“Doesn’t even feel like much,” she said. “Not gonna be a fast-draw, though.”
“Don’t bump into anything and make a clank sound,” Virgil said.
* * *
Lange and Regio showed up early, wearing head-to-toe nylon sailing pants and shirts, and helped carry the gear down to a different vehicle, a Suburban. After they’d loaded the scuba equipment, Virgil climbed into the backseat and said, “New wheels, huh? I’d like to get me one of these. Travel all over the country, you could sleep in the back, you know, at the Walmarts, never have to pay a motel bill . . .”
“You bring us enough of that stuff up, you won’t have to worry about paying for motels,” Regio said over his shoulder.
Rae: “That’s what I’m talking about. Hot showers, big TV, king-sized bed.”
Lange: “Mini-bar . . .”
“Oh, yeah.”
* * *
Lucas and Devlin watched them loading the Suburban, and Devlin said, “Man, I hope they don’t do anything tricky. Wonder why they changed cars? Christ, without the tracker . . . They could spot us if they start dragging us through the back streets.”
“Might be something simple—all that scuba gear plus four people. Maybe the Lexus is a little tight.”
Lucas got on the handset to tell the feds about the change in vehicles. The feds had tracked Cattaneo first to his condo, and then, a half hour later, to his sailboat at an Intracoastal marina south of Hollywood. He was getting ready to move it, they said. Lucas had called them in, to help track Regio and Lange. “We’ll try to get you in front of them until we figure out where they’re going,” he told them. “If they’re headed toward the boat, we’ll back way off.”
“Got it.”
The Suburban’s turn signal came on and the truck made a U-turn and headed toward Lucas and Devlin. They both ducked down and a minute later the Suburban went past, and after another hundred yards, made a left turn.
“Shit, they’re going to drag us through the neighborhoods,” Devlin said. Lucas, at the wheel, got the Pathfinder going and followed, but instead of making the left turn, looked down the street and saw the Suburban make the next right, to run parallel to Lucas and Devlin, but one street over.
“That’s what they’re doing,” Lucas said. He got on the handset. “They’re looking for a tail, gotta be careful, guys. They’re one street north of Hollywood, headed east, get out in front if you can.”
They hardly saw the Suburban over the next fifteen minutes, but it gradually became clear that they were getting closer and closer to Cattaneo’s sailboat. “Gotta be the boat,” the feds called. “Usual spots?”
“Usual spots, let’s go, don’t try to track them anymore. We gotta get there first.”
* * *
After dragging down narrow streets and through yellow lights, Virgil said, “I think we’re clean, guys.”
Regio grunted and said, “Looks like.”
He nevertheless continued a back-street route down to the Intracoastal, where they parked a couple of hundred feet from Cattaneo’s chunky white sailboat. Virgil carried the tanks and Regio and Lange carried the two gear bags down to the boat.
“Right on time,” Cattaneo said. He checked Virgil: “You ready, Willy?”
“That’s why I’m here,” Virgil said. “We got things to talk about. I need GPS numbers, coordinates, I need to know what tricky thing I’ve got to do to find the cans.”
“We got time to talk,” Cattaneo said. “Get everything down below and out of sight. I want to be the only one visible as we’re going out through the cut.”
“Got two hours before it gets dark,” Virgil said.
“Going to take a while to get there at four knots,” Cattaneo said. “We’ve got this nailed down. Don’t worry about it.”
Rae to Virgil: “You know when I said I was getting puckered up? I’ll tell you what, cracker: right now, I couldn’t poop poppy seeds.”
* * *
From across the Intracoastal, Lucas, Devlin, and the FBI team watched the boat from a condo parking lot. “They’re doing it,” Devlin said. “It’s all going down.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Lange stayed in the cockpit with Cattaneo as they cast off, then eased the boat into the Intracoastal and motored north toward the Port Everglades cut into the Atlantic. The boat rode slowly and smoothly with a southerly breeze not strong enough to create even a light chop on the waterway.
Virgil could talk to Cattaneo through the open hatchway and as they passed under a bridge, asked, “When do we get there?”
“Around six-thirty,” he said. “We’ve got to go through one drawbridge and then I’ll give the wheel to Matt and we’ll talk.”
“We’re going to motor the whole way?”
“Yes.”
Rae was poking around the interior of the cabin and said, “This is really neat. I’ve never been on, like, a yacht. It’s like an RV, but way better.”
“Until you get in rough water,” Regio said. “It’s quiet today, so that’s not a problem. But if you start getting queasy . . . If you have to hurl, do it in the sink, or over the side.”
* * *
They had to wait a few minutes at a drawbridge, then Cattaneo steered it through, gave the wheel to Lange, and dropped down into the cabin. The cabin was fifteen feet long, with two parallel benches, each six feet long, facing each other and covered with beige Naugahyde cushions. The deck was wood strip, the walls were white fiberglass.
“Everybody sit down,” Cattaneo said. “Now, Willy. The cans will be in a straight line on the bottom, the line’s only about a half mile long. They were dropped out of a chute over the side of a moving reefer ship that had stopped at Port Everglades and was heading north to Norfolk.”
Virgil: “They stopped? Wasn’t that a big risk?”
“No. The ship was carrying bananas inside containers in a temperature-controlled hold. Our stuff was in a little access hatch under the floor of the hold, between the floor and the hull. There was a stack of Jersey-bound containers sitting on top of it. Too much for the inspectors to move without it being a major pain in the ass. Once the Florida containers were pulled out, and the ship was underway again, the containers were moved and our stuff pulled out from below and loaded into the chute.”