“All day? When are you planning to take him?” Kerry asked.
“Tonight, after dark. We really don’t want people looking at us. People of the drug-buying variety. They can smell a cop at a hundred yards.”
“Let me talk with the AIC,” Orish repeated.
“Fine. In the meantime, let’s get the guy who brought us in here yesterday—Koch? I want to go down and take a look at Pruitt’s place, and the neighborhood.”
* * *
Orish went off somewhere to consult with the Manhattan agent in charge while Lucas and Devlin took the elevator down to the lobby, where they met Dillon Koch. “I have the address,” Koch said. “It’s a neighborhood called Westerleigh. Wester-lay or Wester-lee, I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it right. It’s eight or ten minutes from here.”
The cold hit them when they left the building—something in the low twenties, Lucas thought, and windy. Little mean snaps of snow, more pellet than flake, stung their faces.
Devlin kept his head down into the wind, and Lucas said, “Not something you get much of in Louisiana, huh? The cold.”
“Not like this. But this isn’t terrible.”
Lucas disagreed: “It’s on the edge of terrible and would be even in Minnesota.”
* * *
Westerleigh turned out to be an older neighborhood, mostly prewar and World War II–era two-story houses, painted in pastel shades, and remodeled and remodeled over again. They sat on heavily patched blacktopped streets with mature trees and on-street parking everywhere. Narrow driveways separated the houses, reaching back to single-car garages. Lawns were short and narrow with spotty, dirty snow. The neighborhood reminded Lucas of any number of neighborhoods in the Twin Cities, not far from his own.
Pruitt lived in an old gray house with red shutters and a heavily scarred maple tree on the front boulevard; as with most houses on the street, a tight driveway led to a small garage. Pruitt’s Mustang sat in the driveway next to the house.
“Gonna be hard to keep too close an eye on this place,” Lucas said, as they cruised the house. “Narrow street, if anyone sits in a car too long, the neighbors will spot them.”
Koch pointed at a Chevy van a block up the street. “That’s ours. One guy, he’s now in the back.”
The sign on the side of the van said dave’s remodeling and repair, with a New York phone number beneath it. “Only problem is that it’s a Manhattan number,” Koch said. “That might raise an eyebrow, if anybody really paid attention.”
“Somebody watching the back?” Lucas asked.
“Yes. Same deal. Parked van.”
Satisfied with the watch, and the neighborhood, they went back to the Hilton and up to the task force suite, where Orish told him, “It’s your bust. We’ll do the backup. Nobody’s come or gone from the place except Pruitt. He’s there now.”
“We saw his car,” Lucas said, as he peeled off his overcoat. “Do we know any more about him?”
“No. Nobody really pays any attention to him. He has a day job with—guess who?”
“Sansone?”
“There you go—he’s supposedly a baker at one of the donut shops. That’s probably a cover. He’s still on parole, he reports in to his PO once a month, clean reports so far. He originally got a job as a house cleaner after he got out of Greene Correctional Facility.”
There were several online photos, both from Pruitt’s arrest records and prison days, and from his driver’s licenses. He was a thin man of medium height, going bald, dark questioning eyes, large nose, and large ears.
“Not a real good-looking guy,” Devlin said. “He looks . . . seedy.”
“He’s a drug dealer,” Kerry said. “He’s not a dumb guy—he scores relatively high on the tests they did in prison. He reads well, he took online accounting courses when he was inside.”
* * *
Three more prime distributors came into the car wash, spaced almost exactly an hour apart. “It’s like they don’t want the dealers to see each other,” Orish said. “Suppose it’s some kind of security thing?”
Lucas didn’t know. None of the dealers looked better than Pruitt.
* * *
Rae called at 3:20 and said, quickly and quietly, “Our ride is here. Are we still on?”
“Yeah. We have a target, but we won’t be going after him for another two hours. Watch your phone . . .”
“Take it easy, Lucas. These guys will kill you.”
“You do the same, Rae. Easy does it.”
* * *
The lead surveillance car, watching Pruitt, called at 5:15, just as it was getting dark, to say that Pruitt was moving.
“You going?” Orish asked.
“We’re going,” Lucas said, pulling on his overcoat. “We’ll call when we’ve got him. Keep a van close, but out of sight.”
Lucas and Devlin stopped at their rooms long enough to retrieve lightweight bulletproof vests, then went down to find Dillon Koch waiting for them. They briefed him on the pickup—“We’ll spot his car and wait for him there, then move him to a van for transport”—and they headed south. The cars covering Pruitt said he’d gone to a Vietnamese restaurant called Loan’s on the southeast side of the island. Loan’s was in a strip mall and they found Pruitt’s black Mustang at the edge of a nearly full parking lot.
“What do you think?” Devlin asked.
“Lot of windows looking out at the car,” Lucas said.
“If he unloads the shit here . . . and we grab him later . . . we got nothin’,” Devlin said.
“He won’t unload a kilo here. This is only his first stop of the night. He’ll have more to spread around.”
* * *
They moved a half block away to watch the restaurant, and Pruitt showed five minutes later.
“He didn’t eat,” Lucas said. “He’s unloading the junk.”
Pruitt opened the trunk of the Mustang, did something inside, and carrying a paper sack, climbed into the driver’s seat, sat there for a full three minutes, then pulled out of the lot, heading farther south. They crept along behind, turning down side streets and then making immediate U-turns to get back behind the Mustang.
Pruitt’s next stop was in a neighborhood called Eltingville, according to Koch’s iPad, at a tiny yellow house with a tiny attic sticking up like a cheese wedge. There were three cars parked on the street near the front of the house and Pruitt parked down two houses, got out, carrying the brown paper shopping sack.