“I gotta think about it,” Lucas said. “Where are Romano and Bianchi now?”
“Still inside. They’ll be here for a while and then we’ll transport them up to the federal lockup . . . You want to talk to them?”
“I want to think first,” Lucas said. “But yeah—I want to talk to them. I gotta make a phone call first.”
* * *
Lucas walked past the spot where Bob had been lying, blood on the blacktop looking now like a routine oil spot. He continued to the motel, asked the clerk if people were barred from the second floor, and was told that they weren’t, that the fire had been smoky, but was confined to a single room.
“There’s a lot of FBI up there, and the firemen, it’ll be noisy . . .”
“That’s okay . . .”
He went up to his room, which was undisturbed except for the stink of the smoke. He lay on the bed and called Russell Forte, his boss in Washington.
Forte picked up and said, “If you’re calling before daylight, it’s gotta be really bad or really good.”
“It’s really bad,” Lucas said. “Bob got shot and killed this morning.”
“Holy shit! Holy shit! Lucas! What happened?”
Lucas told him about the stakeout—at one point, Forte said, “Hang on a minute,” and then Lucas heard him talking to a woman, and Forte came back and said, “My wife wanted to know what was going on . . .”
The woman called from the background, “I’m so sorry, Lucas.” She started to cry.
Forte said, “Keep talking.”
Lucas told him about the progress of the investigation, about the arrest of Romano, Bianchi, and the gun smugglers, and the recovery of the dope can. When he ran down, Forte said, “Okay. Listen, we’ve got a guy somewhere around Justice who does notifications and I hear he’s good at it. I’ll have him get to Rae. Didn’t Bob have a fiancée?”
“A girlfriend. I think Rae should go talk to her. That would be best.”
“We’ll check with Rae about it,” Forte said. “What are you going to do?”
“I need to figure out what happened here. Everybody’s confused. If Weaver hadn’t been hidden in that bush, I’d be dead right now. The rest of the FBI guys . . . I mean, they did good, and one of them got shot for his trouble. We don’t know what the fuck happened. I need to find that out.”
“Okay. Whatever you need,” Forte said.
“Russell—don’t let Rae come out here. She’s gonna want to come right out, but I don’t want her here. She couldn’t do any good.”
“Well, I don’t know if . . .”
“Russell—keep her out. I’m telling you, keep her out.”
* * *
Lucas stood in an icy shower for five minutes, letting the water stream through his hair and down his body, a shock that brought him back to earth. He had a hand-sized red spot below his left shoulder blade that would turn into an ugly bruise, and that was it. He toweled off, got some extra-large Band-Aids from his Dopp kit, smeared disinfectant on his knees and elbows and covered the scrapes. That done, he lay on his bed in his underwear, arm over his eyes, and tried to focus on what had happened.
Kept flashing back to the moment Bob went down. He hadn’t seen it, he was already on his stomach and turning, had seen the two shooters dancing in the street, thrashed by FBI bullets. Where the hell had they come from?
Flashed back to the bullet thumping into his back. Got up, found the vest, got a knife from his gear bag, and worked the slug out of the layers of Kevlar, rolled it around in the palm of his hand. Nine-millimeter. He put the slug on the TV stand, dropped back on the bed.
He should be dead. He was hardly injured, but he should be as dead as Bob.
Flashed again to the shooting, to the blacktop, felt the blacktop slicing through his knees and elbows . . . turned to see Bob.
Have to get away from this . . .
He got dressed, went downstairs to the lobby where the desk clerk was sitting with a state trooper. Lucas identified himself to the trooper and then asked the clerk, “The two men who were killed . . . how long were they in their rooms?”
“They checked in a little while after you did. They didn’t have reservations . . .”
“Did they have credit cards?”
“Oh, sure, we don’t allow people to check in without them. The FBI has the card numbers.”
Lucas nodded: “Thanks.”
* * *
He walked across the street to the Romano building, spotted one of the task force’s senior agents and asked about Weaver.
“He’s inside, talking to Don Romano.”
Lucas went into the building. A small lobby sat behind the front doors, and a waist-high counter was barely large enough to accommodate two customers at a time. There was no place to sit, and Lucas realized that while the building was a large one, most of the business must have been done in the back. A square-jawed, dark-haired FBI agent named Parker was standing watch behind the counter. He nodded at Lucas, tilted his head toward a door that led into the back. “Dale’s in back. We’re all screwed up about Bob and Harry.”
“How’s Harry?”
“Shot went right through his gut, side to side, clipped his pelvis, missed his spine,” Parker said. “We were all putting on our vests before we hit the door, but most of us didn’t have them on when the shooting started. Anyway, he’s a mess. They’re saying he’ll make it, but he’s hurt bad.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucas said, and he was. He was haunted by the idea that he’d somehow screwed up, though he wasn’t yet sure how he might have done that. He remembered Bob talking about how they were getting too much cooperation, it wasn’t quite right . . .
He walked around the counter and went through the door into the large back room. An eight-foot-long wooden dining table sat in the middle of a wide-open space, with a half dozen comfortable leather chairs around it. A pool-table light hung over it; farther back in the room was an actual pool table, with another pool table light. The concrete block walls were covered with metal racks, and the racks were heavily stocked with white boxes of light fixtures.
Weaver, three other FBI agents, and a Miami-Dade cop were sitting around the table, peering at an elderly man dressed in slacks and a purple velour sweatshirt. He was short, thin, balding, big-eared, big-nosed, and loose-lipped, with wild white eyebrows like old people get. He had deep frown gouges on either side of his mouth.