Lucas told the cop who Weaver was, then called him, leaving his phone on the speaker function, and Weaver said, “Yes. We have a warrant. Under the circumstances, you can go in right now. Knock the door down.”
“You got it,” the cop said.
* * *
Both the front and back doors had steel cores. The doorframes were made of steel bolted to the concrete block walls. After a few attacks on the two doors, the cops knocked out a window, and the least senior cop crawled into the house and unlocked a door from the inside.
On a fast walk-through, they found nothing except a couple of large cockroaches sitting on the kitchen table and then scuttling out of sight. The house was silent: the television was off, so was the air conditioner and all the lights, until the cops turned them on. There were two clean dishes in the sink.
“There was an alarm, but it was turned off,” the SWAT leader said.
“Because the guys who took him out of here didn’t know how to set it,” Parker said.
The bedroom closets were full of clothes, as was a bedroom bureau. The bathroom showed a razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, and shaving cream on a counter next to a sink, and a drawer, partly opened, revealed a half-empty Dopp kit inside. The bureau had a jewelry tray that contained a couple of rings, a diamond earring, two gold bracelets, and a gold Rolex. Two suitcases and a duffel bag were piled atop one another, in a hallway closet, under a line of jackets.
After walking through, Lucas stopped at the table next to the front door and pulled open the drawer. The .45 was there, reassembled and loaded. Parker looked at it, and at Lucas, and asked, “What do you think?”
“What I thought in the car. He’s gone. If he’d walked away on his own, he would have taken some of his stuff. I don’t know how much that Rolex is worth, but I’d guess between ten and twenty thousand, maybe more.”
“So you think he’s . . .”
“Dead.”
The SWAT squad leader came into the living room from the back. He’d taken off his helmet to reveal a shaved head, and from the shine off his scalp, one that was mostly bald before he got it shaved, Lucas thought.
“We might have found a fake wall,” he said. Lucas trailed him back to a small bedroom, now full of exercise equipment—a stationary bike in front of a wall-mounted TV, a weight rack with weights. One of the SWAT cops pointed at a bookcase. “I work construction on weekends. That bookcase ain’t right. From the side, it’s fourteen inches deep, but he’s got nothing in it but CDs and Blu-Rays and they barely fit.”
“How does it move?”
“Can’t see anything. Maybe it just pulls straight out, but I can’t get it to move. There might be a stopper or something.”
“What would happen if you hit it with your ram?” Lucas asked.
“It’s just veneer over chipboard,” the construction cop said. “It’d fall apart.”
“Then hit it.”
One of the cops went back outside to get the ram and the construction cop began unloading the shelves of the CDs and Blu-Rays. He was on his knees unloading the bottom shelf and he said, “Up . . . here it is.”
The team leaders asked, “What?”
The construction cop lay on the floor, looking up at the bottom of the next-to-the-bottom shelf. “Some kind of pin . . . We need a screwdriver. A big one.”
“Saw a screwdriver in the utility room, there’s some tools,” another cop said.
Lucas walked around a corner to the utility room, saw a nylon tool bag, found a half dozen screwdrivers, shouted back, “Phillips or flat-blade?”
The construction cop yelled back, “Phillips.”
Lucas carried the screwdriver back as a cop was arriving with the ram. Lucas handed the screwdriver to the cop on the floor, who did something under the shelf, grunting, and then said, “It’s coming out.”
He threw a wooden peg out, then said, “There’s a hook behind it . . . Okay. It oughta move.”
The team leader and another cop got on opposite sides of the bookcase and pulled it loose. There was a six-inch deep space behind it, with a half dozen shelves. Three of the shelves were empty; the two top shelves held a half dozen plastic bags filled with a pale brownish heroin, and two bags of cocaine. The third one down held bundles of cash.
“You’re right, he’s dead,” the lead cop said. “He sure as shit wouldn’t leave all that cash behind, not to speak of all the dope.”
“Dead, or spending the night with his girlfriend,” another cop said. “Or running for his life.”
Lucas nodded: “We need to put out an urgent bulletin on him. If he’s not dead yet, he’s going to be. Though I think he’s probably dead. Goddamnit, I need that guy.”
* * *
Lucas sat in the truck, phoned Weaver and told him what they’d found. “There must be two kilos of heroin in there, maybe a half kilo of coke. That could mean he was working with our Coast Guard killers the whole time. Bob and I talked to a guy who said Elliot was close to the top distribution level here, that he’s got quite a few dealers working for him who are selling on a semi-wholesale level. Or maybe this was Elliot’s inventory and it all comes from the Mexican side, like he said it did.”
“Okay. Well, we’ll get that bulletin out on him, make it a big deal. We’ll find him if he’s still walking around South Florida.”
The situation at Romano’s shop was slowly being cleaned up and Romano and Bianchi had been shipped to the Miami federal lockup on gun charges. Bob’s body was at the medical examiner’s and the wounded federal agent was still in surgery at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
“Why don’t you head back to Lauderdale? We’ll bring your car and stuff from the motel . . . we got car keys from Bob,” Weaver said. “The shooting team still wants to talk with you about what you saw.”
* * *
Parker came back to the truck, got in the driver’s seat and said, “Headed for Lauderdale. Think I ought to use the lights and siren?”
“Lights, no siren,” Lucas said. “Goddamn thing is too loud.”
They drove out to I-95, in silence, reflections from the lightbar ticking off the hood. After they turned up the expressway, Parker said, “I have a comment, but I don’t want to annoy you after . . . what happened.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve never been on a raid like that one at Elliot’s. Finding all that heroin. That was cool. I liked it.”
“You’ve got the stress gene,” Lucas said. “Are you out of Washington, or local?”