“She said he’ll be in the Chipotle’s for five minutes. It must be a meet. I bet he’s meeting with Santos, or maybe even Roger Smith. Deese, Smith, and Santos know me and Sandro. We gotta hang back. Rae and Bob, you lead. When you see him, move, and we’ll come running.”
Rae: “Time’s up. We gotta go.”
Everybody nodded, and Lucas said, “Inside and to your right,” and they went through the doors into the mall. A few seconds later, Lucas grabbed Rae’s arm, as she led the way in, and said, “Wait, wait. Jesus, the place is jammed.” He turned to Bob and Rae. “You gotta get right on top of him. We can’t have a firefight in here, everybody will panic, we’ll kill ten people.”
“Got it,” Bob said. To Rae: “We keep people between us and him until we go through the door and then we’ve gotta be fast. Real fast.”
Rae, tense, focused: “Yes. Watch his hands, Bob. Watch his hands.”
* * *
—
LUCAS AND TREMANTY held back as Bob and Rae led the way.
Tremanty: “My God, there are a lot of people. Must be a special event.”
There were forty or fifty people within a few dozen feet of them, strolling through the mall, drinking soda from plastic cups, some of them dragging kids along, dressed in T-shirts and shorts and athletic shoes and baseball caps.
“This is bad,” Lucas said. He could feel the anxiety crawling up the back of his neck. People in the mall were looking at Bob and Rae and their bulletproof vests. He saw Rae talking to a blond woman in a cowboy suit, who, shaking her head, turned and hurried off into the crowd. And then Bob lifted his phone to his face and said, “I can see inside the Chipotle’s and he’s not in there.”
“Then back off,” Lucas said. “Get all the way across to the other side of the mall, like you’re going somewhere else. That crowd doesn’t like the looks of you.”
“We’re backing off,” Bob said.
Lucas looked at the time. “Three minutes of seven. He’s got to be inside if he plans to be there right at seven. Watch for his face, you have the description. But try to stay out of sight, and don’t make another approach until after seven.”
“Hope it’s not some bullshit scam,” Rae said, her voice sounding scratchy through the phone’s speaker.
“It’d be weird, if it was. That woman knew me, knew Deese, knew we were here, and how to get ahold of me,” Lucas said. “It’s gotta be something.”
* * *
—
BOB AND RAE went to a side hall that led down to a Nordstrom’s. There were several circles of easy chairs in the hall, and they could slump down in a couple of chairs and still see into the Chipotle’s. A woman sitting in the same circle asked Bob, “What’s going on?”
“Waiting for somebody,” Rae said.
The woman looked at Bob, then back to Rae, got her shopping bag and walked away.
Lucas and Tremanty joined them a minute later, sliding down into the seats of two other chairs, so low that nothing was sticking up but their eyes beneath the bills of their caps. Lucas said, “Six fifty-nine.”
Thirty seconds passed, and then Bob muttered, “Hold it, hold it. On the left, the wall in front of the Apple Store, walking toward us, a guy with a beard.”
“That’s him,” Rae said.
“Let him get inside and then wait for a minute,” Lucas said, quietly. “Let’s see who else shows up.”
Deese went inside the Chipotle’s and instead of getting in the food line stepped behind the front window and sat on a toadstool-like chair. A few seconds later, Tremanty said, “Holy shit, here we go . . .”
They all looked the other way, toward the opposite end of the mall, and Lucas said, “Santos. See him?”
“I see his hat,” Rae said. “Never actually seen his face.”
And Bob said, “Oh no. No!”
Lucas looked back to where Bob was looking and saw Harvey and two other men jogging down the center of the mall. They looked exactly like cops and not like anybody else in the mall. Lucas said to Bob, “Go! Go!”
Bob and Rae started across the mall, weaving fast through the crowd, toward the Chipotle’s. They were halfway there when a man shouted down from the second level, “Deese! Deese! Cops! Cops! Cops!”
* * *
—
DEESE HAD TAKEN a window seat in the restaurant, next to a crowded table of jocko-looking guys eating plates of black beans and rice and doing