They were less than a minute from the locksmith’s shop. When they pulled to the curb, Kerry pulled in behind. Most of the houses around them showed lights, but there was nobody on the freezing street. Lucas and Devlin walked back to Kerry’s car and got in.
The SSG tracking car called: “One minute.”
“Last time, the driver was only inside a few minutes,” Lucas said.
Devlin: “What if he’s picking up Sansone to take him to the airport?”
“Good thought. If they do that, we jam him with the SSG cars,” Lucas said. To Kerry: “They’re all on radios to Orish. Tell her that the SSG might have to jam them. If we have to do that, we want to do it here where they can’t try to outrun us. Block them on these narrow streets.”
Kerry pushed a button on his phone, and, talking fast, told Orish what they might have to do with the SSG cars and she said she’d call them. “Let me know what’s happening, Christ, I wish I was there, I should be there . . .”
“You’re fine,” Kerry said, and she went away.
The tracking car called and said, “He’s turning the corner . . .”
At the end of the next block, headlights turned the corner and crawled toward them.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Lucas said.
The lights eased to a curb, several car lengths away from the front door of the locksmith’s shop. After a moment, the driver got out with a package in his hand, and walked down to the shop. He was a heavyset man wearing a black knee-length overcoat.
“The money,” Devlin said.
The money man walked to the front door of the shop, did something—rang a doorbell?—waited for a moment, then the door opened and he stepped inside.
“We’re on,” Lucas said. To the SSG driver, he said, “Call Orish, tell her to stage the other SSG people in case they try to break out.”
* * *
The houses on the locksmith’s street each had a tree in the boulevard out front, and Lucas, Devlin, and Kerry crossed the street and hurried toward the shop, not quite running, staying in the gutter, which kept the line of trees between them and shop windows.
When they got close, Lucas said, “Run.”
They ran, Lucas leading, to the front door, guns in hand. Without hesitating, Lucas kicked it, hard as he could, and the door shuddered in its frame, but didn’t entirely give way. Lucas stepped back, kicked it again, and it gave way. He kicked it again and he heard somebody shouting inside and he turned to Kerry and shouted, “Watch the back,” then he and Devlin were inside in the dim light.
They could see a man standing in a patch of light through the door of an interior room, but then, closer, the money man rose up from behind a counter, where he’d crouched when Lucas first kicked the door, and he hurled something at Lucas’s head. Lucas was only six feet away, and he flinched but had no time to duck, and the object—he found out later it was a demonstration lock-set—hit him on the forehead and he staggered, sent to his knees.
Devlin shouted, “Hands, hands in the air or I’ll kill you!” and then he shouted at Lucas, “You okay?”
Lucas stood up and took a tentative step and said, “Hold this guy,” and he ran toward the lighted door, went through, and saw Sansone at a back door, looking at him, and Lucas lifted his pistol but Sansone was gone.
Lucas went after him, saw him running down the side of the shop toward the sidewalk. He shouted, “On the ground, on the ground!” and he heard somebody else shouting and, thirty or forty feet behind Sansone, he fired his pistol into a tree. He shouted again, “Stop, on the ground!” Sansone got to the sidewalk, looked both ways, then at Lucas, and put his hands in the air.
Lucas jogged up behind him and farther down the sidewalk, in the light from a line of house windows, saw a woman running away from Kerry, the lights blinking off her tan coat like a strobe. Kerry was closing in and Lucas saw her turn and lift a hand. Kerry went a bit sideways and the woman fired a gun at him, missing, and then turned, took a few more steps, turned back toward Kerry, and Kerry went down as she fired again, bapbapbapbap, straight down the sidewalk.
Lucas heard Sansone scream, “Ahhh!” He went down on the sidewalk and the woman was running away again and Kerry stood, lifted his gun, and fired once and she went down.
Devlin came down the side of the house, pushing the heavyset man in front of him, looked at Sansone floundering on the sidewalk, and then down at Kerry, standing over the woman’s body, and Lucas with a gun in his hand, and asked, “What happened, what happened? Were you hit?”
Lucas: “Sansone’s wife tried to shoot Kerry and she missed and hit Sansone.”
“What?” And, “You got blood all over your face.”
From down the sidewalk, Kerry yelled, “Ambulance. Ambulance.”
Lucas was on his phone to Orish: “We’re at the locksmith shop. We need a meat wagon, maybe two. In a hurry.”
“Mother of God! Who’s hurt?”
“Sansone and his wife. His wife shot Sansone and Kerry shot her.”
“Wait a minute. Say that again?”
“Call a fuckin’ ambulance, we got people bleeding here!”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
The Elizabeth cops and two ambulances arrived in a cloud of snowflakes and the cops taped off everything in sight and the EMTs put pressure bandages on Sansone and his wife and took them away in no great hurry. A two-person crime scene crew arrived and began marking empty nine-millimeter shells on the sidewalk.
Orish pushed through a crowd of rubberneckers, followed by two other feds from the task force and two SWAT team members from the South Orange raid. Orish demanded to know what had happened and how bad the wounds were: Sansone was hit in the right leg, breaking the femur halfway between the hip and knee. Kerry had hit Sansone’s wife in the butt, in and out through her pelvic bone. Neither wound was life-threatening, which pleased Orish.
The SWAT members took charge of the money man and the $118,000 in the money man’s package. One oddity: there were three checks among the currency. Devlin: “There are junkies who can buy with checks?”
Orish: “This is New York, not some remote backwater.”
“Actually, it’s New Jersey,” Devlin said.
An FBI medic put some antiseptic on Lucas’s head cut and told him not to scratch it.
Kerry was walking up and down the block, breathing hard, hyped on adrenaline after being shot at and narrowly missed. As it happened, he was wearing an Apple Watch that alerted him to unusual heart behavior. An EMT with one of the ambulances took one minute to slap a heart monitor on him and sent the EKG to the local hospital, where a doc said he didn’t see any problem other than overexcitement, and who should he send a bill to?