Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,107
through the rap sheet and Lucas pointed at the bottom of the computer screen: “Look at this. He was a witness in a rape trial. Actually, if I’m reading this right, it looks like he was a victim of a rapist, while he was in prison. He will not want to go back. If we hit him for anything heavy, like possession of a kilo of heroin, he’ll be going back forever.”
“Attention, people,” Orish said to the group, clapping her hands twice. “We’ve got a live one. We need everything we can get on this Pruitt. We need to move three cars and box him, don’t lose him. He could be our man.”
* * *
The surveillance teams tracked Pruitt to a house that was owned by a Kills Realty, which apparently specialized in rental management. The trackers watched, but Pruitt didn’t immediately reemerge.
Orish wanted to watch for more prime distributors and Lucas agreed with that, but suggested that she was unlikely to find somebody better than Pruitt. “Devlin and I will pick him up,” Lucas said. “You need to have someone good at interrogation, I think in Manhattan—and we don’t take that ferry over there, we drive him. We don’t want anyone to see his face after we have him in a car.”
“We feel one of our teams would be better,” Orish said.
Lucas shook his head. “Look. You guys do a mountain of research and you’re really good at that, but you do two kinds of arrests. One is, you send in a SWAT team, knock down all the doors, and pile on top of people; the other is more like a party. You all show up wearing your FBI vests and you seize all the file cabinets. And that’s fine, you do it well. Us marshals arrest individual fugitives. That’s what this is going to be: we can’t have any excitement at all. Devlin and I will sort of amble up to him and ask for a light and tell him he’s under arrest and if he resists we’ll beat the shit out of him, in a hurry. Mug him. That’s what we do. That’s what we need in this situation.”
“If it goes wrong?”
“That’s where you come in. We’ll want surveillance watching us with some of your people ready to jump, if it all goes to hell. But it won’t. We’ll take him, and nobody will know except us chickens.”
“I’ll talk with the AIC,” Orish said. “We need to clear it.”
“Clear it, then. Tell the AIC to have a chat with Louis Mallard before he makes a decision,” Lucas said. “By the way, we’re going to need a warrant to go into Pruitt’s house after we crack him, and we’ll need at least some surveillance all day today. We need to know how many people are in the house, whether there are any children, whether there’s a back way out, and all that.”
“All day? When are you planning to take him?” Kerry asked.
“Tonight, after dark. We really don’t want people looking at us. People of the drug-buying variety. They can smell a cop at a hundred yards.”
“Let me talk with the AIC,” Orish repeated.
“Fine. In the meantime, let’s get the guy who brought us in here yesterday—Koch? I want to go down and take a look at Pruitt’s place, and the neighborhood.”
* * *
Orish went off somewhere to consult with the Manhattan agent in charge while Lucas and Devlin took the elevator down to the lobby, where they met Dillon Koch. “I have the address,” Koch said. “It’s a neighborhood called Westerleigh. Wester-lay or Wester-lee, I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it right. It’s eight or ten minutes from here.”
The cold hit them when they left the building—something in the low twenties, Lucas thought, and windy. Little mean snaps of snow, more pellet than flake, stung their faces.
Devlin kept his head down into the wind, and Lucas said, “Not something you get much of in Louisiana, huh? The cold.”
“Not like this. But this isn’t terrible.”
Lucas disagreed: “It’s on the edge of terrible and would be even in Minnesota.”
* * *
Westerleigh turned out to be an older neighborhood, mostly prewar and World War II–era two-story houses, painted in pastel shades, and remodeled and remodeled over again. They sat on heavily patched blacktopped streets with mature trees and on-street parking everywhere. Narrow driveways separated the houses, reaching back to single-car garages. Lawns were short and narrow with spotty, dirty snow. The neighborhood reminded Lucas of any number of neighborhoods in the