* * *
Lucas called Elsie M. Sweat at the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office, got her out of a meeting, and asked about an appointment for Elliot. She’d see him, she said, at 4:40. “I’ll pull his file, see what’s what. He didn’t kill anyone?”
“No, straight drug bust,” Lucas said. “You know what the deal is, he thinks he can help.”
“All right. That’s 4:40,” Sweat said. “If he’s not outside my door at 4:40, I’ll be gone at 4:41.”
“Heavy date?”
“I just need some goddamn sleep,” she said. “4:40.”
She rang off, and Lucas turned to Elliot, who said, “I heard. I’ll be there at four o’clock, outside her door. If I’m not there, I’m dead.”
* * *
Elliot walked with them out to the gate, to take the chain off. Lucas gave him his card with his cell phone number, said, “Call me,” backed the truck away from the fence, held up a hand to Elliot, and he and Bob started out through the winding streets.
Bob: “Now what?”
“If Elliot has a deal by five o’clock, he might have something for us tonight,” Lucas said. “Why don’t we go back to the hotel, check in with Weaver, see what’s happening with the hairdressers? Take a nap, get something to eat, check with Elliot later on.”
“Okay with me,” Bob said. And: “I’m worried about all the cooperation we’ve been getting. Everybody stepped right up, said, ‘Glad to help out.’ That’s not right.”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Lucas said. “The hairdressers, they might give us something, but then we’ll have to connect a lot of dots to get from guys seen on a boat days before the shooting, to proving they were the same guys who did it. Or even that it’s the same boat. Everybody else, we blackmailed them and still haven’t gotten a name or anything solid.”
“You’re not even a little spooked? By the cooperation?”
“Maybe a little,” Lucas conceded.
Bob yawned and said, “I could use a nap. Miami is a crappy place to drive around. I like it better out in the countryside and there isn’t any here.”
* * *
Elliot watched the marshals leave from behind his window blinds. When he was sure they were gone, he went into the kitchen, rummaged around in the back of a silverware drawer, and took out four burner phones. One of them had never been used to make a call—but it had an encrypted vault on it, with a list of private phone numbers.
He opened the vault, found the number he was looking for, and used another of his phones to make the call.
“Yeah?”
“Yes, sir, this is a big blond guy you met last year over on the beach,” Elliot said. “I made a delivery for you folks from some Latino friends of mine and picked up some money. You asked me about the blue ribbons in my hair.”
“I remember. You said they were there because rednecks would give you a hard time about them, which was an excuse for you to beat the shit out of them.”
“That’s me. You gave me your phone number and said to call if I ever had some news you could use,” Elliot said. “Well, I do. Maybe. Or maybe you know somebody who can use it. A couple of U.S. Marshals were here. They wanted a name from me. Somebody in the Mafia.”
“You didn’t give them one?”
“No, but they offered me a hell of a deal. I’m taking the deal. Now I need to come up with a name. You got one?”
“Let me call you back,” Jack Cattaneo said. “I gotta talk to a guy.”
* * *
Cattaneo talked to Behan one minute later. “You’re not gonna believe this. We’re not gonna have to jump though our asses to set up those guys. They set themselves up.”
“That’s nice,” Behan said. “Come over and tell me about it.”
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Lucas and Bob found Weaver sitting in the conference room with Taylor, the Coast Guard cop. Weaver looked up when Bob and Lucas arrived, and said, “We’ve got people all over South Florida, chasing down those girls . . .” He glanced at Taylor, caught something in her expression, and amended, “. . . women. And we’ve approved four dive boats to look for the drugs.”
“We got a lower response on the dive boats than we anticipated,” Taylor said. She brushed her hair back in frustration. “One of our officers in Fort Lauderdale asked some of the divers why that was. He was told the chance of recovery was too low, the cost of going after it was too high, and because the drug runners might cut off your head if they caught you doing it. The guys out there now are doing it for the adventure, more than anything else. I kinda don’t think they’ll last long, once the novelty wears off.”
“Fifty thousand dollars ain’t what it used to be,” Bob said. “Sounds like a lot, but after taxes . . .”
“I’ll tell you something else,” Taylor said. “There are a lot of guns on the boats that are out there. Perfectly legal, of course. If some Mafias show up and try to push them off they could get a boat full of bullets. I don’t know what I think about that.”
“Even with all that, we’re moving better than we were a week ago,” Weaver said, to Lucas and Bob. “I appreciate what you guys have done. I’m kinda surprised you didn’t go after these girls, these women, yourselves.”
“You’re better equipped to handle it,” Lucas said. “We’ve got another thing going.”
He told them about Magnus Elliot. “He knows something. At least, he thinks he knows something. If he does, we could get a name. We could even get it this afternoon.”
“That would be off-the-scale good,” Weaver said. “That’d be better than finding the dope.”
“Let us know what happens with the hairdressers,” Lucas said. “We’ll be up in our rooms doing more research, checking with some of the Miami narcs. And we’re waiting for Elliot to make his deal with the U.S. attorney.”
“Anything big happens, I’ll call,” Weaver said.
* * *
Out in the hall, Bob said, “I thought we were going to take naps.”
“That’s what I’m gonna do,” Lucas said. “I just wasn’t going to admit it.”
“Ah. Good work. I knew there was a reason I partnered up with you,” Bob said. “I’ll call you about 5:30. If Elliot hasn’t gotten back to us, we could go get some lobster.”