Virgil carefully stepped into the cockpit and halfway down the ladder to the salon. The floor of the cockpit was awash with purple blood. He tugged Regio’s legs around, picked up a bloody black Beretta 92. “Got it,” he said. He leaned over the side of the boat, rinsed the blood off in the ocean, then shook the water off.
“Get up on deck,” Rae said to Virgil. “Matt, you get down in the cockpit with Jack. I know you probably got a gun, but don’t even think about it. Willy’s not a good shot, but we can’t miss and we’re really worried about all this and you twitch wrong and we kill your sorry asses.”
Lange said, “I don’t have a gun.”
Cattaneo said nothing for a moment, then, “We probably ought to get rid of Marc’s body.”
“Fuck that,” Rae said. “We get back to the dock, me’n Willy gonna put a couple-three cans under our arms and all the cash you got and run for it. What you do then, with the rest of the shit and Marc, that’s your problem. We be gone.”
Cattaneo nodded once.
“I can’t fuckin’ believe this,” Lange said. Then, to Rae, “I tried to talk them out of it.”
“Don’t give a wide shit,” Rae said. “You still an asshole. You didn’t want to shoot me, but you weren’t gonna stop them.”
The ride back was tense: Cattaneo kept trying to come up with alternatives to returning to the marina—he suggested a hard left turn and a trip to the Bahamas, dropping Regio over the side before they got there—but Virgil was silent and Rae wouldn’t take anything but a ride back to their car.
On the way, Virgil watchfully stripped off the wet suit, the Beretta close at hand, and changed into his street clothes, and checked the cut on his calf. It was deep, and bleeding, but Cattaneo had a good first-aid kit and he smeared the cut with disinfectant and covered it with a gauze bandage, wrapped it with a couple yards of medical tape.
At the marina, with Rae’s gun still pointing at Cattaneo’s eye, Cattaneo made the sharp turn into the slip, and as they pulled in, a half dozen men dressed in dark clothing materialized from the moored boats around them.
Cattaneo saw them, looked to Rae. “What the fuck is this?”
Rae: “Oh, shit. Did I forget to mention that me’n Willy are U.S. Marshals? You’re under arrest for God only knows how many drug violations, and now, with Marc dead, I believe you’re up for felony murder.”
Cattaneo goggled at them, finally managed, “What?”
Lange, depressed, in a defeated voice: “I warned you. Way back when. I warned you something wasn’t right.”
Cattaneo lifted a hand at Virgil: “This moron is a marshal?”
Rae said, “We don’t brag about it, but he sorta is, yeah.”
Virgil said to Lange: “You want to help tie up, or you gonna stand there with your dick in your hand?” And he yelled to the agents on the dock, “This guy might have a handgun on his belt.”
Four feds, three FBI and one marshal, took Cattaneo and Lange off the boat. Neither one was carrying a gun.
Virgil put an arm around Rae’s waist and squeezed her tight: “You were . . . you’re so fuckin’ amazing.”
“I was scared,” she said, squeezing back. “I was so . . .”
“Fuckin’ amazing,” Virgil repeated.
Two more agents started pulling cans of heroin out of the lift bags. The team leader, a tall thin man with a military look to his face, wearing a flat Marine Corps utility hat, said, “We’ve got a problem. Somebody tipped off Behan. We kicked the door on his condo—we saw him go in and it was him—but he wasn’t there. We’d never been inside and we found out he had two floors with an interior staircase between them. He went down one floor and probably out the fire stairs or something even trickier. We’ve got no idea when he did it, or where he went. He was there an hour ago and then gone.”
“What about his phone?” Rae asked.
“His phone is sitting on the kitchen counter on the upper floor. We were watching it, of course, and it never moved.”
“Damnit. He’s probably the number-two guy in the whole operation, after Sansone.”
“We know that . . .”
* * *
Virgil looked at the file of feds leading Cattaneo and Lange down the dock toward waiting SUVs. “Hey, tell your guys to hold off on Lange. We want to talk to him.”
“You think he might know something?” the team leader asked.
“Maybe. I don’t know if he’ll talk,” Virgil said. “Rae and I should give it a try, though.”
The team leader called on a handset down the dock and the two feds with Lange stopped walking. Virgil and Rae hurried down the dock, trailed by the team leader. A sailboat was moored in one of the slips, its rail a couple of feet above the dock, and Virgil pushed Lange toward it and said, “Sit.”
“I want a lawyer,” Lange said.
Rae said, “You said you didn’t want to shoot me.”
Lange shrugged.
“You’re down for felony murder, ’cause Regio’s dead. And for me, you were gonna let it happen,” Rae said. “The only way you’re not going to spend the rest of your life in prison is you talk to us.”
Lange shrugged again, but he didn’t say no.
“Behan took off. He managed to avoid our surveillance people,” Virgil said. “If you have any idea where he might be, now is the time to say something. If you have something to say about that, and it pans out, you might actually walk around free, someday. If he’s gone . . . well, if he’s gone, you’re gone, too.”
Lange bowed his head, shuffled his feet on the concrete dock, then looked up and said, “You really sucked us in.”
Virgil: “You have something to say?”
“I want more witnesses to this deal. Not just you and Ally and this hat guy.”
The team leader called over a couple more of his men to listen and witness; Lange wanted all their names, written down.
When that was done, Virgil said, “So . . .”
“Behan’s a pilot. He’s got a plane . . .”
The team leader said, “God . . . bless me.”
“They were gonna use it to fly the shit up north, but every time you land a plane up there, I guess, coming out of Florida, they got a dog to sniff you . . . so, they didn’t do that, but they thought about it, because he’s a good pilot. His plane could fly to anywhere. It’s one of those two-engine jobs, six seats in the back.”