and another four ounces of what looked like meth, all neatly packed in tiny Ziploc bags, along with a short but very sharp flat-blade screwdriver. Bob bent him over the Subway table and cuffed him and they walked him across the street to the church steps.
Herrera had disappeared. “I heard you fired Dope,” Lucas said.
“Lawyer.”
“You’re on probation for domestic assault,” Bob said. “Lawyer ain’t gonna save you from getting your probation pulled.”
“Lawyer,” Foot-Long repeated.
“It’s possible we could work out something right here,” Lucas said. “We’re basically looking for information.”
“Fuck you. Lawyer.”
“Trying to figure out who might have killed those Coast Guard guys last summer. They were heroin dealers like you, shot three guys in cold blood. If you . . .”
“Lawyer.”
That’s all he said. Bob finally called in the Miami cops, and when a squad car arrived, explained that they’d gone after Tobin Cain looking for information on the Coast Guard murders, and found him holding the dope. “We’ll testify if you need us, but it’d help us out if you guys could take the arrest,” Lucas told the cops. “He’s on probation on a domestic assault charge, pled down from rape, so . . .”
“We’ll take him, though he’ll probably be back out tomorrow,” the Miami sergeant said. He took Foot-Long by the arm. “Let’s go, Footie.”
“Lawyer.”
As they watched the cops haul Foot-Long away, Bob said, “We’re hearing that ‘lawyer’ stuff all the time now. Hell, every time. The assholes are getting better trained. Keep their mouths shut, except for that one word: ‘lawyer.’”
“Which is why I prefer to shoot them,” Lucas said. “It unclutters the process.”
“Don’t let anybody hear you say that,” Bob said, looking around. “Seriously, you could get your process all cluttered up, if anyone heard you say that.”
* * *
That was the day’s only wrestling match.
With more help from Herrera and a Miami narc named Dan Colson, Lucas and Bob hit four dealers that afternoon and evening, three men and a woman. The dealers were willing to chat; they had no idea who dumped the dope. They were convincing.
They were all holding dope. The woman, who had hair the color of a winter haystack, also had a Smith & Wesson snub-nose .38 revolver in her purse and had a felony in her history. They all took cards from Lucas.
“Here’s the deal,” Lucas told them. “We want you to tell your friends, your suppliers, that we’re out here and we’re coming for them. We got get-out-of-jail cards for good information on the Coast Guard shootings. But it better be good.”
Bob took the dope and scattered it in the streets, like cinnamon sugar. The woman said she needed the gun for self-protection because she worked in a bad area, so they let her keep it after unloading the weapon. Bob put the cartridges in his pocket as they walked away, and later threw them one at a time out the window of the Pathfinder.
Then, later that night: the man with the worst sheet and the best drug connections was a louche redheaded dude named Axel Morris, a former high school teacher who dealt weed, coke, heroin, and methamphetamine out of a booth in a nude-dancer club called Bandit’s.
A Miami narc, Walker Weeks, had suggested Morris as a target during the meeting, and that evening he met Lucas and Bob in a McDonald’s parking lot on 163rd Street in northern Miami-Dade County.
Weeks looked like a wide receiver, a lanky black guy wearing a black T-shirt under a black sport coat, with black jeans and black sport shoes and a diamond in one earlobe. He had a wide smile and big white teeth. “You feds have been a little backward about going after the assholes who killed the Coasties. What changed?”
“We did,” Lucas said.
“I thought marshals mostly shuffled prisoners around,” Weeks said.
Bob: “Not all of us.”
* * *
“What’re you planning to do?” Weeks asked, as they shook hands under the Golden Arches.
“Put a dog collar on him,” Lucas said. “We know he wasn’t on the boat, he doesn’t match what we know about them. They were sorta porky. In the mug shot you gave us, Morris looks like a rake.”
“Yes, he is.”
“What’s his story?” Bob asked.
Weeks shrugged: “He was a music teacher down at Hialeah High School. Supposedly, one of his students was dealing weed to him and he figured the kid was making more than he was, so . . . One summer he went into business himself and quit teaching. Also had a taste for those high school girls, and that can get you put in prison if you’re a teacher. Handsome guy when he was young. I guess he still is handsome, for his age. Likes to have a girl on his lap.”
“How’s this gonna work?” Lucas asked.
“Axel has a personal back booth at Bandit’s,” Weeks said. “When you go inside, point your noses at the back room; you’ll see it. The bouncer inside the door will check you out and he’ll smell pork. He’ll give a look to the bartender and then push you outside and the bartender will wave off Axel. He’ll slide out the back door to his Cadillac. That’s where I’ll be, leaning against it. You don’t even have to talk to the bouncer. As soon as he gets you outside, walk around the back and that’s where we’ll be, me’n Axel.”
“Morris knows you personally?”
“Sure. We don’t bust him anymore because, what’s the point?” Weeks said. “We don’t prosecute less than twenty grams of weed and he doesn’t keep any of the other shit on himself. If a buyer wants that stuff, Axel’ll have somebody in a car close by and he won’t call the car unless he knows the buyer personally, or somebody he trusts vouches for the buyer.”