Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,132
wagon, maybe two. In a hurry.”
“Mother of God! Who’s hurt?”
“Sansone and his wife. His wife shot Sansone and Kerry shot her.”
“Wait a minute. Say that again?”
“Call a fuckin’ ambulance, we got people bleeding here!”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
The Elizabeth cops and two ambulances arrived in a cloud of snowflakes and the cops taped off everything in sight and the EMTs put pressure bandages on Sansone and his wife and took them away in no great hurry. A two-person crime scene crew arrived and began marking empty nine-millimeter shells on the sidewalk.
Orish pushed through a crowd of rubberneckers, followed by two other feds from the task force and two SWAT team members from the South Orange raid. Orish demanded to know what had happened and how bad the wounds were: Sansone was hit in the right leg, breaking the femur halfway between the hip and knee. Kerry had hit Sansone’s wife in the butt, in and out through her pelvic bone. Neither wound was life-threatening, which pleased Orish.
The SWAT members took charge of the money man and the $118,000 in the money man’s package. One oddity: there were three checks among the currency. Devlin: “There are junkies who can buy with checks?”
Orish: “This is New York, not some remote backwater.”
“Actually, it’s New Jersey,” Devlin said.
An FBI medic put some antiseptic on Lucas’s head cut and told him not to scratch it.
Kerry was walking up and down the block, breathing hard, hyped on adrenaline after being shot at and narrowly missed. As it happened, he was wearing an Apple Watch that alerted him to unusual heart behavior. An EMT with one of the ambulances took one minute to slap a heart monitor on him and sent the EKG to the local hospital, where a doc said he didn’t see any problem other than overexcitement, and who should he send a bill to?
* * *
Lucas was wandering around the crime scene trying not to scratch his scalp and to avoid the rubberneckers when Virgil called.
“We have a problem,” Virgil said. “We got Cattaneo and Lange, Regio’s dead, and Weaver’s team is rounding up the small fry, but it turns out that Behan probably knew we were coming . . .”
He gave Lucas a quick summary of the night so far.
“Sansone called him. He had a silent alarm . . .” Lucas explained, and told him about the arrests and the shootings in New Jersey.
“Well, we don’t have Behan, not yet,” Virgil said. “Turns out he’s a pilot and has a plane down in Miami. We’re on the way . . .”
“I can hear the siren,” Lucas said. “You get Behan and we’ll have a clean sweep. We’ll have set back New York heroin dealing by at least an hour and only cost the American taxpayers a couple of million.”
“But hey, we had a good time doing it and that’s what really counts,” Virgil said. “And we’re gonna put the Coast Guard killers away.”
“Yes, we are. Call me when you’ve got Behan,” Lucas said. “Please tell me you’re not carrying a pistol.”
“Can’t do that,” Virgil said. “I’ve even got seventeen bullets. I know because I counted them. Rae couldn’t come, because she had to talk to the bureaucrats about shooting Regio.”
“Okay, then,” Lucas said. “Take care, Virgie.”
* * *
Miami.
Rush hour was well past but traffic was still snarly as it always was in South Florida, unregimented and fast once they were on I-95 headed south. The FBI driver, whose name was George Hamm, said, “I’d like to be there when they take him, but we’re gonna be late.”
“How long does it take to get an airplane up in the air from an airport?” Virgil asked. “I’ve never been on a private flight out of a major airport.”
“Me, neither,” Hamm said. “I can’t believe you could run in the door and drive the plane out the other side in one minute. There are millions of commercial flights in and out all the time, I expect you’d have to wait at least a little while. Maybe quite a while.”
“I hope,” Virgil said. “Behan would have been the guy who set up the shootings down in Florida City.”
“I’ve been told,” Hamm said. He missed an aging Saab, with Minnesota plates, barely.
* * *
Virgil took a call from a fed at Miami International Airport. “You sure you got good information? We’ve gone through the fixed-base operators here and they never heard of Behan and they don’t recognize a photo.”
“The guy who gave it to us is looking at a murder charge and