Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,126
boat. Neither one was carrying a gun.
Virgil put an arm around Rae’s waist and squeezed her tight: “You were . . . you’re so fuckin’ amazing.”
“I was scared,” she said, squeezing back. “I was so . . .”
“Fuckin’ amazing,” Virgil repeated.
Two more agents started pulling cans of heroin out of the lift bags. The team leader, a tall thin man with a military look to his face, wearing a flat Marine Corps utility hat, said, “We’ve got a problem. Somebody tipped off Behan. We kicked the door on his condo—we saw him go in and it was him—but he wasn’t there. We’d never been inside and we found out he had two floors with an interior staircase between them. He went down one floor and probably out the fire stairs or something even trickier. We’ve got no idea when he did it, or where he went. He was there an hour ago and then gone.”
“What about his phone?” Rae asked.
“His phone is sitting on the kitchen counter on the upper floor. We were watching it, of course, and it never moved.”
“Damnit. He’s probably the number-two guy in the whole operation, after Sansone.”
“We know that . . .”
* * *
Virgil looked at the file of feds leading Cattaneo and Lange down the dock toward waiting SUVs. “Hey, tell your guys to hold off on Lange. We want to talk to him.”
“You think he might know something?” the team leader asked.
“Maybe. I don’t know if he’ll talk,” Virgil said. “Rae and I should give it a try, though.”
The team leader called on a handset down the dock and the two feds with Lange stopped walking. Virgil and Rae hurried down the dock, trailed by the team leader. A sailboat was moored in one of the slips, its rail a couple of feet above the dock, and Virgil pushed Lange toward it and said, “Sit.”
“I want a lawyer,” Lange said.
Rae said, “You said you didn’t want to shoot me.”
Lange shrugged.
“You’re down for felony murder, ’cause Regio’s dead. And for me, you were gonna let it happen,” Rae said. “The only way you’re not going to spend the rest of your life in prison is you talk to us.”
Lange shrugged again, but he didn’t say no.
“Behan took off. He managed to avoid our surveillance people,” Virgil said. “If you have any idea where he might be, now is the time to say something. If you have something to say about that, and it pans out, you might actually walk around free, someday. If he’s gone . . . well, if he’s gone, you’re gone, too.”
Lange bowed his head, shuffled his feet on the concrete dock, then looked up and said, “You really sucked us in.”
Virgil: “You have something to say?”
“I want more witnesses to this deal. Not just you and Ally and this hat guy.”
The team leader called over a couple more of his men to listen and witness; Lange wanted all their names, written down.
When that was done, Virgil said, “So . . .”
“Behan’s a pilot. He’s got a plane . . .”
The team leader said, “God . . . bless me.”
“They were gonna use it to fly the shit up north, but every time you land a plane up there, I guess, coming out of Florida, they got a dog to sniff you . . . so, they didn’t do that, but they thought about it, because he’s a good pilot. His plane could fly to anywhere. It’s one of those two-engine jobs, six seats in the back.”
“Where does he keep it?” Virgil asked.
“Miami. I’ve never seen it, but I know it’s down there. He’s made a couple of trips when I was around. I know he’s been to Venezuela.”
The team leader said, “I’ll make a call.”
Virgil: “We need to get down there. We need to identify him, tie him down. If he gets off the coast in that plane, gets over the Bahamas, everything will get a lot tougher.”
“I’ll get a ride for you,” the team leader said. “Our own people will be way ahead of you, though.”
“We still oughta go,” Rae said to Virgil.
The team leader said to Rae, “You can’t. You gotta stay. You shot Regio, there’s official stuff you gotta do right now.”
“Man . . .”
“He’s right,” Virgil said. “I got this. Won’t be much for us to do, anyway.”
She nodded, reluctantly, and watched as Virgil rinsed off Regio’s gun again, with a freshwater dockside water hose, then rinsed off the magazine and slapped it back in the