Bob: “Heroin and meth. You’re really a low-life piece of scum, Axel.”
Morris said, “Hey, I thought we were best friends now.” He flashed his charming smile back at Bob and ate another French fry. “You guys gonna give me a ride back to Bandit’s? I don’t do Uber. What? C’mon, don’t be little federal bitches about it.”
CHAPTER
SIX
At the hotel the next morning, Lucas and Bob were walking down a hallway toward the conference room, past a woman in a do-rag running a floor polisher. They were a few minutes early, and saw Weaver step out of an elevator alone, carrying a briefcase. Bob called out to him, and when they caught up, asked, “Are you doing the reward?”
Weaver nodded: “Yeah. They added up all the possibilities in Washington and figured they couldn’t lose. If we get nothing, they pay nothing, no change. If they do have to put up the fifty thousand, we’ve got a bucket of heroin to show for it and probably even more buckets. It pays for itself in PR.”
“That’s important,” Bob said, with an eye-roll.
“Maybe not for you, but it is for me,” Weaver said. “If I don’t get something, I’ll be wearing a ‘Fucked it up’ sign around my neck. I’d rather not retire for another ten years or so.” He checked them out—they were wearing jeans, knit shirts, and sport coats—and asked, “What happened to the Hawaiian shirts and shorts?”
Bob shrugged. “Got cold overnight. We’re gonna be on the street, some.”
Lucas: “Let me embarrass myself with a question. You’re sure of the guys on this task force? We won’t get any leaks?”
Weaver didn’t answer directly. Instead, he asked, “You get anything last night?”
“A couple things,” Lucas said. “If somebody leaks for any reason . . . even something bureaucratic, like trying to one-up the Marshals Service, we could have a tragedy. We’re talking about people who shot down three Coast Guardsmen in cold blood. A guy we talked to said the whole Miami narc community leaks like a sieve.”
“I’ll say a few words before we start,” Weaver said. “I’m very confident of these people, but I’ll say a few words.”
He led the way down the hall, and when he stepped into the conference room, Lucas hooked Bob’s arm and muttered, “We never heard of anyone called Magnus Elliot. Or John.”
Bob nodded: “Gotcha.”
* * *
When all the agents and the Coast Guard cop had settled into the conference room, joined by the Lauderdale cop who’d been missing the day before, Weaver looked around and said, “The marshals here have been scuffing around, talking to people. We’ll hear from them in a minute, but I want to warn everybody: if anyone talks about what is said in this room, and I find out, I’ll run you out of the FBI, I’ll run you out of the law enforcement profession, and, if I can, I’ll put you in jail. I don’t want you talking to anybody, including spouses, girlfriends, dead uncles. Nothing gets out. Is that clear?”
Everybody nodded and there was a shuffling of feet and annoyed glances passed around the room, and then Weaver said, “Good,” and he turned to one of the senior agents and asked, “What do we have on the diver?”
The task force had contacted twenty-one female professional and semipro divers in the three-county South Florida area. Sixteen of them had provided superficially convincing alibis for the day of the shootings, which still had to be checked, but none of them looked really good for the diver being sought. Given Barney Hall’s description, many of them were simply too heavy, and that included three of the five who couldn’t provide solid alibis.
“We’re not seeing a lot of really, mmm, lithe female divers,” the lead agent said.
“That’s not what you see on YouTube,” the Lauderdale cop said.
“You spend a lot of time watching women divers on YouTube?” asked Taylor, the female Coastie.
“I do it some,” the cop admitted with a grin.
“YouTube divers are a whole different reality,” another agent said. “Anyway, we’re not feeling real good about the prospects with the ones we’ve checked. One of them told us something I guess we knew, which I’m not sure helps at all—the water out there where the dope is, runs anywhere from a hundred to two hundred and fifty feet deep. You can get training to dive down to a hundred and thirty feet in two weeks, starting from nothing. Going deeper than that, especially for novice divers, gets risky, but for the kind of money we’re talking about . . .”
“How long would it take to train to go down deeper?” Lucas asked. “Go down to a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet?”
“A lot of places wouldn’t do it for liability reasons. What you’d do is get some experience. Take the training to get down to a hundred and thirty, which is routine, learn something about nitrogen narcosis and really how to manage your decompression problems, then start dipping deeper. Take technical courses. Learn to really use your dive computer and your lights and whatever kind of direction finder you have.”
“Are you a diver?” Bob asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s a decompression problem?”
The agent explained that nitrogen in air, under high pressure, as found in deeper scuba diving, is forced into the bloodstream. When the diver surfaces, the nitrogen can come out of the bloodstream as bubbles that lodge in the joints and internal organs, and cause painful, sometimes crippling, and sometimes deadly effects.
“It’s called the bends,” the diving agent said. “You don’t want the bends. You prevent them by stopping on the way back to the surface, when you’re still under pressure, to let the nitrogen work its way out of your body through the lungs . . . you exhale it as a gas.”
“I’ve heard of the bends,” Bob said. “Note to self: don’t get them.”
Lucas asked him, “How deep would you dive? On air, like the diver on the boat?”
The agent said, “A hundred and fifty feet wouldn’t bother me too much, but two hundred would be a problem. I wouldn’t do two hundred unless it was an emergency, and I sure as hell wouldn’t stay long. I wouldn’t be picking up any heroin cans.”
Another agent suggested, “Maybe . . . Trimix?” He looked at Lucas and Bob and added, “I’m a diver, too.”
“What’s Trimix?” Bob asked.
“A mixture of gases that’ll help you go deeper . . . but we checked that,” said the first diving agent. “The gas in the scuba tanks on the boat was straight air.”