who said his name was Richard. The other guy didn’t mention a name, but was, Eli said, “An evil-looking fuck.”
They were pushing him on it when one of the cops said, “There’s another drawer.”
He’d pulled the drawer out, which was shallower than the others, and then reached back into its cavity, where he found another handle. He pulled it, and in a second compartment were nine pistols, ranging from a piece of crap .32 to a .50 caliber Desert Eagle.
Mallow went off on Eli again and was still hassling him about selling guns illegally when a cop brought Bobby Eli into the room. Eli asked, “What the fuck?”
“That’s what the marshal and I were saying,” Mallow said to him. “What the fuck? We look in one drawer and we find guns, and we look in another and we find a buttload of jewelry stolen by the Louisiana cannibal. I never would have believed you guys would have joined up with an animal like that. I thought you were the friendly neighborhood fences. And then we’ve got OxyContin all over the goddamn place . . .”
“Wait a minute,” Tommy Eli said. “The fuckin’ cannibal?”
* * *
—
THE ELIS HAD two things relevant to the Gang of Four. The first was a scrap of lined yellow paper, ripped from a legal pad, with a license number scrawled on the back. While Tommy was paying the two guys who’d brought in the Loloma, Bobby had run around the block to watch them leave. He followed them to a Dodge Challenger with Oregon license tags. Bobby had written down the number, should it ever be needed.
Mallow called the number in to his office and was told that they’d get back to him as soon as they could.
The second was that in the negotiations for the Loloma jewelry, “Richard” had mentioned he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before because of the fuckin’ planes taking off.
The Elis had written down the date that the Loloma had come in, and Mallow called somebody at the Las Vegas sheriff’s office and asked them to call somebody at the Federal Aviation Administration to find out which way the planes had been taking off the night before they’d brought in the jewelry.
The narcs eventually took the Elis off to jail, though the brothers protested that they were victims, not perpetrators. The burglary guys were working through the office space inch by inch. They’d already solved a couple of burglaries and were hoping to solve more.
“That OxyContin was the biggest break we ever had back here,” Mallow told Lucas. “We never had a way to get inside before. I’m a happy guy. Thank you.”
“I’ll be happy if you can help me get to Deese,” Lucas said. “The rest of them are all yours.”
* * *
—
LUCAS WAS STILL at the Eli brothers’ office when Bob and Rae called about what they’d found at the medical center. “We got a subpoena on the way. We ought to know about the prescriptions and where they were filled inside the hour.”
And as they were talking about that, Mallow waved at him and then called, “Got the car. It’s a Hertz and it’s already been returned. Hertz has video, and they’ll give it to us, but they want some paper to cover their asses.”
Lucas asked to Rae, “Who’d you talk to about the subpoena?”
“An assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. You need one?”
“Yeah. We need to talk to Hertz.”
* * *
—
MALLOW DIDN’T WANT to go talk to Hertz because the Eli search was producing too much good material. Lucas talked to the assistant at the U.S. Attorney’s, stopped at the federal building and got the subpoena from a pretty young woman who said, “We know about you. You’re world-famous in the Justice Department.”
Lucas said, “Right,” but he liked pretty women and stayed to chat with her for a minute before he went on his way.
Lucas followed his iPhone GPS map to the Hertz office, which was in a car rental center south of the airport. The manager looked at the subpoena and then led the way into a back room, where he called up the video of the car rental. The renters were two men, one big and the other smaller, both wearing ball caps that obscured their faces.
At the end of the rental transaction, as the two were walking out to the car, one of the men half turned, and Lucas could see the side of his face. The manager hit a button and