Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,102
left the cabin and climbed the stairs—Cattaneo called it a ladder—into the cockpit. A light mist, little more than a fog, was falling on the boat, dampening her face.
“How are we doing?” she asked.
“We’ll make the turn in a couple of minutes,” Cattaneo said. “Sit down and enjoy the night. There’s a poncho in the locker just below the ladder.”
She went back down the stairs and got it, pulled it on—a piece of plastic with a head hole and a hood—climbed back up the stairs and sat next to Regio. They made the turn, and off to the west, the oceanside condos had an eerie glow in the mist.
“Where are you from, Ally?” Cattaneo asked. “I mean, originally.”
“New Orleans.”
“New Orleans. Only been there a couple of times,” Cattaneo said. “Gotta tell you, I don’t understand the charm, though I had some shrimp thing that was good. My wife knew about it.”
“Well, it’s got beat up the last few years,” Rae said. “Still like it, though. They do got good food there. Good weed, good music.”
“Huh. Used to be a big Mafia town,” Regio said. “Long time ago, not much going on there now. All those ratshit gangbangers selling eight-balls and killing each other. Used to have some nice casinos, nice ladies.”
“You mean whores?” Rae asked.
“That’s ungenerous,” Cattaneo said.
“Ungenerous, but right,” Lange said. “I once spent a week down there and some of those women were flat nasty. I talked to one who had a scar that started between her tits and went all the way down to her pussy. Straight line. Some guys get off on that, I guess. Nasty.”
“If you didn’t get off on it, how do you know it went all the way down to her pussy?” Regio asked.
“She told us.”
“She told you?” Rae asked. “Just like that? ‘Yeah, I got a scar that goes from my tits all the way down to my pussy’?”
“Look. I was in a titty bar with this dufus motherfucker from Queens whose old lady would never let him go to one, so we got to New Orleans and he had to go. Anyway, she was hustling drinks and she was wearing a bikini and dufus saw this scar and asked her where it stopped.”
“And she told you?”
“Yeah. I don’t think he was the first guy who asked,” Lange said.
* * *
They rode along on that thought for a while, until Rae asked, “How much longer?”
Cattaneo looked at his watch. “Forty minutes.”
“You really gonna pay me’n Willy a million dollars?”
“If Willy keeps bringing up the goods, damn straight. There may be a lot more than that. This was only the first load coming up the coast. We might get them to dump it further north next time, but Willy’s skills are exactly what we’ve been looking for. I like the way this boy works.”
“What happened to your first diver?”
“She decided she didn’t want to do it anymore. She was from the Bahamas and she said she was going to go back and visit her mama after . . . the problem we had. But she didn’t do that. When we went to pick her up again, no diver, and no mama.”
“Jaquell was a nervous one,” Regio said. “We’re better off with Willy. And Ally.”
* * *
After some silence, Rae asked, “You the fools that shot those Coast Guard sailors last summer?”
Lange glanced at Regio, which was as good as a “Yes, he did it,” but Cattaneo said, “We really don’t talk about that kind of thing. It’s impolite. We don’t mess with the Coast Guard.”
“So it was somebody else who shot them?”
Regio was staring at her, his rattlesnake stare, but Rae had been stared at by worse people when she hadn’t had a gun taped to her ankle.
“We don’t talk about those things,” Cattaneo repeated. He smiled at her. “So, you know . . . shut the fuck up. Please?”
* * *
Virgil was floating on the surface. They spotted him a couple of hundred feet out, off to their left, and Cattaneo cut the motor and they glided on forward, slowing as they went, and then Lange threw Virgil a line. Virgil pulled himself up to the boat, which, as Cattaneo had said, was dead in the water. Virgil stayed five feet away, shed his backplate and tanks, passed them up to Regio and Lange. The lift bag line went next, up to Regio, and Virgil said, “Didn’t do so good this time, but I got five. We got a problem.”