“You really think that?” Devlin was surprised.
“I do. And we do things that they can’t do. Can’t have a SWAT team tracking some asshole across Kansas. The FBI plays zone defense, we’re man-to-man.”
“Let me think about that.”
The house was surprisingly quiet. Lucas and Devlin went through the front door to find the SWATs in the living room talking to a frightened, bespectacled Hispanic woman with a vacuum cleaner. She was saying, “. . . by the time they got home, they wanted every rug in the house to be clean. Really clean. I been vacuuming . . .”
The team leader asked, “They went out the back door?”
“Yes, but I seen no car go down the driveway, maybe I was in the wrong room . . .”
“When was that?”
She shrugged. “Maybe . . . one hour? Maybe less.”
The team leader said to Lucas and Devlin, “Sansone and his wife are running for it.”
* * *
Lucas grabbed Devlin by the elbow and pulled him to the door. “They had the housekeeper running around the house so the SSG guys would see her shadow on the drapes.”
“Now what?”
“We go man-to-man.” Lucas got on his cell phone, called Koch. “Where are you?”
“Out at the curb. I followed you over. What’s happening?”
“We need another ride,” Lucas said. He held up a hand to the SWAT team leader, saying, “We’re outta here,” and on the sidewalk outside the door, Devlin asked, “Where are we going?”
“When we followed the money delivery man, he went to a locksmith shop over in Elizabeth. Sansone was there to get the money. I’m hoping he went there for one last pickup . . . could be a hundred thousand dollars. Might be hard to give up, if you’re about to run off somewhere. South America, Southeast Asia.”
“I’ll buy that,” Devlin said. “We better hurry, though. He’s been out for a while.”
* * *
Lucas didn’t know exactly where the locksmith shop was, and called Orish to find out. She found the address from the SSG driver’s daily log and asked, “Do we hit the car wash?”
“Is anything happening there?”
“Yes, we had that Zamora come in a while ago. Just left.”
“Hold off, then. Call me if the car wash delivery guy leaves. He might, and soon.”
* * *
Orish called a few minutes later, said that Kerry, her second, wanted to be at the locksmith shop. “That could be awkward,” Lucas said. “Devlin and I do this a lot. If this isn’t Kerry’s kind of thing . . .”
“He’ll be fine, he used to be SWAT, and besides, he’s already on his way,” Orish said. “Where do you want to meet?”
The driver had a map up on the navigation screen, and gave Orish an intersection a couple of blocks from the locksmith’s. Off the freeway, they threaded their way through an older section of the city, tall narrow yellow- and blue-painted clapboard houses built directly on the front sidewalks, no lawns at all, the houses separated by narrow driveways. Cars were parked all along the street, and in the dark, and cold, they saw only one man and one woman, the man getting in a parked car, and then pulling away, the woman standing outside a closed store, hunched against the wind, smoking.
“Let’s troll the shop,” Lucas said. They did that, saw one dim light, but no movement in the windows.
Lucas got on the phone to Orish: “Call your SWAT team. See if there are cars in Sansone’s garage.”
“Back in a minute,” she said.
A minute later she called back and said, “It’s a three-car garage with two cars in it, and the third space is filled up with stuff—lawn mower and so on. So . . . they’re on foot.”
“I can promise you that they’re not on foot,” Lucas said. “Where’s Kerry?”
“He should be at the rendezvous,” she said, anxiety leaking into her voice. “I talked to him three or four minutes ago and he was close.”
“We’ll be there in a minute or so.”
They were, and saw a deep red RAV4 sitting on the street with its windows fogged. “There they are,” said Koch. “How do you want to do this?”
“We’ll walk down, I think,” Lucas said. “We’ll call you when . . .”
His phone buzzed and he looked at the screen. Orish. “Yeah?”
“The money man is leaving the car wash. We’re tracking him.”
“Do not let him spot you,” Lucas said. “Stay way back, all we need to know is that he’s coming this way.”
“We got it, we got it,” Orish said.
“We just pulled up behind Kerry, we’ll tell him,” Lucas said.
* * *
Lucas told Koch to stay in the car, while he and Devlin walked to the RAV4 and jammed themselves into the backseat. “Tell me what you want,” Kerry said.
Lucas relayed Orish’s call about the money man, and said, “We need to wait until he gets here. We’ll catch them with the money. I think we should walk the last block or so, quieter that way.”
“I know,” Kerry said. “We drove one time past the shop, to get an idea of the layout.”
“Good.”
Orish called and Lucas touched the speaker button on the phone. “The money’s coming your way,” she said. “Same route as last time.”
* * *
They waited. A man walking a leashed dog went past, blowing puffs of steam into the cold air. He stooped a bit to look at the Toyota, then hurried off. Not a neighborhood where you got curious about four men sitting in a compact car at night.
“Hope he doesn’t call the cops,” Kerry said.
“He might,” Devlin said. To Lucas: “We all know what we’re doing, let’s move back to the other car. It’s getting stuffy with four of us in here.”
* * *
Time drags when you’re not having fun; they took a call from the leading SSG car tracking the money man. “We’re five minutes away, maybe less.”
Lucas said to Koch, “Let’s go, stop a block out and around the corner from the shop.”
Devlin was on his phone to Kerry: “We’re moving.”