The younger woman crawled to the couch, used it to push herself up. She began to cry and the older woman patted her vaguely on the back and stuck her hand down between the couch cushions behind her.
Lucas moved quickly to stand over her, his pistol next to her nose. “Is that another gun?”
She said, “It’s my Kleenex pack.” She dug deeper, and came up with a Kleenex purse pack and began excavating a tissue.
The bird was up, but not flying; it walked around the room with an occasional, questioning squawk, avoiding Lucas. Lucas asked the younger woman, “Could you put the chicken somewhere? With the dog? Stick them in a bedroom?”
She was still crying and gathered up the bird and said to the dog, “Come on, Noodles.” The dog wandered after her, and Lucas followed her down the hall and watched as she put the bird in a bedroom with the dog. He pointed her back to the couch, and Curry asked, “What’s this all about?”
“It’s about a life sentence,” Devlin said. “Without parole. And this lady? This your mother?”
Curry glanced at the old lady and said, “Mother-in-law.”
“It’s about her going for a gun, which is aggravated assault on a federal officer which is about six to eight years, minimum. And this lady”—he pointed at the younger woman—“went after a federal marshal with her fingernails. That’s assault, that’s a couple of years.”
Lucas ran his fingers through his hair, across his burning scalp, came away with blood. “As for that fuckin’ chicken, I’m gonna wring its neck . . .”
“That’s a very valuable sulphur cockatoo,” the younger woman said. She sat on the couch next to the old woman. “That’s no kind of chicken.”
“What the fuck do you want?” Curry asked.
Devlin looked at Lucas, who shrugged and said, “Sansone. We want Sansone. We’ve got a lawyer coming to explain all of that to you, your options.”
“I want an attorney,” Curry said. “I’m not answering any questions, I want a lawyer, I haven’t done anything wrong.”
Lucas: “Really? You already unload all that heroin?”
Curry opened his mouth to answer, then slammed it shut, and the younger woman sobbed, “Oh, no.”
“We’re not going to ask any questions. Not without you saying okay,” Lucas said. “What we’re going to do is, you’re going to listen to a lawyer talk. Then, you’re all four going to the Manhattan federal lockup. If you’re not interested in talking to us, we’ll hold you for seventy-two hours and then we’ll give you any lawyer you want or call in a federal public defender.”
“If I talk to you, Sansone will have me killed,” Curry said.
“Sansone will be in prison and you won’t be,” Lucas said. “You and your family will be in witness protection. Nobody in witness protection has ever been killed.”
Devlin asked Lucas, “You want to call Orish?”
* * *
Lucas called, told her what had happened, and she said, “Good. Expect company in three or four minutes. They’re close.”
Lucas passed the word to Devlin, then went into the kitchen, got a kitchen chair, brought it back to the living room and told Curry to sit. He did. Five minutes later, the doorbell rang, and Devlin let three women inside, all in dresses and high heels, all carrying tote bags with brightly colored designs.
One of them, a tall, fortyish woman with salt-and-pepper hair, gunmetal rimmed glasses, skinny like a runner, said to Lucas, “I’m Ann Wright with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. We need to speak privately for a moment.”
“In the kitchen.”
One of the other women said, “Jill and I need a place to change. We’re not doing this in heels.”
Devlin pointed down the hall toward the bedrooms, but said, “Don’t go through the door on the left. There’s a chicken in there that already attacked Davenport and drew some blood.”
“Fuckin’ cockatoo,” said the old man.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
Lucas and Ann Wright went into the kitchen and shut the door behind them. Wright took a black spiral notebook and a pen out of her bag, opened it on the kitchen counter and said, “All right. We’ll begin the search as soon as Jill and Ivy change clothes. Tell me what happened here. Was there any resistance?”
Lucas filled her in on the entry, the old lady with the gun, the younger woman with the fingernails. Wright wrote it down in what appeared to be excellent shorthand.
“But she didn’t actually get to you? With her nails?”
“No, she fell on her dachshund.”
“Dachshund,” she said, and made a note. “Then . . .”
“There was this bird . . .” Lucas stepped to the kitchen counter and ripped a paper towel off a roll hung next to the sink, wiped through his hair and showed her the spots of blood. He told her about the attack.
“There was no evidence, though, that the Currys were directing the attack?”
Lucas suspected sarcasm, but Wright showed innocent brown eyes and no sign of a smile. “Well, no, but it’s obviously a dangerous bird, a sulphurous cockatoo, as I understand it.”
She finished with, “You saw no sign of the heroin?”
“Not yet, but we haven’t looked for it.”
* * *
Lucas glanced at his watch as Wright led the way back to the front room: three o’clock, and they hadn’t started yet with Curry. Too late to call Virgil and tell him to bail.
“Too late,” he said, aloud.
Wright turned: “What?”
He shook his head, but Devlin looked at him and said, “Fuck me.”
* * *
In the living room, the four inhabitants of the house were seated in a line, like a jury. Devlin introduced them, pointing at them one at a time. “Paul Curry on the end, and then Sophia Curry, Paul’s wife, and Sophia’s mother and father, David Bruno and Carol Bruno.”
Wright, standing in front of them with a clutch of paper, peeled off a piece of it and handed it to Paul Curry. “You are under arrest. This is a search warrant for your house. We are searching for heroin and money, currency. These two women . . .” she turned and nodded at the two search specialists, “. . . are going to tear this house apart looking for the heroin and the currency. I mean that literally. They have tools with them, wrecking bars and so on. They’ll take apart furniture, pull up baseboards, clean out closets, and so on. If you wish to concede the presence of the heroin and the currency, that won’t be necessary.”