“I think Prancer’s a girl,” Lucas said.
“No fuckin’ way,” Devlin said. He went to Google on his iPhone, and a minute later said, “Damn! All of Santa’s reindeer are girls. Even Rudolph.”
* * *
An agent named Dillon Koch picked them up at the Staten Island terminal in a Chevy Equinox, a small gray SUV picked, Koch said, for its anonymity. “You look at it, and you don’t see it,” he said.
Koch himself was a small gray man, balding, bespectacled, dressed in a dark blue parka, a blue oxford cloth shirt, and black jeans, as unnoticeable as the Equinox. A member of the FBI’s Special Surveillance Group, he mostly worked street surveillance for the antiterrorism squad in Washington, now temporarily forwarded to the Sansone task force.
“Where are we going?” Lucas asked.
“The Hilton. We’ve got a big business suite,” Koch said. “Some of the agents are staying there, at the Hilton, some are next door at the Hampton Inn. They divided us up so . . . there wouldn’t be so many FBI-looking people at the same hotel.”
“How many agents are working this deal?” Devlin asked from the backseat.
“I’m not sure exactly, but I’d guess a dozen or so, here on the island, most of them SSG singles in a bunch of different rented Camrys and Civics and these Equinoxes. We’re not tailing the hearse directly, it’s all indirect, and we’re watching the tracker you guys planted on it. It’s on the island, by the way. They’re headed for the Clean N Go car wash up in Port Richmond. We’ve got a truck a half block away, parked on the street, with a good view of the entrance and exit. They’re spotting and filming people as they come and go.”
“Hope to Christ nobody is spotting and filming the truck,” Lucas said.
“Naw, it looks exactly like a Penske rental,” Koch said. “The way it’s positioned . . . you’d have to see it to understand it, I guess. They have a good view of the Clean N Go, but from the Clean N Go, you have to look between a couple of evergreen trees to see it, and then you only see the top of it. The top is where our guys are at, but you’d never know it from the outside. Looks like an ordinary moving truck.”
“Any way we can watch?” Devlin asked.
“Not directly. You can’t go to the truck,” Koch said. “But you can see what their cameras are seeing, from the task force suite.”
“How far is the hotel from the car wash?”
“Ten, twelve minutes. Three or four miles. The word from the top is, we don’t want anything to give us away. Everybody stays back, except for us surveillance guys. We’re online with the mob specialists in Washington, they’ll call out Sansone’s people when they go through the car wash . . . assuming that any of them go through the car wash, and we’re not barking up the entirely wrong tree.”
“We’re not,” Lucas said. “When will the hearse get there?”
“About now,” Koch said. He pointed out a large beige building on the street ahead. “That’s the Hilton. We’ll be there in two minutes.”
* * *
The task force suite was on the hotel’s top floor, behind double doors. A sign sat on a tripod by the door, and said, private meeting—benelux insurance corporation. Inside, three men and four women sat at two boardroom-style tables, looking at computer screens, or chatting; one of them was reading a copy of the Times. Two cartons of pastries sat on a side table, with some dry-looking Saran-wrapped sandwiches; a Yeti cooler held soft drinks and single-serving bottles of orange juice.
Another man and a woman were at a window, looking out over Staten Island. Everybody paused to look at Lucas, Devlin, and Koch; then the people at computers went back to the computers, or chatting, while the two at the window walked over to the newcomers.
The woman was tall, wearing a dark green suit that matched her eyes, and reddish hair. She stuck out a large, square hand to Lucas and said, “I’m Kate Orish, I’m running the room here.” She nodded at the man, “Dick Kerry is my second.”
Lucas introduced himself and Devlin, then asked, “Where’s the hearse?”
“Looking for surveillance. We were worried that they might be going somewhere we didn’t know about, but then we realized they were running a countersurveillance pattern. They’re still doing that, weaving through the streets, but they’re getting closer and closer to the car wash. Don’t worry, they haven’t seen us.”
“Any idea about their schedule? How soon they’ll be moving the dope?”
“The car wash has a garage on the back part of the lot. We think that’s where they’ll park the hearse. But they’ve got a body on board, and we think they’ll want to get rid of it as soon as they can. We think that the prime distributors will start coming by today. It’s likely that each of the prime guys will be cutting the heroin on his own, rather than somebody trying to cut it all at once, because they all know their own markets. Some will want to cut with fentanyl, some might cut with baking powder, some might move the pure stuff on to lower levels. We don’t know how they do it in this operation.”
“Here we go,” said one of the women looking at computers. “The hearse is making a move toward the car wash.”
Lucas looked over her shoulder, to what looked like a Google map; the map was actually following the tracker on the hearse. Lucas asked, “Where’s the car wash?”
She tapped the screen: “Here. He’s five blocks away.”
They watched as the hearse made another quick turn, and another, and then the woman said, “They’ll drive right past our truck.”
They watched the tracker, then switched to a new computer screen, with a male operator, as the hearse popped up on the camera view of the car wash. After pausing at the cross street, the hearse crossed it, pulled into the driveway at the car wash, and drove toward the garage, where an overhead door opened as it approached. As soon as the hearse was inside, the door came down.
“There are two people in the garage, besides the hearse drivers,” Orish said. “Neither one is a prime distributor. Those guys haven’t shown up yet.”
Nothing moved for a half hour, when an access door opened, and a man came out, followed by the two drivers who Lucas had seen in Hallandale. They walked across the driveway and into the main car wash building, and out of sight. “That’s our guys,” Lucas said. “They looked happy enough.”
“They’re probably looking for an envelope full of cash,” Kerry said. “I expect they’ll be filling out their income tax forms later today, reporting the payment.”
“Probably,” Devlin said. “Getting that Social Security deducted.”