Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,15
carrying these things that looked like black buckets, but the Coast Guard thinks they were PVC pipes, which is probably right. They looked like buckets to me. They threw them in the back of the SUV. The two guys made three trips, so maybe six buckets.”
He sat back and opened his eyes. “Hell, I don’t know how many buckets there were, but I think six is a good guess. With the buckets the size I was seeing, I’m told they could get ten kilograms of heroin in each, and ten kilos would be worth maybe three hundred thousand dollars, wholesale. If there were six buckets, that’s almost two million bucks.”
“Let’s go back to the chase,” Lucas said. “You see four guys. The fourth guy was spraying gasoline around?”
“Yeah. The guy I shot.” Hall closed his eyes again. “The Mako went into the pier . . . let me see, the fourth guy tied it off, real quick, like he was a boat guy. Then he got the gas . . . He had a five-gallon can, but not the kind you’d have on a boat. It was plastic, it was more the kind you’d use for a lawn tractor or something. They recovered it from the boat when they brought it off the bottom. It was melted, but they could see what it was. I told the FBI guys I think they had it there for exactly how they used it—in case they had to burn the boat. That boat was probably worth a couple hundred thousand and they burned it without thinking twice.”
Lucas: “So you’re closing in. What did the guys look like?”
“Three of them were big guys, including the guy I shot. The fourth one was quite a bit smaller, he was the guy who got the car. Ten kilos is about twenty-two pounds, plus there was the weight of the buckets, or pipes, and these guys were climbing out of the boat onto the pier and running to the car carrying two buckets, so maybe . . . fifty pounds? They had to be a little strong.”
“Hair color, or anything like that?” Bob asked.
“The small guy had black hair, I want to say, maybe Latino. The other three guys look like these snowbirds we get down here in the winter, from New York and New Jersey. Kinda burned-looking. I don’t know about their hair, but on those guys, it’s usually black.”
Lucas: “Clothes?”
“Shorts, and you know, tropical-like shirts, like New York guys buy when they get down here. They go to a Tommy Bahama store, first thing. Get parrots on their shirts. Orange and bright yellow, neon stuff. Except the small guy, he was wearing black pants and a dark-colored shirt. Yeah. Dark-colored.”
Bob: “New York and New Jersey.”
Hall, who’d closed his eyes again, opened them now, and said, “Yeah. Those guys have a look. You see it all the time down here. Wraparound sunglasses, short hair, big guys, square faces, chewing gum, making it snap. They had the look.”
“The small guy . . . how small? Let’s say the other guys were six feet. How big was the small guy compared to them?”
“Oh, I don’t . . . Jeez, now that you ask it that way, about half their size,” Hall said. “Skinny. I don’t think he came up to their shoulders. I guess that’s why I’m thinking Latino.”
They talked a while about the recovery of the sunken Mako. The Coast Guard and Lauderdale cops sent divers down to recover what they could, before the remains of the boat were brought up with a crane. Among the recovered items were two scuba tanks, a badly burned buoyancy control vest, and other scuba gear.
“They found the diver’s wet suit, but it got melted into a lump,” Hall said. “I guess the guy peeled it off as soon as he got on board the Mako.”
“Any fishing gear on board?” Bob asked.
“Yes. They found rods and reels, ordinary stuff, cheap for a boat like that,” Hall said. “The FBI tried to trace it to a specific outlet, but . . . nothing came of it. There wasn’t much on board the boat. It’s like they used it for this one thing, and maybe fishing.”
“Maybe kept the personal stuff down to make it harder to identify them, if they got stopped and weren’t able to burn the boat,” Lucas said. “Even the fishing gear might have been stage dressing, so they’d look like they were doing something legitimate out there.”