Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,104

said, “Look at this, look at this.”

A Chrysler sedan rolled past the truck, paused at the cross street, and then rolled into the car wash parking lot. The overhead door on the garage went up and the Chrysler went inside. The door came down and one of the computer operators was already running the license tag.

“This is one of the prime dealers,” she said. “Jerry Poole, AKA the Hat. He wears hats.”

“What’s his file look like?” Lucas asked. He’d been sitting on a couch, reading a battered New Yorker, and came to look at the computer screen.

“He’s bad. Bad enough? Maybe,” Kate Orish said.

“If he’s only a ‘maybe,’ then let’s wait,” Lucas said. “Can we track him?”

“We can. I seriously doubt that he’ll put anything on the street tonight. He’ll want to get it cut, talk to his people . . .”

“Are we covering his phone?”

“One of them: but he has another and we don’t know what it is. He mostly talks to his wife on the iPhone.”

“Damnit. Stay on him, and let’s wait.”

“Your call,” Orish said. “For now, anyway.”

“There’s still somebody in the garage. You can see the light under the doors. There are more people on the way,” Devlin said.

* * *

Rae called. “We’re back at the apartment,” she said. “Virgil brought up another five cans. You’ll have to talk to the surveillance guys to find out where they went. But: Regio shot the Coast Guardsmen. He didn’t admit it, but he did. Cattaneo was on the boat and I think Lange was there, too.”

She told him about the short conversation on the boat, and how Cattaneo had cut it off.

“Don’t push it,” Lucas said. “We don’t want them pissed or suspicious.”

“They’re too greedy to suspect anything. We’re going back out tomorrow night, unless you say otherwise. They’re pushing Virgil.”

“Watch your phones. We’ve got people picking up the dope now. You get the red flag, you bail, okay?”

“Got it.”

After a brief silence, Lucas added, “Tomorrow could be the last dive. I think we’ll be grabbing them tomorrow, probably tomorrow night. Watch the street tomorrow, and when you see them coming to pick you up, call me. I may tell you to bail right then.”

* * *

Another car pulled into the car wash, which was now dark. The car disappeared into the garage, as the others had, and when the computer operator ran the New Jersey license tag, it came back with Salas Zamora, a street dealer with a half dozen low-level drug busts.

“He’s moving up, but he’s not the one you want,” Orish said. “We’ve been here all day. I’ll give it another hour, and then I’m going to bed. I’d suggest you do the same—if anything really good-looking comes up, the night shift will give us a call.”

“What about the guys in the truck?” Lucas asked.

“We’ve got another shift coming in for them, too. They’ll drive out a way, drop the day shift and load the night shift, and go back. While they’re making the trade, we’ve got a car that’ll park in their space to keep it open.”

“You know what I want to do?” Lucas asked. “I want to see where the garage guys go, when they close down. Could I get a surveillance car around front, somebody to give me a ride?”

Orish said, “Sure. What are you thinking?”

“Unless they’re passing out kilos of heroin on credit, those prime dealers are handing over cash when they pick up the dope. In my experience, credit is unlikely, though I don’t have that much experience with dope.”

“I think you’re right,” said one of the feds. “I used to be a cop in Boston and worked narcotics for a while. Credit was nonexistent on the street and rare higher up. They might not be collecting money from everyone, but I bet they’re collecting from most of them. From the new guys, anyway.”

As they were talking, Zamora left, and Orish called for a surveillance car to pick up Lucas. Lucas asked Devlin to hang at the task force suite, watching incoming cars, then hurried down through the lobby and caught a tan Camry. The driver, whose name was Rob Blake, said, “We’ll wait completely out of sight until they move. There are Cokes in the cooler in back.”

They drove over to the street where the surveillance truck was parked, found a dark space under a tree, well back, and pulled in.

Devlin called a while later: “We got another customer. Black Jeep.”

He called again, one minute later: “He’s not a customer,