“You have to push,” Weaver said. “These girls could break this for us.”
Weaver reported that the $50,000 heroin-can reward notices had gone up in every dive shop in South Florida, from Palm Beach to Key West. Taylor, the Coast Guard cop, said they’d gotten some hits, divers who wanted to go out and look for the dope.
Lucas: “What if somebody decides that three million in heroin is worth more than a fifty-thousand-dollar reward?”
Taylor said, “Everybody’s on notice that we’ll be right there with them, that we’ll be boarding them a couple of times a day, that nobody will leave the search area without being boarded. If they try to run with heroin, they go to prison.”
Lucas nodded. “Sounds good.”
The plan to put an organized crime expert in the Angelus Hotel was also on schedule, Weaver said. “It turns out that one of our DC organized crime guys is dating a model. A fairly well-known model. She’s been on the cover of that American Express Departures magazine, and some other ones, too. They approached her and she said she’d be happy to spend a week at the Angelus as long as she didn’t have to do anything dangerous. She said she’s got a lot of stuff she can do. Her agent is setting up contacts with fashion people on Miami Beach, so they’ll look legit. They’ll be in there tonight.”
Weaver asked Lucas what he and Bob would be doing, and Lucas said, “We’ve got another guy to talk to in Miami. Don’t know what will come out of it, but he’s bigger than the dealers we’ve been hitting so far. We’ve heard that he might actually be able to tell us something and that he could really use our . . . affection. He has a couple years of probation hanging over his head.”
“If anyone busts him, he’s going back to Atlanta. Not exactly a garden spot,” Bob added.
* * *
With Weaver’s blessing, they headed south, again on I-95, the only way they knew. On the way, Bob took a call from Rae Givens, his partner, who was still with her cancer-stricken mother in Houston. They talked for a few minutes about her mother’s condition and about the Miami investigation.
“We’re kicking ass,” Bob told her. “We got the only break the feds have gotten so far. We fed it to them. We could get another one in the next couple of hours.”
He listened for a moment, glanced at Lucas and then said, “Don’t worry about me. I’m taking care . . . I won’t. It’s just fine.”
When he rang off, Lucas said, “She’s still pissed at me.”
“Naw. She’s . . . worried about you.”
“Sounded more like she was worried about you and what I might get you into.”
Bob wiggled in his seat, then said, “Well . . . you know, what we do is a lot cleaner than what you do. The people we chase have already been in court, one way or another. They’re guilty, or they’re on the run because they know they’re screwed and they’re headed for prison. We spot them, plan everything out, and then grab them. With you . . .”
“Yeah?”
Bob was looking out the window at all the passing concrete: “With you . . . it’s always kinda fuzzy, more free-form. Sometimes we’re not sure who did what, or why. Sometimes things get done for political reasons. Not court reasons.”
“You didn’t have to come along,” Lucas said.
“No, no, I find it interesting. Rae does, too. Every once in a while, though, you go full Schwarzenegger. We’ve only been hanging out for what, three years? I’ve been shot and you’ve been shot and your FBI girlfriend Jane Chase got shot . . .”
Lucas half-smiled: “Jane has signaled that there might be a change in our relationship.”
“Because she got shot?”
“No, because I shot the 1919 guy. She wanted a show trial with all the fixin’s.”
“I’d prefer that myself, to be honest,” Bob said. “But, if that’s not the way it is, it’s still intense. I like intense.”
* * *
They followed the concrete channel to 103rd Street in Miami, turned west to 27th Avenue, then back north to 131st Street and then east, and Lucas said, “What are we doing? We’re driving in circles.”
“The streets get all tangled up,” Bob said, looking at the map on his phone. “This was the quickest way. Turn here.”
They turned south again and after a few hundred yards, again back west on Country Club Lane. The houses were small, flat, concrete block boxes generally separated from the street with chain-link or steel-bar fences. The narrow, blacktopped streets were potholed and cracked, all set in a flat landscape of palms and slick-leaved tropical-looking trees, along with a few cedars and rubber trees. Bob said, “Banana tree! Bananas grow upside down. See?”
“I knew that,” Lucas said.
“Bullshit you knew that . . . Magnus is around the corner. There’s a canal . . . It’s the green one.”
Elliot’s house looked across the narrow street and a canal toward the back of an apartment complex. They cruised the house, which was a sour chemical green with a tar roof, the yard surrounded by a chest-high steel-bar fence; each of the bars had a sharp arrow point at the top. The yard, like the neighboring yards, had ankle-deep grass, unmown for weeks. The driveway was gated, and a single pedestrian gate would open toward the street, if it hadn’t been chained shut.
“A little fort,” Lucas said, as they drove past. “You’re wearing Nikes, right?”
“Yeah. I can’t vault that fence, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’d wind up getting one of those arrowheads right in the nuts.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking. What I’m thinking is that there’s no curb, so I drive right up to the fence, nose in, we climb on the hood of the truck and jump down. Don’t want to dent the hood, though, so Nikes are good.”
“Let me loosen up my gun and put on a marshal vest,” Bob said. “If he’s a big-time dealer he might not be happy about unexpected drop-ins.”
They stopped at the end of the street and Bob stepped around behind the truck, popped the back lid, dug in his gear bag and got out two blue bulletproof vests that said police in tall white letters and under that, in smaller letters, u.s. marshal. Lucas pulled off his sport coat, took his ID out of the jacket pocket and put it in the hip pocket of his jeans.
They got the vests on, turned the truck, rolled back up the street and Lucas swerved out toward the canal and then back toward Elliot’s gate. He stopped with the grille two inches from the gate, the back of the truck blocking six feet of the street. He and Bob popped their doors, stood on the front bumper, climbed on the hood one at a time, and dropped down over the fence.